Customer Reviews

Invincible: The Ultimate Collection Volume 5

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After waiting months upon months for the release of this hardcover, it finally came out and I frankly devoured it in one sitting one night during the work week, of all times. That should give an indication to anyone who might be thinking about getting into the Invincible universe for the first time, of the level of investment Kirkman has managed to prompt from readers, with his fresh, inventive and charming take on some well worn superhero clichés. I'll get back to that in a bit but for now, this is a great volume full of great characters and wonderful stories.

Invincible is the story of a teenage superhero with immense power, trying to cope with the awesome responsibility of preventing a looming alien invasion, while also trying to deal with the skewed morality of his alien half brother, between dates with his lovely, caring super-powered girlfriend and fights with his sneaky, bastard boss... It's more fun than you can shake a stick at or pay for illegally, and it's quite simply one of the absolute best things being published in comics right now or just about ever.

This volume is about two main problems in Mark's life; namely his shocking discovery that his boss, CIA sneak Cecil Steadman is a right bastard, who has been collecting Invincible's enemies unbeknownst to him, to help with shady or questionable research among other things. The other relates to Mark's indoctrination of his younger, half, and half alien brother, into the world of super-heroing, with some unexpected and tragic results. Mark discovers that his younger brother's moral views may not be quite on point with his own, and that leads them into an inevitably uncomfortable discussion with no easy resolution. As usual, there are lots of other things going on but these are the two major through-lines for this volume. All of them though are entertaining and make for great reading.

The art by Ryan Ottley, who has been drawing the series ever since about issue 8 or so, is incredibly beautiful, detailed, expressive, and increasingly confident, while the colors on the book continue to be amazing. On the surface, the style of the series is evocative of a high quality animated series or even Pixar film, and to an extent, Invincible reads like the comic version of an involving, animated series that's been on television for several years. But that's merely an opinion on the general visual sensibility of the book, because frankly, the detail of the art, the complexity of the world and the characters in it, as well as the interconnectedness and long running nature of the various plots and themes, is irrefutable proof that no other medium could do what comics does.

If there's one concern, it is that the violence in the book does occasionally get a little too graphic even for me, and Kirkman sometimes allows it to be gratuitous. In this volume there are some incidents where the violence does get to be a bit much. Ironically, although the visual sensibility of the book might suggest a youth friendly series, that fact alone means that Invincible is not for kids, at least young kids, and is very much an adult book. In fact, the bright attractive art makes the violence even more shocking. This isn't so much a criticism as it is an observation, and a warning for potential buyers who may be mislead by bits of art they may see from time to time in various reviews or websites, etc.

With Invincible, Kirkman really is producing something special here. Unlike an entire generation of comic creators currently working in the field, Kirkman gets that comics are far more than movie pitches in storyboard form, and because he isn't a frustrated novelist or screenwriter lurking in comics until he makes it big in the movies, he's able to exploit the medium to its fullest, and is currently providing the medium with two of the most vital, essential, and unabashedly entertaining comics to ever be produced; Invincible being one of them with the Walking Dead being the other. (A usually good measure of a competent writer is that he can produce interesting stories of radically different types, and the contrast between Invincible and Walking Dead couldn't be greater.)

But Invincible is also really important because it represents the future of comics. Since it began some 7 or more years ago, Invincible has been written by the same writer, and with the exception of the first seven or eight issues, has also been drawn by the same artist. Even then, the art styles were wonderfully consistent to the point of being almost indistinguishable. Monthly issues are printed on the same if not higher paper quality than the average Marvel or DC comic and cost about a dollar less, and the character and his world are as recognizable some 73 plus issues and specials on, as they were when the first issue was released.

