In a nutshell:
Someone kills the Guardians of the Globe.
Synopsis:
While Mark spends the weekend catching up on sleep, the Guardians of the Globe are pretty active. The premiere superhero team in the world, Darkwing, War Woman, Red Rush, Martian Man, Green Ghost, Aquarus and Immortal gather at headquarters for an emergency meeting. It isn’t long before they realize none of them set up the emergency meeting, and then the members find themselves dismembered one at a time. Once the Immortal is decapitated, the assailant is revealed to be Omni-Man.
Firsts:
Of course, this is the introduction of the Guardians of the Globe, a clear rip-off of the Justice League, and their introduction serves the beautifully effective purpose of setting us up to be thrown off by the immediate deaths of these characters.
Kursk, a minor villain, also shows up.
Notes:
The Green Ghost mentions he’s new to the role. The original Green Ghost will have a minor role in helping set up another superhero, Bulletproof.
Midnight City, where Darkwing hails, will be revisited in ten or so issues.
Recurring Gag:
Atlantis being a pretty boring place will be revisited for humorous effect in issue #58 I believe.
Marvel Connection:
The throwaway villain Immortal fights in this issue, Bi-Plane, looks and sounds suspiciously like the Vulture from Spider-Man comics. Both are bald, flying villains, and they both have a suspiciously similar cancer storyline. In Spectacular Spider-Man #186-188, the Vulture contracts cancer from his flying mechanism and goes out to get revenge on everyone who wronged him. I can’t help thinking about that story when Bi-Plane runs through his exposition in the space of few panels.
Review:
Well, this is it. This is pretty much the moment that hooked everyone who watched the show, and that applies to me as well. I’m more of a comic guy, so I left the show so that I could read it instead. And the setup is just beautiful. After being introduced to the powerful and resourceful (yet openly shallow) Guardians of the Globe through a series of vignettes, they are brutally wiped out by none other than Mark’s father, Omni-Man. Okay, intrigue met, seat settled in. I’m ready to see what’s next.
If I can get a little more personal, I was still skeptical of the series at this point, and I think that’s entirely the point. I was SURE that I knew what was going on here. More specifically, I KNEW this was trick of some kind. See, as I’ve said annoyingly enough already, I read a lot of comics. Lots of Spider-Man, X-Men, Batman, etc. And after reading all of these, I thought I knew where the twist was going. I was cynical and thought, “There’s no way they’re actually committing to this.” No, I remember resolving it could only be one of two things. 1) A shapeshifter taking Omni-Man’s place to stir up some conventional misunderstood drama, or 2) Omni-Man being mind-controlled by the government so we could have a cynical government story of some kind. Yep, I was used to shapeshifters and conspiracies, basically things used to explain away any REAL change in a comic. But like everyone else, even though I thought I knew where it was going, I couldn’t help being intrigued. What if I was wrong? What if they were really committing to a story that really shook up the foundations of what you knew could be done in a superhero comic? What if there was…consequences?
That idea of consequences is what makes shows like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul so good, and we almost see the same kind of internal drama play out here. Things get real, and they won’t be swept under the rug as an accident or misunderstanding of some kind. No, something real happened here, and it’s going to shake the foundation of Invincible’s life forever. Of course we were all intrigued.