They say at some point that Nolan’s sci-fi books never sold as well as his travel books- I wonder if, when he started writing, he figured he’d just tell us yokels about how cool and badass his people are, and that we’d just eat it up- only to realize that a bunch of unbeatable space-fascists who murder everybody and can’t be hurt at all is not necessarily what our sensibilities would define as interesting storytelling. I mean, what other kind of stories would a society like the Vilturmites tell?

So, I imagine he’d realize he needs to introduce some threats, and since there’s no indication that Nolan was a particularly inventive writer, he was forced to mine the depths of his memory to introduce some stakes to the story. Then when that didn’t work either, he started writing travel books.

It’s been a while since I read those parts, but I think all of the “weaknesses” he writes about are stuff he eventually overcame, right? He beat Spacer Racer, he’s alive so he obviously made it out of the encounter with the Ragnarrs. I could see him writing that stuff and not even considering that it could be used against them until after the fact.

This has always been one of my favorite little sequences- I imagine it happening in the span of like two seconds lol

One of my favorite things about Invincible is how it treats the idea of redemption- it doesn’t treat morality like stats in a video game, there are no “morality points”. It’s not a question of “oh, this guy did 5 evil things, but he also did 6 good things, and this good act outweighs these evil acts, so therefor he can be redeemed”. It’s all character based; it’s a personal question for them, just as it is for people in real life- can the people who have been wronged find it within themselves to forgive? Can the person who did wrong make the choice to be better?

Mark and Debbie forgive Nolan, and we see him make the decision to change- does that mean he’s “redeemed”? For those characters, yes. For us, as an audience, the answer is probably “sure” because these are our protagonists, these are the characters we care about- but he still did all of those horrible things; they were all his decision. Would the rest of the world make that same choice, to forgive? The families of all those people in Chicago, or on that cruise-ship, or the people killed in that avalanche, or the loved ones of the Guardians? Almost certainly not- and though the story doesn’t linger on that, it doesn’t go out of it’s way to discount it, either. He wasn’t possessed by Parallax, or by Onslaught, or whatever comic-book thing they could come up with so that it wasn’t really his fault. You could make the argument that thousands of years of Viltrumite teaching serves that function, but it doesn’t mean that that person wasn’t still Nolan- and that’s okay, because we understand how he came to that mindset, as well as the struggle that led him away from it.

When I first saw the train scene, that was a moment that really gave me pause, because it was so sadistic, so over-the-top, that I thought “man, people are not going to want to forgive Nolan for this”. Maybe thats the point? Maybe that’s how we always should have felt, and Kirkman really wants to drive the point home.

IF they are able to stick the landing with his character, and really chew on that question of forgiveness and change, then I think they can still do it. But they’ve given themselves a tougher challenge going about it the way they’ve done it, and I hope they manage to pull it off. Because I really think the development of Nolan as a character is one of the best parts of the comic series, and I’d hate to see it not work for people on screen. There have been some oddly clunky moments in the series that make me worry, to be honest, but I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.