Probably a hot take but long before <insert favorite character> got killed I got bored of it because I actually wanted a sci-fi story with a logical conclusion. Everyone hated the season 1 CDC episode but I enjoyed that little tidbit of investigation and possible clues towards solving the outbreak. Then the creator had to go and disavow it and say "This isn't sci-fi, there are no happy endings, it's just a story about zombies. We don't plan to explain the zombies." I wasn't really into it any more and finally stopped watching when it was obvious that guy who was supposedly traveling to DC to report what he knew about the outbreak was bullshitting everyone.
The thing is, ever since Night of the Living Dead it’s been a given that the zombies don’t get explained or resolved. It’s hardly groundbreaking to do that shit, and yet people still think they’re blowing our minds by going that route.
I agree 100% actually, and hated how they threw away the world building that Darabont managed to introduce in Season 1.
I stuck around a little while longer, to see if they could actually pull off what the comic managed to in terms of great antagonists and interesting personal conflicts (largely in the form of The Governor). But the show never really found its footing after losing Darabont imo. S2 was a fucking boring slog, then they went on to screw up the Governor and every change they made to the characters of the comics was worse and worse. The women characters were insufferable which is again disappointing because the comic actually had some really good ones.
In fact, the show was so bad it killed any interest I had to finish reading the comic lol, knowing that Kirkman was supporting this shit full-steam
Now that sounds a hell of a lot better than the shit we got, with more filler than DBZ’s original run (“WHATS IN THE BARN” for what was it, 24 episodes? Fuck right off).
Instead of that, which could have been really interesting vinettes which would have probably tied into eachother and the mainline group eventually (like we saw with Morgan kind of), we got, what are they up to now, 6 fucking spin off shows? I’ve never met someone in my entire life who has discussed watching a single episode of any of those shows, despite knowing tons of people who saw at least some of the main show.
Maybe I’m just exaggerating (I do that a lot), or maybe I read something back when the main one was ending about upcoming shows...there was also that lame hour long commentary show which they tried to make appealing. I couldn’t imagine being some TWD superfan who tried to absorb all of it - it strikes me as some kind of sick irony thinking of how zombified that person would have to be to enjoy that lol
Kirkman has a habit for writing very, very, very long stories but does at least eventually end them. TWD comic lasted 193 issues over 16 years [October 2003 - July 2019] while Invincible took 144 issues over 15 [January 2003 - February 2018].
Somewhat surprisingly the ending to Invincible was actually quite good despite how long it ran for as often the hype overtakes the story and sets an impossible standard to meet.
His current comic Fire Power recently came back from a 9 month break of all things but is supposedly meant to carry on monthly now.
How did Invincible end exactly? I tried reading a synopsis and it had something to do with time travel or something? And didn't the main bad guy win or something? I remember re-reading the synopsis for the finale several times and not really understanding what was supposed to be going on.
Invincible is a story best summed up as: "Invincible: The Never Ending Suffering of Mark Grayson", because taken as a whole that's what happens. A lot.
Seriously, every major arc involves something horrible happening to the main character such as almost getting beaten to death multiple times, stranded in another dimension multiple times, watching your close friends and family die in front of you multiple times, fucking up and getting countless people killed multiple times, getting betrayed by your closest allies multiple times. On the plus side he only gets raped once.
😶
Anyway, the time travel thing falls into the category for "stranded in another dimension" and simply put is just one in a long line of moments where Mark's life goes to complete shit.
The actual ending still manages to land remarkably well considering how long the story went on for and rather than try to describe it myself I'm going to just quote some of the top comments from the site I read all my comics on these days.
I was terrified, actually terrified to read this, because there was no way it was going to be a good enough end to this great series, I was wrong!
And I'm so happy!
Mark's become Actual Silver Age Superman
what a ending seriously,i didnt think it could live up to the rest of the series but it did, wow no words just perfect
If you want to read the comic yourself, and I would certainly recommend the main run although the various side stories like Brit, Capes, and Guarding the Globe are all good reading as well, the whole thing is online here,
Brit gets weird with the dimension jumping stuff but then that's somewhat consistent with the Invincible universe. I only read Capes recently despite the run being out for so long and it was both a great read and unfortunate victim of the main story when it caught up to certain events. GtG has some very worthwhile reading for what happens to Rudy and Monster Girl, though.