As a creator owned work, there's a purity to the vision guiding Invincible that isn't periodically sacrificed at the corporate altar of short-term-thinking. While events will occur, characters may change allegiances or die, etc, the core of the series will never change, be watered down, be "retconned," or "rebooted," to the point where it is no longer recognizable from its original premise. That's fairly rare of most comics being pubished today by the "big two." These days, depending on who's writing it that particular month, most fans might be hard pressed to identify the Spiderman they knew growing up with the version that's currently being published, (and that probably includes his creator, Stan Lee himself though he may never admit it.) Coupled with the exponentially increasing prices of monthly comics, the lack of creative faithfulness to most characters' original premises, is like a slow working poison in the blood stream of the American comic book industry. In the future, the most satisfying, innovative, and consistently high quality comic series won't come from Marvel or DC; it will be all creator owned; it will maintain a high level of quality for several years, be written and drawn by the same people more or less every month, and will be published at prices that bear some relationship to reality. In other words, it will be just like Invincible.

Until earlier this year, when the long promised "Viltrumite War" began in earnest, I never collected the monthly installments of Invincible, and my primary experience of reading these adventures has been through these collected Ultimate Collection HCs, which are fantastic value for money and high quality volumes that look brilliant on a shelf. They are also frankly far superior to all the other collections available, including the trade paperbacks and larger omnibuses. Kirkman literally almost killed me then with the wait for this volume, which came out in April/May, while it had been promised for release since January. For that reason, I was tempted to give this volume one star less. I don't know why the delay took place, and as a financial supporter of Kirkman's work, I thought at least some explanation was owed to fans as to why this volume was so delayed. None has been provided that I am aware of. But that problem aside, the quality of the material here, as well as of the physical volume containing them, is really excellent and deserves my highest recommendation.

I think every lover of the medium should own collections of Invincible. It highlights the medium at its very best, because no other medium could produce a series of such high quality stories, over such a long period of time, with that kind of complexity and faithfulness to its original premise. This is worth owning and I highly recommend it!

Here's the lowdown. I loved all of the Ultimate Collections, but this one was just lacking overall compared to the others. Don't get me wrong... It's still worth checking out, but nothing really happens.

The whole Doc Seismic plot line felt a lot more like an advertisement for other comics than anything else. I'm all for crossovers, but not when there isn't any meat to it.

There are a couple of short stories as well. One is from the Astounding Wolfman, but if you read those books you'll already have read it. Another is about Allen the Alien and Omni-man in prison, and the last is about Invincible in the future. They are more filler than anything.

The rest is just set up for the big events that come after this. If it wasn't a year or so between the Ultimate Collections I wouldn't mind, but it is so I'm disappointed.

All that being said... the art and writing overall is still great. It has definitely gotten me excited for what's to come.

I gave up buying individual issues of comics a few years back in favor of hardcover and trade collections, but I swear if any title is compelling enough to get me back to the monthly issues it has to be Invincible. It was almost impossible to wait a year for a new hardcover collection to arrive.

Invincible Ultimate Collection Volume 5 is here now, and it was absolutely worth the wait. This is probably the only series in recent memory that is so consistently good. Remember that really lousy Invincible issue? No, because there isn't one. I imagine this is what it must have felt like to go to the newsstand in the 60's and read new Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four or Lee/Ditko Spider-Man issues.

The main focus of the issues in Volume 5 is the split between Mark and his government employers, but there are some highly interesting developments with his half-brother Oliver (that I didn't see coming) and his relationship with Atom Eve (that I had been hoping to see), plus various battles, time traveling adventures, an interlude with Allen and Nolan and an Astounding Wolf-Man crossover. You also get a ton of extras, including cover art, sketches, and the like.

Kirkman is in top form here. He's not as edgy as Bendis or Millar, but he has really become the best writer in the business one exceptional issue at a time. The dialogue, the action, the characters (major and minor) - Invincible is always perfect. It doesn't hurt that he has a stellar artistic counterpart in Ryan Ottley, who can draw dynamic fight scenes and everyday situations with astonishing style. The eye-popping colors are the icing on the cake.

At this point, do I even need to recommend a new Invincible hardcover collection? If you're already a fan of the series, you know you need to buy this, and if you're new to Invincible you need to go get the Invincible: The Ultimate Collection, Vol. 1 collection pronto. Trust me, you'll be a raving fan in no time.

