Invincible, Issue #4

* Part 4 of 4 of the Family Matters storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Invincible, Issue #4! In the previous installment, Mark gets to hang out with his dad doing superhero stuff! They find a platoon of aliens emerging from a portal, which they fight for a little bit before the aliens get old and wither before their eyes. They retreat. Easy stuff, very anticlimactic.

Later, when Omni-Man flies to the mall and throws a kid with a bomb strapped to his chest up into the air. He explodes and harms no one, except for himself, but that’s the price to pay for having a bomb strapped to your chest. It’s not a moment later when a portal opens behind Omni-Man and aliens steal him through to another dimension!

So what’s next for Mark “Invincible” Grayson? Saving his father? Fondling his genitals? Choose your own adventure!

Invincible, Issue #4 [May, 2003]
Written by: Robert Kirkman

Robot is marveling at the technological handiwork of the robots with the video game console chips. Supremely advanced. Very impressive. Invincible interrupts his good time with a question with respect to his pulsating boner: “I’m trying to find Eve… do you know where she is?” Well, sonny, Eve and Rex are out on a “mission”, if you catch my drift. When Rex is done with his “mission” after 45 seconds, they’ll come back and you can see her then.

Invincible really really REALLY needs to talk to her, though. It’s super urgent. It’s, like, pants-wetting levels of urgency here. Someone is turning high school kids into human bombs for, you know, nefarious reasons. It’s spooky and awful. Robot already knows this because he’s perceptive and smart! Unlike Invincible, who is unobservant and dumb! Invincible is taken aback, but Robot had deduced this revelation by blah blah blahblah blahblahblah blah. He has a very lengthy explanation that I didn’t read because I have better things to do than read comics and write 2,000 words about them. I just… uh… I don’t wanna.

Eve and Rex have returned from their evening of “mission”ary-ing. “I think the mall bombings are connected to missing kids at our school,” Invincible blurts. After Eve asks who might be behind it, Robot tells them no and shut up and just go to bed and then go to school in the morning.

So they do, because Robot is the boss around here I guess. They should spray him with a dang hose.

Mark goes home to find his mother sadly watching TV at whatever ungodly hour it is. Mark’s all “what are you doing up?” and his mother is all “what are you doing up?” It’s a stalemate. “Just because you’re wearing tights doesn’t mean you don’t have a curfew,” she rebukes. Checkmate.

Of course, Mom is worried about Dad. Being whisked away to another dimension is always anxiety-riddled territory. Who knows what kind of otherworldly harems he might be missionary-ing in? “It’s going to be okay, Mom,” Mark tells her with a sincere side hug. “Don’t worry about Dad. He’ll be back…”

Yeah. In a casket.

Who can think about mall bombings at a time like this? The chicken has been boiled! Like an egg. What came first? We’ll never know.

“I’m trying not to think about it,” Mark says of the mall bombings while holding a forkful of mushy chicken. Eve is less than happy about this deliberate avoidance. It’s unbecoming of a superhero, honestly. Mark argues that they have no leads. Eve agrees and puts a sock in it.

“I wish it were just a monster we could punch,” Mark sighs as they get up and dump their shitty cafeteria food in the trash. Eve agrees again. Thinking is hard!

Speaking of thinking, Mark goes to a boring class about Mayan mythology. Something about severed heads and spitting in hands to make women pregnant. Mark falls so asleep it’s so damn dull. He told Eve he was going to keep an eye on anything suspicious during class, but it’s hard to do that during some shut-eye. Mark is proving to be quite useless for this team. They should throw him down a well. Robot too after they’re done spraying him with that hose.

Mark and Eve’s talking has upset their teacher, who tells Eve that she needs to put a sock in it. He calls the two of them lovebirds, which I find rather inappropriate and is grounds for getting sprayed with the hose. In my opinion. The whole class laughs. Mark is grumpy. “She’s not my girlfriend,” he sneers. Doth protest too much, Marcus? Professor Dipshit is slightly apologetic, but he still says “muh class was interrupted”. Mark is salty. Grumpy and salty. Like Frylock from Aqua Teen Hunger Force!

Great, now things are awkward. Mark and Eve walk together in the hall with 1,000-yard stares and are likely contemplating taking each other down to the Bone Zone. Mark attempts to break the silence with uncomfortable banter, which thankfully doesn’t last long for all of our sakes! Eve gets a phone call from Robot.

What’s uncomfortable? The weird warts y’all got on your noses?

“I have been using secondary operating systems to run checks on all employees of your high school. Teachers, custodians, bus drivers, everyone, and I– hold on.”

