WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Invincible, by Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley, and the Season 1 finale of Invincible, "Where I Really Come From," streaming now on Amazon Prime.
Though Invincible starts out as a coming of age tale of a young hero learning to live up to his father, it eventually becomes so much more than that. Fans of the Amazon series will recognize just how powerful the title hero is when he starts out, but this young hero still has a long way to go to reach the full potential he displayed in the comics.
Through his comic book adventures, Invincible ascends to some truly impressive power levels that would make him stand out in any superhero universe. But just how strong, durable, and fast does Invincible become?
When Invincible's powers first manifest, he accidentally hurls a garbage bag into the stratosphere, and that level of power becomes the baseline for the hero from that point on. Lifting vans, busting down walls and taking hits that could shatter concrete become the norm for the hero. But in his brutal fight with his own father at the start of the series, he learns that he has a long way to go. While the hero survives hits into skyscrapers and getting smashing into mountains, he is left a bleeding mess with a lot of growth ahead of him.
In the Amazon series, the hero gets his keister kicked incredibly often, and those beatdowns usually come at the hands of a fully grown Viltrumite several times stronger than he is. While on an alien world with his father in the comic series, the two face off against multiple Viltrumites at once and Invincible figures out that in order to grow, he needs to start exercising. After surviving that battle, Invincible starts working out, pushing himself to fly faster and lift more weight so that he can be truly prepared for the battles yet to come. Over the course of the series, he ends up growing to an astonishing degree.
By the time Invincible is able to hold his own against other Viltrumites, he is no longer the one getting smashed into buildings, but the one smashing them. He proves capable of destroying building-sized spaceships by flying through them and even cracks massive starships that dwarfed entire city blocks in half before tossing the halves into space where they would not harm any civilian down below. With help from a few others, he even manages to bust apart the planet Viltrum after its core was destabilized, hinting at how the hero's power had increased.
That strength combines with his speed to devastating effect when the hero performs a flying slam. Even at the start of the series, the hero is easily supersonic, crossing the distance between Earth's surface and its upper atmosphere in seconds and flying between continents in under a minute. The Official Handbook of the Invincible Universe even states that Invincible could cross 8000 miles in under 25 seconds, and the hero only got faster after the handbook's publication. At one point, he outraced a starship approaching Earth, so eager to get onto the surface of the planet that he exceeded the speed of a faster-than-light spacecraft that crossed entire solar systems in the span of weeks.
Beyond his strength and speed, his durability is his most noteworthy trait, and Invincible no longer got bloodied and broken by mere building-busting hits at the end of his series. Indeed, he shrugs off the explosion of a nuclear weapon fired by the Mauler Twins, and when Dinosaurus glassed the entirety of Las Vegas with a bomb, it did nothing more to Invincible than sear off his costume. By the end of the series, his name is put to its ultimate test as he fights in a battle inside the Sun itself, and he still emerges victorious.
The fights in the Amazon series have been jaw-dropping in their scope, and in the wake of the finale, it's clear the adaptation knows how to retain its source material's epic quality. While some recoiled at how weak the character felt in comparison to his comic book counterpart, challenging the hero early on is exactly what builds him toward the incredible powerhouse he becomes. As the animated series progresses, watching that rise to power takes place in animation will undoubtedly be an engaging experience. With a hero as strong as Invincible it's clear the sky is far from the limit.