Don't let the bright, bright colors and the very cool art and all the exuberant superhero antics fool you. There's a sort of camouflaged complexity to INVINCIBLE, underneath that shiny sense of fun, and that's only one more layer which Robert Kirkman consistently weaves into his world-building and storytelling. It seems like only yesterday when I first picked up this comic book, and look at it now, about to hit the 75th issue mark, clearly having stood the test of time. And the same nod goes to Kirkman's other monumental title, THE WALKING DEAD. At this stage, Mark Grayson, teenaged powerhouse, has become an established superhero, the go-to savior of the world. But he's still learning.

INVINCIBLE: ULTIMATE COLLECTION Volume 5 collects issues #48-59 of the ongoing series, as well as ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN #11, meaning that if you already have the trades INVINCIBLE Vol. 10: WHO'S THE BOSS? and INVINCIBLE Vol. 11: HAPPY DAYS, then you've already peeped this bunch of goodies. What's striking about this particular run is that it doesn't seem to feature a consistent thru thread, unless you count the arc which develops Invincible's younger half-brother, Oliver, whose own powers manifest in early, astronomical fashion. We follow Oliver's acclimation as a fledgling superhero under Invincible's wing, and it's interesting that the kid means to redeem the reputation of his hero-turned-villain father. And so he assumes the codename "Kid Omni-Man.' The most fascinating theme in these issues, for me anyway, is the clash between Oliver's pragmatic worldview and Mark's more humane principles. This is one of the things Robert Kirkman, a dynamite writer, really excels at. He raises morality issues but offers no pat resolutions, although the characters do engage in meaningful conversations about them. Kirkman always sets a torrid pace. He throws in oodles of other story arcs. Except that, in this particular stretch of issues, those story arcs don't feel epic.

Friendly warning: The following may be fraught with SPOILERS and, also, with words like "fraught."

Kirkman, possibly comic books' premier dabbler in the realm of pure superhero escapism, keeps on cavorting in his personal playground, guest-starring plenty of his other created characters as well as other established characters from Image Comics. The first arc here deals with Mark Grayson's falling out with Cecil Stedman and the Global Defense Agency, as Mark leans that Stedman is even more underhanded than first suspected. Also, Dr. Seismic launches his big power play, utilizing his legions of Underearths to capture most of the world's superheroes. This gives us a chance to feast our eyeballs on the likes of the Dynamo 5, Savage Dragon, the Capes, the Guardians of the Globe, and the Astounding Wolf-Man rubbing elbows in shared captivity. Invincible and Atom Eve dramatically fly in to save the day. Except that they don't.

I don't know exactly what it is about Atom Eve that I like so much. Maybe it's her awesome power set, or maybe it's that she's simply this hot babe, and yet she acts like that down-to-earth girl next door. Anyway, there's solid progression in her relationship with Mark, although Mark's ex-girlfriend manages to briefly pop up.

Ryan Ottley's artwork is clean and crisp and dynamic and so dang perfect for this comic book. And Robert Kirkman keeps you guessing. You just never know in which direction this dude is gonna swerve. Predictably, he peppers in a few shocking moments in these pages, again reminding readers that the contents here aren't suited for the younger kids. As always, Kirkman ushers in new plotlines even as he closes off existing ones. Somewhere in this trade we get sucked into a gang turf war and there's a catch-up interlude with Allen the Alien, still imprisoned in a space vessel, and with Omni-Man, Mark and Oliver's dad, who is still scheduled for execution. There's a nifty crossover with Gary Hampton, a.k.a. the Astounding Wolf-Man. Gary is a fugitive wanted for his wife's murder, and Mark gets roped into bringing him in. Later, Mark and Eve, looking ahead financially, venture into freelance superheroing. Mark responds to a plea for help from the future and runs into an old friend. At the hind end of the volume, we get wind of Kirkman's next epic arc as the demented genius Angstrom Levy, after months of discreetly spying on Mark, finally launches his revenge scheme against Invincible. But, in issue #59, we don't have to wait to see how supervillain Powerplex's revenge play turns out.

End SPOILERS.

