Before Invincible Season 4 hits Prime Video on March 18, Collider readers had the opportunity to check out the first two episodes over a week before its release. After the screening, creator, co-showrunner, and executive producer Robert Kirkman and co-showrunner and executive producer Simon Racioppa joined Steve Weintraub on stage for an exclusive conversation to discuss behind-the-scenes details about Season 4 and share exciting updates for Season 5.

After Season 3’s all-out devastation in the wake of Conquest (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Mark (Steven Yeun) is in a dark place mentally. He’s reeling from the destruction and struggling with the responsibility of his powers. In Season 4, as Earth is recovering from its last invasion, a far more powerful being is coming. Grand Regent Thragg, voiced by Lee Pace (Foundation), poses a threat that could change the fate of humanity forever.

During the Q&A, Kirkman and Racioppa discuss Easter eggs (that even Kirkman missed), Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons) versus The Boys‘ Homelander (Antony Starr), Mark’s headspace in Season 4, the all-star cast, and so much more. You can watch the very fun Q&A in the video above, or you can read the transcript below.

You Probably Missed This Horrible Season 3 Death

And that really ticks Robert Kirkman off.

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COLLIDER: Before we get into specifics, I want to do something called “get to know your Invincible showrunner.” These are harmless questions, I promise. For both of you, have you ever asked for someone’s autograph?

ROBERT KIRKMAN: Yeah. I mean, of course. Not as much as I could have. There are some comic book people that I’ve gotten autographs from that I’m really excited about. I had Erik Larsen sign the first copy of Spider-Man that I ever got because I still had it, and he drew it. That was cool. I still have that. That’s pretty awesome. But yeah, that’s it. I’ve never gotten Steven Yeun to sign anything for me.

SIMON RACIOPPA: I did. Actually, when we did Season 1, I got everybody to sign a copy of the first script. But the problem was, we were in the studio, so I just grabbed whatever pen, so half the signatures are now just faded. You can’t read them anymore, so it’s just terrible.

If only you were going to work with him again.

RACIOPPA: Exactly.

KIRKMAN: “Hey, guys, can you go slowly over these signatures and just kind of rebuild what we had here?”

For each of you, what do you collect?

KIRKMAN: I collect too many things. I collect Transformers toys and G.I. Joe toys. I collect comic books. I collect Transformers statues. My house looks like a comic shop died and just spilled out into the room.

RACIOPPA: It’s like a full comic shop after there’s been an earthquake.

KIRKMAN: You’ve been there recently. It’s just piles.

RACIOPPA: There is nowhere to sit. It’s a big space, and there is nowhere to sit because there’s a Transformer there, and you’re like, “Well, Megatron’s got the seat already, so I gotta find somewhere else.”

KIRKMAN: Because I got this giant Devastator. In the pandemic, I would make myself not sad by getting these super complicated and expensive transformer statues, and then I would spend an entire day putting them together. I have a Devastator statue that’s like this tall if it was on the floor, and it’s on a little table in between a chair and a couch. So, I often have meetings where there’s a Devastator fist in view as I’m trying to talk to somebody.

RACIOPPA: You have to kind of just lean around Devastator.

KIRKMAN: It’s totally normal.

RACIOPPA: Yeah, you all have that, right? A giant Devastator?

KIRKMAN: [Laughs] So March 18th, Season 4 comes out, but I will talk about Transformers for the rest of the night.

Oh, I know you will. Did you say what you collect?

RACIOPPA: I’ve got some graphic novels. I’ve got a couple of good long boxes of comics. I like buying them after they’re trades, after they’re hardcovers and stuff like that. I’ve got quite a bit.

KIRKMAN: But you’re an adult. You collect silver dollars or something like that.

RACIOPPA: Yeah, stamps. Totally. No, no stamps.

KIRKMAN: What’s a stamp collector? A philanthropist? What is that called?

RACIOPPA: No, it’s not a philanthropist.

KIRKMAN: Close enough.

What is something that audiences don’t notice that you wish they would?

