Haste Makes Waste

I like Invincible. What I don’t like is that co-creator Robert Kirkman continues to tout the Prime Video show as an annual animated series, even though the waning quality across its four seasons has become increasingly hard to ignore. A loud part of the fandom is perfectly fine with that so long as they get more content quicker, but for me, that’s a backward way to look at animation.

Back in 2023, Kirkman spoke about the animation issues Prime Video faced in its first two seasons in the wake of the pandemic. He also revealed his edict to try to have a new season of the show every year so that the gap between seasons isn’t as large as it was between its first two seasons, according to Collider. 

Aesthetically, the biggest change is evident in how the first season was handled by Korean studio Wind Sun Sky Entertainment, which felt less stiff in dialogue scenes before the show was handed off to Skybound Animation, a newly minted wing of Skybound Entertainment established in 2023. In the interim, the release of Invincible: Atom Eve special—an episode meant to wet viewers’ proverbial beaks prior to the release of its second season—has become an artifact for how good the show could look and likely never will again, so long as the show follows its brisk release schedule. 

[Correction 4/4/26, 3:23 p.m. ET: The original version of this article misstated the owner of Skybound Entertainment.]

But as far as Kirkman is concerned, he’s cracked the code for American comics to be adapted into TV shows in the same way Japan has with manga and anime. Speaking at ComicsPRO 2026, Kirkman took his success with Invincible as the template for comic book adaptations. 

“What I’m seeing with Invincible, and the way that the animated series is fueling the sales on the trades in the direct market, is something that to me is signaling that there’s a potential to build something really exciting in this industry that will sustain us for years and years and years,” Kirkman said, according to Complex.

“Everybody talks about manga and how successful manga is, and the thing that makes manga so successful is the manga to anime pipeline,” he continued. “And with Invincible, we’re seeing that you can with American comics basically do the exact same thing.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Kirkman hasn’t reverse-engineered a solution to animation. He’s perpetuating a problem that’s long plagued the anime industry. Same shit, different toilet. In the current state of anime and its fandom, animation is treated less like art and more like content that must chase relevancy in the immediacy of its release schedule rather than taking time to make a show that looks great. The anime industry can be terrible, with animators crunching long hours and stress to get a show out in tight release windows—a scenario not unlike how comic book artists are ground to dust with rates that haven’t changed, and have even gotten worse, since the 70s. 

The proof is in the pudding. In its current season, many of Invincible’s scenes feel like sliding PNGs and character key visuals, copied and pasted into a room, with none of the sense of movement from earlier seasons. If it weren’t for the script and voice acting, the show would be grounds for you to put it down, pick up the comic instead, and let your imagination do the in-betweens. Alas, one of the show’s better qualities is how it left dead-in-the-water storylines from decades ago to the comics, and writing more thoughtful arcs for characters that were done dirty—a sentiment Kirkman is comfortably in agreement with. After all, he’s not the same white dude he was years ago, writing a comic just for a male audience.

Of course, the show hasn’t been unwatchable by any means. But much of the greatness of the show feels saved for finales, in the same way anime fans colloquially (and wrongly) interpret it as an anime saving its budget for a finale. Outside of that, however, the show has felt consistently inconsistent in the animation quality department. 

Animation will always be judged by how well things look in motion—it’s literally in the name—so wasting the medium’s biggest advantage by cutting corners just to make a show more immediate and therefore more “relevant” is disappointingly shortsighted. You only get one chance to make a show look right, so why rush it when you could take the time to make something that looks great? And for a flagship show meant to get people subscribed to the streamer, Invincible simply doesn’t look like one. 

Plenty of shows—Castlevania, Avatar: The Last Airbender—proved that absence can make fans’ hearts grow fonder when the return comes with animation and storytelling at the height of their powers. Invincible doesn’t have the same affordances anime has, where the Blu-ray release gets another pass to fix cuts and polish sequences beyond the broadcast version. And it certainly doesn’t have the “share the wealth” solution Mappa implemented with Chainsaw Man—The Movie: Reze Arc by fully funding the movie and keeping all the rights, so the profits go back to animators and they no longer make poverty wages. 

Instead, Invincible gets cannibalized by a streamer who charges more to remove ads while simultaneously spitting on the medium's face with AI nonsense every month, leaving whatever profits trickle down to animators like wringing a towel over cracked lips and calling that Fiji water. 

And more time and “better sakuga” as a solution don’t mean the show needs to be a fluid spectacle only in its action scenes. Anime like Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End have proven that sakuga speaks loudly in small moments, such as when characters put on a jacket, the way their hair dances in the wind, or the subtle shift in hand gestures. But the way Invincible is made now, the whole show feels like boring missionary sex with the promise that the finale will deliver a climax worth the wait. Sure, there are neat things like impact frames and gory battles here and there, but they hit like jingly keys rather than the explosive payoff to a season’s worth of build-up inertia felt throughout its hour-long runtime. 

I’d rather have a show that spends longer in the hopper and comes out looking as good as it possibly can. Honoring animators, scriptwriters, and voice actors’ time and work, rather than a show that arrives yearly like Madden or 2K, that’s bare and barely worth writing home about outside of TikTok edits that do the heavy lifting to make only its action and dialogue look good out of context, as a concentrated highlight of an eight hour-long episodes, condensed into half-finished 1-minute AMVs. Invincible deserves better, but I don’t think it’ll ever escape the trappings Kirkman has placed on it by treating it as content rather than art—a divide its fandom is currently at war over.  

While many Invincible fans ran with the now-deleted comment from an alleged former animator like a game of telephone—claiming the show only has four compositors in total, something Castlevania director Samuel Deats clarified while still noting the number is low—others took a different stance, accusing critics of wanting Mappa-level action animation.

Translation: they’re saying fans want the show to perpetuate the same crunch conditions that produced “sakuga slop” in Jujutsu Kaisen, which led animators to voice their dire work conditions. As far as this camp is concerned, they’d rather get the show immediately than wait years for a follow-up season, because that’d kill the show’s momentum. Both arguments are so close to the actual problem, and it’s driving me insane. 

Kirkman wants the show to be annual. Fine. The comic is already a story that requires sifting through some bullshit to find worthwhile parts, made better by the Prime Video adaptation leaving source material arcs on the cutting room floor. It’s an entertaining show that’s sometimes fascinating. But passable animation with a carrot-on-a-stick approach to save our budget for the finale animation sequences is the wrong lesson to take from anime. If anything, it treats the show like content and viewers like mindless consumers who don’t need quality, just immediacy. 

And that’s the problem. This is supposed to be the streamer’s flagship animated series, yet the animation feels like the least‑valued part of a show fans proudly call the Dragon Ball Z of comic books. Well‑meaning compositing tweaks and heavy backlighting aren’t the fix Invincible needs. I’d be far happier as a fan if the series took the time to make something worth watching, instead of delivering a version whose animation drags down everything else on the blank check promise that “at least you’ll get it again in 12 months.”

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