To commemorate having achieved the 50th issue landmark, Mark Grayson gets new superhero threads (even though he didn't ask for a makeover). Oliver also gets outfitted, and his costume is actually cooler looking than Mark's. And because absolutely no one asked for it, there's also Cecil Stedman's secret origin revealed.

As ever with these terrific Ultimate editions, there's a ton of extra goodies in the form of Ryan Ottley's sketches and cover art with behind-the-scenes commentary from Kirkman and Ottley. The script for issue #50 is also reproduced (in very, very small print). As fun as they are to read, I do get the sense that most of the stories in ULTIMATE INVINCIBLE Volume 5 are of the tread-the-water variety, filler stuff while Kirkman preps for the massive events about to go down. I collect the individual issues, so I know what I'm talking about. Devastating, earth-shaking stuff is about to go down! ULTIMATE INVINCIBLE Volume 6 can't come soon enough. Still, this Volume 5 is still very much worth the get, even if its sense of epic isn't as "epic" as in the previous editions. But no one blends those personal little moments and those large scale, world-hanging-in-the-balance moments quite as exquisitely as Kirkman. And no one draws his stuff as invigoratingly as Ryan Ottley. This applies to Volume 5.

Invincible is one of the best new superhero books of the last 10 years. It grew from being a take-off on Superman to a well-developed book with memorable and very likable characters. In this volume we get 12 issues of story and 50 pages of sketches and scripts.

This volume is fairly calm, it fills us in on the supporting cast, catches up on some old plot lines and introduces new threats. It also has a crossover with Kirkman's Astonishing Wolf-Man book. The pages are nicely over-sized and the printing is top quality. These Ultimate Collections are definitely the cadillac of reprints.

Invincible is a comic about a very powerful teenage superhero. Robert Kirkman does a great job of humanizing the character while at the same time giving us tons of fun adventures. One thing I love about Kirkman is that he keeps developing subplots in issues while finishing previous subplots. This way, every issue seems important while at the same time it creates moments where a bunch of subplots come into the forefront creating a big mess for our hero. I love this. You never know where Invincible will be in the next issue. There are countless villains making up their own plans and who knows when they will attack.

I read this volume in one sitting and it made me eager to get more issues of Invincible. This series is so good that it seems like waiting a year for the next collected hardcover is too long a wait.

I love this series. I read a lot of comics and this might be my favorite series. I highly recommend it.

This volume of Invincible pushes our hero to the brink. With increasingly dangerous foes and a new "dark" costume, Invincible must deal with the fact that the government he's been working for is not all it seems, someone seems to be spying on him, his anger is getting out of control, and his brother has no qualms about killing and the way he justifies it makes Invincible question his own morals. This volume deals with the idea that someone as powerful as Superman could easily kill anyone who threatens the world, but should he? It's what the dark age of comics tried to do, showing the heroes questioning their ideals in a world where the villains don't learn their lesson and don't try to reform. While this volume doesn't finish the story arc, it is a good read for Invincible fans and introduces the villain Powerplex, an interesting villain that I want to see more of. Highly Recommended.

As someone who has been reading comics since the 1950's, Invincible is a fairly new (started in 2003) addition to the genre, but I can honestly say that this is the best 'new' comic I've come across in years. This collection includes Invincible issues (#48 thru #59) plus The Astounding Wolfman #11 due to a crossover plot involving Invicible. The original creative team - Robert Kirkman (writer), Ryan Ottley (penciler, inker), Bill Crabtree (colorist), and Russ Wooton (letterer) - with the addition of FCO Plascencia as colorist and of Jason Howard and Cliff Rathburn (penciler and inker for Astounding Wolf Man), continue to amaze in what they have produced, a superb blend that plays on the established traditions of the superhero genre while bringing in original takes and twists that make it all fresh and new again.

The lead-in lines inside of the dust jacket pretty much set the tone for the series:

"Girls, acne, homework, super-villains. When you're a teenager, it helps to be INVINCIBLE"

...while the lines on the back of the dust jacket set the stage for this fifth volume:

"Ever since Invincible's father, Omni-Man, revealed himself to be an alien conquerer bent on taking over the Earth, Invincible has been working for the Global Defense Agency, led by Cecil Stedman. He's been fighting their fights, defeating their enemies, he's been a good soldier, but now something has changed. Invincible an no longer follow their orders unquestioned. Now he finds himself up against the very organization he's been working for! This won't be pretty..."