There are a few other related comics set in the same universe. Techjacket is the universe's Blue Beetle stand in and there's a comic somewhere about the werewolf character, but both are far more detached from Invincible than the others. Still quite good.
I got bored with the show and decided to finish the comic books and be done with it. To think this show was at around Game of Thrones level hype at one point.
Whenever the comic book ended. I got bored with the show and said I’ll just follow the comic book until it ends. 2018 I think. Yea the showrunner is obsessed with diversity. Also in a post apocalyptic setting there are an awful lot of gay people
It makes sense that they're desperate to make zombies a threat. Actual zombies wouldn't be scary at all. A shield phalanx with a line of bows behind would solve every conflict.
I noticed early on in the show that once they had a nice group set up, the threat from zombies was always either a surprise attack, or the "swarms" just being too large for the group to handle. There's only so much mileage you can get out of that cliche before people start questioning the worldbuilding.
However when it comes to zombies every storyline I've seen even though yeah the scenes are creepy as fuck for me at the same time it's a case of why are the survivors the most stupid people on the planet? If they had half a brain like you point out they would switch to medieval weapons and armour which zombies can't bite through and then it would be over in five seconds, especially proper plate armour you can put on easily thanks to modern design.
Or you know just set up crew served weapons and destroy every zombie to the horizon. Too bad the military in these stories never thinks of that.
The flood from Halo because worse still that's actually plausible since the flood is essentially an outer space organism that can infect people just by breathing the air in and they take control of your brain and warp you inside out which is creepy as fuck.
The concept of the Flood is right proper Lovecraftian horror. It was never really depicted in the Halo series as scary as the Flood actually was; we had a brief glimpse of how horrific something like that might be with the short film Into The Aquila Rift, but it's a shame we don't have more media that properly explores the absolute horror of being a living shell for an outer-dimensional species (though, I suppose the movie The Puppet Masters from 1994 comes sort of close) .
Doesn't even take that much. The Monster Hunter International world treats zombies as your entry level threat, more of a payday on legs. Only issue is if they were created by a necromancer or houdoun. Put on armor, pop pop pop, collect samples, collect paycheck.
WWZ was excellent, really lightning in a bottle almost, given how obsessed with zombies every aspect of pop culture was back then. TZSG was funny too in its own right
I loaned my copy out to a friend, in exchange for their copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra...don’t regret that but I have been craving a reread of WWZ as time goes on
Can you expand on this? I never thought of it like that, and watched for the first ~4 seasons (largely because I had quite enjoyed the comic up until that point)
The shows have almost identical tropes. Danger is only exceeded by drama, acting is all hyper emotional, characters are killed off for dramatic effect, random acts of betrayal, etc.
Ehh I don’t really see it, beyond the over-reliance on interpersonal drama between characters who should realistically have far bigger concerns than, for example, carol’s husband being kind of a dick. When I think police procedural I think adamantium-lined plot armor for the main characters, while TWD almost had the opposite problem of killing characters for no reason beyond shock value
It’s not? If you replace zombies with criminals you have the exact same show. Hyper emotional people, random acts of betrayal, characters dying for dramatic effect, nonsensical relationships, etc
Oz was quite literally a cop drama, just the prison version. Deadwood was at least rational but again cops versus criminals, same as justified. Boardwalk empire and sopranos have their moments but like deadwood aren’t reliant on the tropes despite using some of them.
Apparently, they're releasing free teaser episodes for the other shows on youtube in order to get you hooked. Although, I haven't seen one for the Daryl spin-off.
Haven't seen anything from this franchise in ages. It's still as formulaic and rote as ever. The deaths are cheap, the melodrama is weak and the world is empty. A lot of wasted potential.
Probably a hot take but long before <insert favorite character> got killed I got bored of it because I actually wanted a sci-fi story with a logical conclusion. Everyone hated the season 1 CDC episode but I enjoyed that little tidbit of investigation and possible clues towards solving the outbreak. Then the creator had to go and disavow it and say "This isn't sci-fi, there are no happy endings, it's just a story about zombies. We don't plan to explain the zombies." I wasn't really into it any more and finally stopped watching when it was obvious that guy who was supposedly traveling to DC to report what he knew about the outbreak was bullshitting everyone.
