I recently finished the comic, it is a very good read but I feel like Eve is quite underutilized in the story. She is basically a depowered Dr. Manhatten but the story treats her like a typical superhero girlfriend for the most part. Early in the comic and in her special it is revealed that her power is only limited by her psychological restriction and she can turn into super saiyan in near-death experiences. It felt like a Chekov Gun but it is only brought up again in the very end of the comic for a comedic moment. She is also revealed to be a science genius and was never brought up again.
I feel like Eve’s five years in the Coalition should help her to explore the potential of her power and become well prepared for the 2nd Viltrumite War. And she should have a badass moment in the final arc instead of throwing useless pink things. Hell, the writers could even create some dramatic tension by giving Eve a countdown for going into deus ex mode, like she could only hold it for five minutes or else she could DIE, something like that.
There’s one point where she derisively says Rex thought her powers were just making pink constructs appear but to be honest you can’t really blame him because that’s all she ever uses them for in fights.
Even with the mental block, she should be able to crush Robot without blinking but during that whole fight she’s still just firing pink blasts. Idk why it’s bugged me so much, but there was a particularly egregious example during the last fight with Robot where Mark tells Tech Jacket to blast through the walls of the Pentagon so she can get in. Eve should be able to turn the steel and concrete into sand with a snap of her fingers, why does she need to get led in?
There’s a general lack of creativity when using her powers. Her “arch-nemesis” is Killcannon, a guy whose entire power relies on a non-organic weapon attached to his arm. She should be able to turn people’s guns into flowers, she could turn people’s clothes into lead to fix them in place, if she wanted to kill someone she could change the air in their lungs into iron. We see a million evil Marks, I’d be interested in seeing what an evil alternate dimension Eve would look like with her powers completely untethered from morality, but the comic is uninterested in that sort of thing.
The comic explicitly states that she and Mark can work together while Amber and Mark don’t because Eve is a superhero and understands that part of his life. Despite that, from the time she gets pregnant until the end of the story she serves mostly as a damsel in distress for Mark to save and as an authorial mouthpiece to tell you what lesson Mark should have learned from the previous story arc. The full extent of her physical contributions during the back half of the story are when her powers kick in to ctrl-z whatever gory death she or Mark just experienced and then temporarily rescuing Omni-Man at the end.
Throughout the entire story I was waiting for her to finally be taken seriously by the story but she just never is. I really hope the show fixes that.
I know I’m gonna get extremely downvoted for saying this in this sub, but in general the comics do not treat women very well and I find some of the content downright sexist (especially in the first compendium). It makes sense that Eves powers would be down graded or not fully explored.
I feel like the show is correcting some of the mistakes in the comics, so I hope we continue to see more development in her powers!
I wouldn’t say the depiction of Eve is sexist in Invincible, and to be fair the series in general is never interested in having creative use of superpowers and abilities, and the treatment is not exclusive to Eve or female characters. Basically every Earth superhero except Robot (and Eve) is inconsequential to the major plot of the story which is the Viltrumite war, which I think is the kind of the point of the story.