In this volume, Invincible finds his life growing ever more complicated, particularly in his relationship with Stedman and the Global Defense Agency. He finds out that not only did Stedman fail to imprison Darkwing for his murders and D.A. Sinclair for kidnapping people and using them as subjects for his Reanimen experiments, Stedman in fact covered up their crimes and they're both now working for the GDA. Adding to the pressures on Invincible, his younger brother Oliver wants to get into the superhero game, he's gotten a new costume he's not sure he likes, and he can't get Eve out of his mind.

I particularly liked the section where Mark (Invincible) confronts Oliver after Oliver ends up killing the Mauler Twins in the process of coming to the rescue of the Guardians of the Globe. It really brings home the growing ambiguities and blurring of lines that Mark is having to deal with:

O: "Are you mad at me because I defeated those guys?"
M: "You _killed_ those guys!"
O: "So what? They were _bad_guys_... They killed people down there. I killed them -- Now they can't kill anyone. You should be _happy_!
M: "That's not what we do. We don't kill."
O: "_You_ do. You killed that guy who broke Mom's arm."
M: "That was an accident!"
O: "_This_ was an accident!"
M: "Okay -- never mind. Start over. You shouldn't kill -- We're not murderers, Oliver. But you didn't mean to kill them, okay. I get that. The main problem I'm having here -- the thing that worries me about this is that you don't seem to _care_ that you've killed them."
O: "Why _should_ I? How many times have you fought these guys now? How many people have they killed since the _first_ time you fought? What you do is _illogical_. The logical thing to do would be to stop these guys -- permanently. That's what makes sense to _me_."
M: "There are laws and rules and... well, we can't just take that kind of responsibility for someone's life -- For _anyone's_ life. We're not infallible-- what if we're wrong and someone we kill is innocent. What then? Human life is a precious thing."
O: "No, it's _not_."
M: "_What_?!"
O: "Precious. Human life isn't precious. Not in general -- not everyone. People risk their lives every day. They kill each other. If they don't think their lives are important, why should I? Most of them are utterly _insignificant_."
M: "You sould like _Dad_."
O: "So? Why is that bad? Was he so wrong? Did nothing he said make sense to you -- even on a small level? Have you ever thought that maybe our father was _right_?"
M: (hesitating) "..."
M: (finally) "Sometimes."

Other blurring of lines occur when Invincible re-encounters two supposed thieves he'd fought in a previous issue who turn out to be heroes from their own time in the future who now need his help... against a hero from his time who has become a villain in theirs. And a new character named Powerplex is introduced who - motivated by personal loss for which he holds Invincible responsible - is obsessed with destroying Invincible.

And other continuing plot lines are further developed in this volume as Robot makes a breakthrough in solving the problem of Monster Girl's reverse aging, Angstrom Levy appears to be recruiting 'bad' Invincibles from alternate universes for his revenge on Invincible, and Allen the Alien helps Nolan break out of the Viltrumite prison they're being held in. And of course there is the afore-mentioned crossover with the Astounding Wolfman.

And as always, the collection has as an added treat another Sketchbook section at the end with all kinds of artwork and commentary showing the creative process the team went through developing and promoting the comic.

Highly, highly recommended for anyone who enjoys quality work in the superhero comic genre.

The story really picks up in volume five leading to new directions and evolving the storyline. Oliver and Eve begin to play a bigger part in Marks life leading to more conflict. Some old and new villians appear to try to take down Invincible too. Also some nice cameos by other heroes. The art continues to be awesome.

The whole book felt off to me... The art seemed a little rushed and juvenile, the paper quality looked poor compared to previous volumes, and I had really hoped we had seen the last of Doc Seismic (no really, I mean it.)

It's still INVINCIBLE, so it's still good, but I'm still waiting for a volume to really knock my socks off like Volume I.