The thing is, ever since Night of the Living Dead it’s been a given that the zombies don’t get explained or resolved. It’s hardly groundbreaking to do that shit, and yet people still think they’re blowing our minds by going that route.
Everyone knows it was a virus brought to earth by a crashing probe from Venus.
That or Hell literally flowing over, I liked how he left it open while also pointing in some directions.
I agree 100% actually, and hated how they threw away the world building that Darabont managed to introduce in Season 1.
I stuck around a little while longer, to see if they could actually pull off what the comic managed to in terms of great antagonists and interesting personal conflicts (largely in the form of The Governor). But the show never really found its footing after losing Darabont imo. S2 was a fucking boring slog, then they went on to screw up the Governor and every change they made to the characters of the comics was worse and worse. The women characters were insufferable which is again disappointing because the comic actually had some really good ones.
In fact, the show was so bad it killed any interest I had to finish reading the comic lol, knowing that Kirkman was supporting this shit full-steam
Now that sounds a hell of a lot better than the shit we got, with more filler than DBZ’s original run (“WHATS IN THE BARN” for what was it, 24 episodes? Fuck right off).
Instead of that, which could have been really interesting vinettes which would have probably tied into eachother and the mainline group eventually (like we saw with Morgan kind of), we got, what are they up to now, 6 fucking spin off shows? I’ve never met someone in my entire life who has discussed watching a single episode of any of those shows, despite knowing tons of people who saw at least some of the main show.
Maybe I’m just exaggerating (I do that a lot), or maybe I read something back when the main one was ending about upcoming shows...there was also that lame hour long commentary show which they tried to make appealing. I couldn’t imagine being some TWD superfan who tried to absorb all of it - it strikes me as some kind of sick irony thinking of how zombified that person would have to be to enjoy that lol
Kirkman has a habit for writing very, very, very long stories but does at least eventually end them. TWD comic lasted 193 issues over 16 years [October 2003 - July 2019] while Invincible took 144 issues over 15 [January 2003 - February 2018].
Somewhat surprisingly the ending to Invincible was actually quite good despite how long it ran for as often the hype overtakes the story and sets an impossible standard to meet.
His current comic Fire Power recently came back from a 9 month break of all things but is supposedly meant to carry on monthly now.
How did Invincible end exactly? I tried reading a synopsis and it had something to do with time travel or something? And didn't the main bad guy win or something? I remember re-reading the synopsis for the finale several times and not really understanding what was supposed to be going on.
Spoilers ahead!
Invincible is a story best summed up as: "Invincible: The Never Ending Suffering of Mark Grayson", because taken as a whole that's what happens. A lot.
Seriously, every major arc involves something horrible happening to the main character such as almost getting beaten to death multiple times, stranded in another dimension multiple times, watching your close friends and family die in front of you multiple times, fucking up and getting countless people killed multiple times, getting betrayed by your closest allies multiple times. On the plus side he only gets raped once.
😶
Anyway, the time travel thing falls into the category for "stranded in another dimension" and simply put is just one in a long line of moments where Mark's life goes to complete shit.
The actual ending still manages to land remarkably well considering how long the story went on for and rather than try to describe it myself I'm going to just quote some of the top comments from the site I read all my comics on these days.
If you want to read the comic yourself, and I would certainly recommend the main run although the various side stories like Brit, Capes, and Guarding the Globe are all good reading as well, the whole thing is online here,
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Invincible
Brit gets weird with the dimension jumping stuff but then that's somewhat consistent with the Invincible universe. I only read Capes recently despite the run being out for so long and it was both a great read and unfortunate victim of the main story when it caught up to certain events. GtG has some very worthwhile reading for what happens to Rudy and Monster Girl, though.
There are a few other related comics set in the same universe. Techjacket is the universe's Blue Beetle stand in and there's a comic somewhere about the werewolf character, but both are far more detached from Invincible than the others. Still quite good.
Wow. If I have the time I may read through it one day.
Thanks for the quick summary.