KIRKMAN: Oh, this is a bad one, but it’s the only thing that came to mind. When Conquest is pushing Mark through that entire city at the end of Season 3 — spoiler alert — there’s a particular death that happens in the foreground in a split second as he’s zipping through, and it’s a dog. A pet peeve of mine is how everyone is so upset about dogs dying, and less so with people. I’m going to lose this argument, so we won’t go there. But we were in the sound mix, and I was like, “I want a dog yelp. I want a really loud, distinct [yelps] as that’s happening.” And we put it in, and then I was like, “Make it louder.” And I think we did two or three rounds of making it louder until it was really noticeable, and I don’t think anyone’s noticed it. So, we killed a dog in Season 3.

I’m stunned by this. I definitely didn’t notice. Anything you want to add?

RACIOPPA: I would just add to that if you actually freeze frame, the guy who has the dog is like the coolest extra ever. He looks like he came out of a 1990s Capcom fighting game, like Final Fight. He’s just got these cool shades, a leather jacket, and he’s dead in two seconds or less. So, yeah, no one notices the work that went into that.

KIRKMAN: I want to say that no one in the audience reacted at all to that human’s death.

Have you watched the show?

KIRKMAN: [Laughs]

If you could drop one character from another universe into Invincible, just to watch the chaos, who would it be?

RACIOPPA: Charlie brown? “Good grief.”

KIRKMAN: Geez, I’m not going to have a good answer for this. I don’t know. Al Bundy from Married with Children.

Omni-Man Would “Wipe the Floor” With Homelander

“He’s also genuinely just a cooler character on a cooler show.”

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I know you’ve been asked this a million times, but who wins in a fight between Homelander and Omni-Man?

KIRKMAN: I think these are just clickbait questions. I’ve answered this a thousand times, but I will say every time I answer it, it kicks back up. So, good on you. Good on you. But I think that even [Eric] Kripke and [Seth] Rogen and [Evan] Goldberg would all admit that Homelander’s power set is much less than Omni-Man. Omni-Man would wipe the floor with Homelander. He’s also genuinely just a cooler character on a cooler show that’s on a cooler streaming service.

Definitely. It’s always new to somebody.

KIRKMAN: Simon, do you have an answer for that? Are you going to go Team Homelander because of your Diabolical affiliations or…?

RACIOPPA: I think this is being discussed in depth on the internet. There are videos people have done, like 10-minute-long animations. I think it’s clear that Omni-Man would.

KIRKMAN: Also, people don’t know this, but if you picked Homelander versus Omni-Man in Mortal Kombat one, Homelander always lost, no matter how well you played. That was a thing that I demanded to allow Omni-Man in the game. So, no one has ever beaten Omni-Man with Homelander in the Mortal Kombat 1 game. They don’t really talk about that. None of that is true.

You absolutely had me going. If Mark had access to therapy from day one, how different would this show be?

KIRKMAN: So boring.

RACIOPPA: Longer. Much longer. Hours. More expensive for Mark, I guess, too.

KIRKMAN: More pleasant for him.

Season 4 Is a Huge Progression for the Series

“This season definitely delivers on Omni-Man and the Viltrumite storyline.”

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Is Season 4 finished?

KIRKMAN: Yeah. [Laughs]

You never know if you’re still doing the last episode.

KIRKMAN: Oh, yeah. No, I mean, I think we have to turn it all in as a block, right?

RACIOPPA: Yeah. So, they have to do this thing called versioning, where they translate the show for all the different territories, like into Portuguese, into Italian, into Japanese. So you have to get the whole show done with enough time for that to happen before it comes in, because it comes out everywhere. Like what, 120 countries or 220 territories all at the same time? So we have to wrap the show and give them enough time to do that, which is months sometimes.

One of the things I love is the title cards, and each season is a little bit different. What do you want to tease about Season 4’s title cards?

KIRKMAN: I was standing in the hallway when the episode started, and it was so jarring when the title card hit. I was like, “Whoa, it’s really loud!” So, it’s loud this season. I’m really excited. It’s really epic, and it’s much different. I’m very taken with this title card treatment. You guys got a sense of what it is from watching the two episodes, but if this is going out before then, I don’t want to spoil what it is, but it’s space-related.

RACIOPPA: There’s space in this season. We go to space.

Without spoilers, what do you guys want to tease about Season 4, and maybe how it compares to the first three?

