In a nutshell:
Invincible confronts the man responsible for turning teenagers into bombs.
Synopsis:
Mark makes the connection that the missing students from his school are being turned into bombs. Later at school, Robot calls Eve to let her know he’s done background checks on all the school employees and that their science teacher, David Hiles, has a history in weapon engineering. Invincible and Atom Eve fly to his house where Hiles explains his motive: his son had committed suicide due to popular kids and that led to the decline in his marriage and career. He shows them the fourth missing student, Derek, and reveals he has a bomb implanted in himself about to go off. Invincible flies Hiles to Antartica where he detonates harmlessly in the air. Mark heads home and his father returns from the Flaxan dimension around the same time, allowing the Graysons to enjoy a family dinner.
Notes:
Superhero, not a detective:
When Eve chastises Mark for disregarding the teen bomb incidents, he points out he’s a superhero, not a detective. He will say this a few times throughout the series.
David Hiles’ weird speech?
Eve tells Mark to keep an eye out for clues. We then get four panels of Mr. Hiles telling some weird mythology story about a father impregnating the daughter by spitting in her hand, and then Eve asks Mark if he caught any clues in the speech. I don’t know if I missed something here, because it’s Robot’s phone call later that identifies Hiles as the bad guy.
Review:
This wraps up the first little arc of Invincible, and on the surface, there doesn’t appear to be much indication that it’s going to be anything particularly special. I’d feel bad if someone read this arc and then dropped off just when everything we know is about to get turned upside-down, but for the record, I didn’t know about the twist and I still enjoyed these four issues on my first read. Robert Kirkman’s humorous look at the superhero world, and the lighthearted adventures of Mark at this time in his life, is a nice little place to be while setting up something a little darker and more ominous. I find myself enjoying this story arc on rereads because it’s just a slice of life for Mark Grayson before he “grows up,” so to speak. The plot of teens being turned into bombs is a nice introductory conflict for Mark in his superhero career, being a serious threat while not a planet-threatening villain, without being too grim. Hiles’ motivation is explained in about two speech bubbles, and I like the way Kirkman condenses so much exposition when it’s just there to fill a plot function and explain the villain’s backstory. The villain could’ve gone on and on but that would’ve gotten cliched, so it’s handled within a page so that we can move on to the action. Kirkman loves throwing out a bunch of crazy ideas at once that take a second or two to sink in. We’ll see it with some of his villain origins later in the series.
So this is the end of the beginning, so to speak. We meet Mark Grayson and get a nice introduction to his world with this arc. After this, things get serious. Then they get really serious. I really enjoy how comfortable and homely the series feels right now to an avid comic book fan before pulling the rug out from under us in three issues.