I got bored with the show and decided to finish the comic books and be done with it. To think this show was at around Game of Thrones level hype at one point.
Whenever the comic book ended. I got bored with the show and said I’ll just follow the comic book until it ends. 2018 I think. Yea the showrunner is obsessed with diversity. Also in a post apocalyptic setting there are an awful lot of gay people
Do you think humans will end up being the real threat like every other zombie story ever made?
Zombies are just humans with the civilized veneer shorn off.
humans are just zombies with social media
It makes sense that they're desperate to make zombies a threat. Actual zombies wouldn't be scary at all. A shield phalanx with a line of bows behind would solve every conflict.
I noticed early on in the show that once they had a nice group set up, the threat from zombies was always either a surprise attack, or the "swarms" just being too large for the group to handle. There's only so much mileage you can get out of that cliche before people start questioning the worldbuilding.
Or you know just set up crew served weapons and destroy every zombie to the horizon. Too bad the military in these stories never thinks of that.
The concept of the Flood is right proper Lovecraftian horror. It was never really depicted in the Halo series as scary as the Flood actually was; we had a brief glimpse of how horrific something like that might be with the short film Into The Aquila Rift, but it's a shame we don't have more media that properly explores the absolute horror of being a living shell for an outer-dimensional species (though, I suppose the movie The Puppet Masters from 1994 comes sort of close) .
Doesn't even take that much. The Monster Hunter International world treats zombies as your entry level threat, more of a payday on legs. Only issue is if they were created by a necromancer or houdoun. Put on armor, pop pop pop, collect samples, collect paycheck.
Man, I’ve got to re-read those.
Prepare... for wrath... of Skippy!
More Human Than Human begins playing
WWZ was excellent, really lightning in a bottle almost, given how obsessed with zombies every aspect of pop culture was back then. TZSG was funny too in its own right
i've read both more times than i can really remember
I loaned my copy out to a friend, in exchange for their copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra...don’t regret that but I have been craving a reread of WWZ as time goes on
Meh, cop drama with zombies sucked to begin with
Look closer, they are quite literally the exact same formula
Can you expand on this? I never thought of it like that, and watched for the first ~4 seasons (largely because I had quite enjoyed the comic up until that point)
The shows have almost identical tropes. Danger is only exceeded by drama, acting is all hyper emotional, characters are killed off for dramatic effect, random acts of betrayal, etc.
Ehh I don’t really see it, beyond the over-reliance on interpersonal drama between characters who should realistically have far bigger concerns than, for example, carol’s husband being kind of a dick. When I think police procedural I think adamantium-lined plot armor for the main characters, while TWD almost had the opposite problem of killing characters for no reason beyond shock value
Thank women for that one. Their love of “true crime” and hyper emotional drama created some of the laziest tv tropes ever seen.
It did feel formulaic to me in how every episode basically followed the same pattern of:
-Inciting incident from last episode’s conclusion dealt with
-quiet down time for female characters to babble / setup upcoming interpersonal conflicts
-brief taste of the ol’ ultra violence
-more prolonged babbling
-high tension incident set up for next episode
But not the police procedural formula - it was like a really poorly written Breaking Bad imo
idiot kid/female runs off not telling anyone
It’s not? If you replace zombies with criminals you have the exact same show. Hyper emotional people, random acts of betrayal, characters dying for dramatic effect, nonsensical relationships, etc
Oz was quite literally a cop drama, just the prison version. Deadwood was at least rational but again cops versus criminals, same as justified. Boardwalk empire and sopranos have their moments but like deadwood aren’t reliant on the tropes despite using some of them.
The original show died with the pilot episode.
Apparently, they're releasing free teaser episodes for the other shows on youtube in order to get you hooked. Although, I haven't seen one for the Daryl spin-off.
Haven't seen anything from this franchise in ages. It's still as formulaic and rote as ever. The deaths are cheap, the melodrama is weak and the world is empty. A lot of wasted potential.
$10 says it was a recycled Aliens show that never found its legs or was somehow stuck in pre-development hell.
Valid point about Raised by Wolves, but TWD has brand recognition so it comes with a built in fan base.
Just tell everyone how suave and debonair I am, or that I saved your dog's life once in Taiwan instead.