Over two years since the first season aired, Prime Video’s Invincible is back for Season 2. The animated superhero series will pick up right where the last season ended, introducing new characters and stories from the comic it is based on. The first four episodes of Season 2 will debut on Prime Video on Nov. 3, and the remaining four episodes will be released in early 2024.
The Season 2 trailer was unveiled at Prime Video’s New York Comic Con panel on Saturday, along with an exclusive episode clip and a series conversation with co-showrunners Robert Kirkman and Simon Racioppa.
Invincible follows 18-year-old Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), who is just like every guy his age — except that his father Nolan, voiced by J.K. Simmons, is (or was) the world’s most powerful superhero. Still reeling from Nolan’s betrayal in Season 1, Mark struggles to rebuild his life as he faces a host of new threats, all while battling his greatest fear — that he might become his father without even knowing it.
In celebration of season 2, The Koalition participated in a roundtable with Kirman and Racioppa at NYCC.
Where things are starting in season 2 and what are you most excited for fans to see in the new season?
“Things more or less pick up right where we left off it’s in the aftermath of the massive fight with Omni-Man and Invincible. We’re picking up with that status quo and watching the characters pick up the pieces as they try to move on. It’s a very emotional season. it starts in a very emotional place and is going to be no less intense than what we saw at the end of season one.”
Season 1 had a phenomenal cast; can you talk about added to the cast?
“There’s no ego in it at all. It’s all because of Steven Yeun to a certain extent and it’s a team effort with our casting director Linda L Montaine, Simon and myself. Cory Walker chimes in a lot as well as Dan Duncan Shan O’Neal. We sit together with the scripts and try to figure out who would be best for those roles. Sometimes we get exactly the perfect actor and then sometimes someone will suggest someone that we didn’t expect and we’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s perfect as well,’ but I really have to give credit to Steven. Steven believed in us early on, he’s a buddy of mine. Maybe I called in a favor and the fact that he’s leading this show, the fact he’s playing Invincible is just attracting no end of talent because everyone in Hollywood wants to work with that guy.”
“We’ve been really fortunate on that front. Imagine making Sterling K Brown mean, he’s incredible. He brought everything to this, left it all in the booth from the first day to last day, he’s incredible. I can’t wait till you guys see and hear Sterling on screen for this season. He’s absolutely spectacular. He’s an actor that can be the most sincere, kindest, warmest individual you’ve ever encountered and also be insanely threatening and terrifying almost at the same time. He’s got a very JK Simmons-like ability in that respect, and it’s really cool to be able to work with him and then he gets in the booth and it’s a whole different level there too.”
Kirkman how do you strike a balance when it comes to adapting the source material for this season compared to the first season?
“I think the first season was slightly more difficult just because we were trying to maintain the bookend element to the Nolan/Omni-Man Invincible story. We knew what we wanted the first episode to be we knew what we wanted the last episode to be. We had six episodes in the middle and if we had adapted the comics directly, we wouldn’t have had the space to have those two moments be the book in so we moved a lot of stuff around and adjusted story lines to accommodate that. With our second season and beyond, we have some similar problems along the way where there are certain things we want to give more time or less time or we want to condense story lines in comics. You can do a subplot and then come back to the subplot like 10 20 30 issues later and the fan base is really accustomed to that. In television it’s a little bit more difficult so you want to give them a little bit more to hang their hat on so there’s sometimes there instead of having a seven-beat subplot that ran over 50 issues. We’ll turn it into like a six-beat subplot that’ll play over multiple seasons. So, we’re combining things, but it’s been a lot of fun working with Simon, Helen Le and Ros Stroy to figure out exactly how we’re going to be adapting the stories from the comics.”
“One of the best examples in season one was the reanimate story which in the comics run all the way to issue 58 or something is the final beat of that and we was pulling those beats out realizing, ‘Oh this is one great story may be harder to sustain over five seasons in a comic but we can make it one episode in the show and still find what was there in the books and just sort of bring it together and package it for you like 45 minutes.’
Ang Hasen advantage of further exploring its own Multiverse while building on the core connection between invincible and omn how important was it what got angstrom from the comics in a thematically important way um I think that
Angstrom Levy is the first villain that is an Invincible villain. It’s not just someone that existed in the world, possibly Omni-Man faced, or other members of the Guardians of the Globe faced. In this season Invincible is taking the mantle of defender of the Earth from Omni-Man because he’s not there and Angstrom emerges at a time when Mark is trying to figure things out and exist. Having a villain that is the core of our season that also is so tied to Invincible at this time in his life when he is so uncertain and he’s trying to figure things out was something that was really important to us. [It was important we] pull directly from the comics and really showcase and build a season around.”
Will Omni-Man’s exile be further explored? Will we know what he’s up to or will it be more of a mystery?