RACIOPPA: I like to think we go bigger. We escalate every season. It’s crazier. We don’t forget about anything that happened in Season 1 and 2, so all that stuff is still in play. We had the team really firing on all cylinders. I think it’s a good season. I think you guys will like it.

KIRKMAN: We’re a little biased, but it’s pretty rad. I will say that we’ve done a lot of Viltrumite stuff in the first three seasons, but it’s kind of drips and drabs, and we’ve always heard the audience of like, “Oh, can we just get some more of that sweet, sweet Omni-Man?” And I will say that this season definitely delivers on Omni-Man and the Viltrumite storyline. It’s, in a lot of ways, a culmination of all the Viltrumite stuff that we’ve peppered into Seasons 1, 2, and 3. So, it’s a really huge progression for the overall narrative of the show, and it sets us up in a big way for the future of the show. So this is like a real transition season.

Without spoilers, what do you think fans are going to say after they’ve seen the Season 4 finale?

KIRKMAN: Well, I will say first, you don’t have to worry. You don’t have to tell us not to spoil things because there are Amazon people who will tackle us, that we are well aware of. But what will people say after watching Season 4? I think they’re going to be shocked. I think that we end the show in Season 4 in a big, huge, Earth-shattering transition for the show.

RACIOPPA: Hopefully they’ll have to take a break for a second. Maybe not watch TV for a couple of days and then start it again. That’d be the perfect thing.

How does Season 4 push Mark emotionally in ways he hasn’t been?

KIRKMAN: I mean, same as every season. We put him through his paces. We find a new low for him by the end of the season.

RACIOPPA: He’s not okay at the start of the season.

KIRKMAN: And he’s worse by the end.

RACIOPPA: Basically. It’s not easy being Mark! Give him a break.

KIRKMAN: You’d think we don’t like him, but we do.

One of the things that I love about the show, and I think one of the things that fans love, is the way that it deals with what someone would really be like if they were in this situation with these characters, and if their family was suffering. What would push you towards killing someone, versus at the beginning, when I would never hurt someone like that?

RACIOPPA: He changes. He’s a different character. He’s only 20 years old at the start of the season, so he’s a 20-year-old kid who still now is the most powerful thing on the planet, being asked to make all these crazy decisions, wondering if, “Maybe I should start murdering people because that will save lives like that?” You don’t get away consequence-free from those kinds of thoughts or those kinds of decisions, and we’re going to deal with all of that in the season. It’s not easy. Some people were like, “Oh, you should just kill people, that way you’ll save lives.” It’s not that easy.

KIRKMAN: And we pushed him to the point where at the beginning of the season, he’s like, “Maybe murder is a good idea?” And then we go from there.

It does seem like Mark and Nolan could be meeting up again this season.

KIRKMAN: [Laughs] I think that’s a safe bet.

RACIOPPA: A spoiler!

KIRKMAN: Ah, here comes the Amazon person!

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Exactly. So what do you want to tease about that confrontation, and maybe what happens when Nolan meets Debbie’s new boyfriend?

KIRKMAN: They fight, and it’s nuts. You’d never guess who wins.

RACIOPPA: I was going to say, if you’re worried about Mark and Nolan meeting again for the first time, it’s Debbie and Nolan you should really be worried about.

KIRKMAN: There are a lot of reunions in this season. Can we say that? But it’s nice because you’ve seen Mark and Nolan interact in Season 2, post what happened in Season 1, but there’s a lot that’s happened in between there. Nolan has definitely gone through a lot of things and has changed in some big ways, or has at least solidified his allegiances to a certain extent. So, two very different characters will be interacting this season, even though we’ve known them from season to season.

Fans Can Expect ‘Invincible’ Season 5 Same Time Next Year

“I think that a pattern has formed.”

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We know that Season 5 has been announced, so where are you in Season 5 in production?

KIRKMAN: We’re getting final animation back and doing retakes and doing… What’s ADR stand for?

RACIOPPA: Automatic dialogue replacement.

KIRKMAN: Yeah, we’re doing that.

RACIOPPA: Lots of that.

KIRKMAN: Putting the final touches on things.

RACIOPPA: End of production, start of post. I guess we can say that. But that takes a long time. It’s not like a week.

KIRKMAN: The voice recording is done first, so that was done years ago. It’s crazy. We were talking the other day about how we were working on Season 5 kind of while we were still promoting Season 2. So, it stacks so much.