Oh boy, the SECONDARY OPERATING SYSTEMS are in use! Nerd alert!

Robot is in the middle of kicking some bad guy ass and he’s handling himself quite swimmingly. He launches back into his explanation of what he was doing, which boils down to “which adults at the school have the capacity to build a bomb?”

“Surprisingly, your physics teacher, David Hiles, is a former weapons engineer for Globaltech, a military sanctioned research firm. It’s not definitive evidence of his guilt, but I’m 99.8% sure that he’s who you’re looking for.”

DAVID HILES IT IS! Bombing kids is his modus operandi! Robot’s gonna call some cops! Mark and Eve, you two break into his house! Let’s do this thing! And after about 20 panels of them running around starting to do this thing, they finally get around to putting on their superhero jammies and doing this thing.

Geek Patrol is here with our retainers and inhalers! Stand down, sir!

“What should we do now?” Invincible asks as they fly away.

“Ask him questions, I guess… according to Robot the police should be on the way. How dangerous could he be?”

They fly to David Hiles’ house. A completely egregious continuity error occurs, because Hiles is the same teacher who was explaining Mayan mythology. Apparently, physics teachers teach Mayan mythology at Carl Winslow High School.

“Well, I didn’t expect to get caught quite this early, and I certainly expected… more conventional authorities when the time did come,” Hiles drawls as he invites them in. He calls them by their Christian god-given names, which surprises them even though Eve doesn’t even wear a mask and Mark looks like a Mark-shaped bug. “Follow me,” he says, leading them into the basement, “I’ll show you the fourth missing student. I assure you, I have no intention of resisting.”

Well ain’t that ducky? “You see…” Hiles begins his sob story, “…it was the constant pestering and belittling from things like what you see before you that caused my son to commit suicide. My son’s suicide resulting in my divorce… and my divorce led me to losing my job.”

There’s an unconscious kid strapped with a bomb in the basement. His name is Derek. I know this because Invincible screams “DEREK!”.

Hiles just keeps talking and talking like one of those dumb villains. His sad little life was destroyed and he’s, apparently, taking it out on children. “Children that spend too much time at the mall… attend parties… consume alcohol… and play sports, when they should be studying and doing homework.” Wow, what a wet blanket. Wet with piss, no less.

Gimme a kiss!!

So he turned these kids into bombs. A disproportionate response, but hey? Kids suck, what can we say? They deserve to have their guts exploded all over other kids who will also explode soon. It’s poetic if you think about it really, really, REALLY hard.

“I can’t think of a more appropriate end to my crusade…” Hiles rips open his shirt, revealing the Superman logo! Or a bomb. “…than the death of two superheroes!”

39 seconds left, but Invincible is tired of all the blithering and blathering from Unabomber Jones! He grabs the guy and flies through the roof, and we are exactly where we began at the top of Issue #1. “Y’know you really ruined my afternoon,” Invincible tells this wretched motherfucker as he flies all the way to some polar region and throws the guy like a… well, like a bomb. CHA-THOOM! We’re done here. Hiles is dead. Serves him right for calling him and Eve lovebirds. Spray him with the hose!

Invincible flies back over the Hiles’ house where Derek is getting loaded into an ambulance. “So… is it over?” he asks Eve. Whatever Eve’s superhero name is. I don’t remember. And yeah, it’s over. Robot’s gonna come by and do a sweep, the police are done. Time to go home, I guess.

Mark’s mom is still sad because her husband has probably been murdered by alternate dimension creepy crawleys.

“Hey, is Dad back yet?” Mark asks as he enters the kitchen.

“Not yet,” Mom replies glumly. “Go upstairs and clean up so we can eat. I thought I was going to have dinner alone tonight.” Pile that guilt on, Momma. It’s not like your son just saved a bunch more kids from getting killed or anything of that fashion.

Dad comes back. That’s anticlimactic. He looks sad. Mom looks sad. Everyone looks sad. It’s pretty sad.

One big happy family!

“So…” Mom says at the table, breaking the hella awkward silence. “Anything interesting happen to either of you today?”

Mark speaks first: “I found out one of my teachers was turning my classmates into organic bombs in order to take revenge on kids he felt were like the ones who led his son to commit suicide. Apparently he turned himself into a bomb also, and tried to kill me and a friend of mine, but I flew him to Antarctica before he blew up so that he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

Dad’s next: “I spent the last eight months enslaved by an army from an alternate dimension, although it seems much less time passed here. About a week ago I led a revolt against my captors and regained control of my powers. Today, a team of scientists from the rebellion found a way to get me home.”

…

“That’s nice,” Mom smiles vaguely. “Who’s ready for dessert?”