“It’s definitely going to be a mystery. The thing I’m comfortable with saying is you’re not going to watch the entirety of season 2 without seeing Omni-Man. A lot of people came from season one loving what that character did, but interested in who that character is, and wanting to see more of him. At some point we’ll deliver that, but I think there is a lot of mystery as to how and why and when that character will show up. The way he left the planet in the first season, as a fan I would definitely want to see where he went and what happened to him and that’s something that we’ll see eventually at some point in some form, but when it happens it’ll be when you least expect it.”
“One of the things that makes the comics so great is everything has weight and repercussions in it as opposed to some other comics where a terrible thing happens, and it is forgotten two issues later. What’s so great about that and Invincible is things have repercussions, so we try to bring that into the show. We’re going to show you the repercussions of season one going forward. You’re going to find out what happens after season one and season two.”
We’re in living in a golden age of comic book and fantasy content on TV and movies. What draws you two specifically to the adult side of that because you’re both succeeding at the highest level.
“The Invincible show is happening at the best possible time because when the Invincible comic debuted 20 years ago it was commenting on expanding upon playing up the tropes of superhero storytelling. Superhero storytelling have been going on since the 30s, the Marvel Universe had been going since the 60s, and the comic book audience was very well versed in those tropes and so it played really well with Invincible because we were putting those books out to a very educated audience. Now because of the prevalence of superhero stories in all media Invincible the show is coming at a time where the same way the comics commented on Marvel comics from the 90s and to the 60s and various different stories from DC Comics. The Invincible show gets to kind of shine a light on some of the functions and some of the story structures that have been popular in the MCU and various DC movies. We’re not spoofing anything at any point, but I love that an audience comes into Invincible with an awareness of how superhero stories normally go. You come into any episode of Invincible and you’re going to be feeling like, ‘Oh I know how this is going to go because I’ve seen Iron Man 2, I’ve seen Avengers, and I know how they build to this, I know how they do this, and I know they do reveals.’ But we do the exact opposite often and we change expectations often. We’re going to take an audience and have them going into an area they think they’re going to expect and then we get to pull the rug out from under them in a really cool way. We try to ground our stuff a lot more. Yeah, we have fantastical things, we have great moments of comedy, we have crazy things happening, but it’s the emotional reactions and the effects of superheroes on the world. We ground it; we make it feel real. That’s the goal in a way that a lot of these other series don’t. Sometimes a good guy doesn’t work, sometimes if you get hit by Superman you die and buildings fall down, and there’s repercussions to that. That’s what I think helps make it adult or makes it adult to me. It’s not the swear words, it’s not the actors, it’s the content the emotional content of the episodes.”
You have a wealth of source material obviously from the original comics, but you also know where the story ends. How far in advance have you planned out the animated series at this point?
“I roughly have a vague notion of the beats I’d like to hit season to season all the way through the end. It’s important to keep things malleable. We may end up going more seasons than I expect or less seasons, but it is a tremendous gift to have that 144-issue run and be able to expand that storyline or not expand that story line, we can truncate things here. I’ve said often I look at this series as a second draft of what we were able to do on the comics because I didn’t know exactly where everything was going at every point in writing the original series but now we know how the story wraps up, how important some characters become, we can backwards engineered new things into the television series that will set up some of those coming events better and that’s a that’s a fun experiment. We have the roadmap of the show right in the comics. That’s what we’re doing, we’re expanding where we can, we’re opening up the space between the panels sometimes and showing you a bit more that happening between these panels and you couldn’t comment but that’s the show. We’re very lucky in that sense.
How did you balance everything Mark is going through in the show? How did you balance all of these emotions with Steven Yeun and his character so heavily in these first two seasons?
“Steven Yeun brings so much to it. He reads the scripts, we talked about the character role, and he has so much great input into where the character’s head is at, especially that age because Steven’s older. Mark is 20ish at the start of that because he’s just graduated high school. He really gets into the character has good questions about that for us. I think it was like looking at the comic and then sort of just asking, ‘Where would you be in this place? Where would anyone be with these kinds of responsibilities having just gone through the events at the end of season 1? How could you not have trauma from that? How could you not be wrecked from that and still trying to pull the world and trying to pull your world back together through all that because you have these responsibilities?’ One of the things that makes the series so complicated and engaging is that we’re taking really high stakes and really insane superhero scenarios and applying human emotion, human logic, and real-world aspects to it. That’s why you see Invincible as a character going through all these emotions and having to deal with the situation that he’s in, the status quo shakeups and the pressures he has around him because of his ability. It’s all just an effort to bring some sense of realism to this fantastical world.”
Invincible season 2 will release on November 3rd. Check out our full interview in the audio player below.
