u/RandominusDredichitu

Paul's death wasn't the last you've see of him! Full Rabintrospective here

Invincible was not a serialized comic. It wasnt written with an ending in mind. Kirkman has talked about how his original plan was to have Invincible go on forever, and made it clear that he had ideas for continuing the story that he never used, and would have been fine with another writer taking over eventually. The Viltrumite saga is not the backbone of the series. In the comics >!the Viltrumites are a looming threat up until the Viltrumite War. The end of the war in issue 77 is the end of the Viltrumite threat. Thragg notes it will take take thousands of years until the Viltrumites would be done with Earth. Obviously the plot doesnt end here, but the looming threat does. In issue 101-102, Nolan takes over the empire and Thragg is the only Viltrumite who still represents a threat. Hes an antagonist, but hes not the main anatagonist, hes not behind every event of the series, and his death isn't even the final battle of the series. !<How does this relate to the discourse surrounding the series? Filler episodes and power scaling are not applicable criticisms. Perpetual stories are not expected to continuously up the ante like other stories are. For example, there doesnt need to be a justification for why the Vulture is still a threat to Spider-Man even though Peter was able to defeat him as a teenager, and Vulture has only gotten older. This is the same reason why Batman doesnt just kill the Joker. Comic runs are self contained, and if the previous writer wrote a story where the Joker almost destroys the world, the next writer is not expected to keep him at that threat level. One may not like this style of storytelling, but the comics dont retend to be anything else, and all the fans know what to expect. At the end of the day, Invincible was still a superhero comic, and so it needed to have inconsistent power-scaling so Mark could still fight regular supervillains after defeating Conquest, for example. After a certain point in the comics, >!all the villains stories get wrapped up and Mark never really acts as a traditional superhero again, but its not like this was a natural profession, you can see how characters like Titan were just presumably dealt with offscreen, and as the comic ends, a lot of plot threads are dealt with offscreen. !<People who talk about plot progression, filler episodes, and Mark scaling up are trying to force the comic to be something its not. Mark doesnt have a main goal hes working towards throughout the series. In fact, only the villains do! I understand frustration with how the episodes are presented of course. Eight episode seasons don't fit an episodic format that still contains larger arcs like Invincible does. But a lot of people who havent read the comics seem to expect a continuous escalation between seasons, but thats not going to be able to happen for all the seasons. There are parts of the comic where a giant battle happens and nothing of that scale happens again for a while. This is the mindset people need to approach the show with. It's not serialized, and it cant be.

For context, the villain here is a hitman who took J Jonah Jameson hostage and threatened to kill him if Frank didn't let him go. And the reason Frank tries to save him is because the hitman saved him in Vietnam. Nowadays he wouldnt even think of saving him