RACIOPPA: This is a good thing, by the way. We’re very happy Amazon buys many seasons from us at the same time.

One of the things that I commend you guys on is that a lot of streaming shows take these really long breaks between seasons, and they’re just too long.

KIRKMAN: We’re not stopping until everyone on this production is burnt out.

Well, Season 3 was February of last year, and Season 4 starts in March of this year.

KIRKMAN: We slipped a month, technically.

I think that’s okay. But my question is, with Season 5, do you think it could be March of next year? Do you think it’ll be around the same time?

KIRKMAN: I think that a pattern has formed, but I can’t confirm anything. Maybe it will be April.

That’s fine.

KIRKMAN: Maybe May. Maybe January. I don’t know. Who knows? We’ll see. But I would say that the goal is to is to come back in this general timeframe.

RACIOPPA: On a regular pattern.

KIRKMAN: Yeah. So, that’s the goal. Like I say, we’re pretty far into Season 5, so we feel like we’re in good shape.

Go Behind the Scenes Into the ‘Invincible’ Writers’ Room

“I would love to do 10 seasons.”

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You’ve now made four shows. You’re on Season 5. What have you learned through the process of making the first few years? How has the process been refined in terms of the writing, the animation, and being able to pull off what you can do with the budget that you’re given?

KIRKMAN: Everything’s streamlining. So, everything that we’re doing isn’t changing, but everyone at every level of the process is getting a little bit more efficient. The writing team is learning how to write to production a little bit better. This is a very complicated and bizarre show, and our production pipeline is very complicated, so we’re learning to navigate that. I’ll say for me, each season gets easier. I don’t think everybody on the production would say that.

RACIOPPA: No, because each season gets bigger. So, exactly what Robert said, you find little efficiencies along the way from a technical point of view. From the writing point of view, it’s just more fun because all the characters have so much more history and trauma we can bring into the new season, so that’s always great. It’s fun to take characters where you haven’t been before.

How do you guys decide which episodes you want to write yourself and when you want someone on the writing staff to write?

KIRKMAN: Oh, we take the good ones.

RACIOPPA: Yeah, sometimes. Everyone has their own strengths on the writing team, so sometimes if someone gets really passionate about an episode, they usually end up writing it.

KIRKMAN: Unless we want it.

RACIOPPA: Unless we want it. Yeah. Usually, I take first or last and you take…

KIRKMAN: Whatever the coolest ones are.

RACIOPPA: Yeah, exactly. Robert’s just like, “That one!” No, it’s a sort of organic process.

Take us into the writers’ room. At the beginning of the season, you’re planning out, say, hypothetically, we can talk about 4 or 5. How does it work? What is it like behind the scenes when you’re first breaking that season and figuring out where and when you want to start and stop?

KIRKMAN: We have a pre-room session that we have that’s usually something like a week long. We get the writers together. I’m going to make someone mad right now: Co-creator Cory Walker usually comes in and sits for those, so can we get Cory to do a standing wave? He’s shaking his head. He’s shaking his head. Just a standing wave. Just a simple on your feet, a little bit of a princess wave or something. One of these.

RACIOPPA: We could pretend it’s his birthday and get everyone to sing for him. He would hate that.

KIRKMAN: He already doesn’t like you. Why are you doing this? So Cory sits in with the writers, and we basically map out, “Okay, the beginning of the season is going to be this issue. The end of the season is going to be this issue.” And we do a rough like, “How does this episode fall and where is this event going to land?” And we do a real rough beat-out of what the season is going to be. Then we usually get together for other periods of time with the writers and whoever we bring in that’s going to freelance episodes, if we have anybody freelancing episodes in a season, and then we do longer breakouts for the individual episodes.

RACIOPPA: So a rough break and then a finer break later on.

Is the plan still for seven seasons?

KIRKMAN: I wish I had never nailed anything down like that, but we’re hoping to continue past Season 5. Please make sure you watch on March 18th. We’d really appreciate it. Watch again. If everyone in this room doesn’t watch, we’re sunk — probably not. But somewhere around there. Maybe it goes longer, maybe it goes longer. I don’t want to limit myself. I would love to do 10 seasons. We’ll see.

Robert Kirkman Reveals His Thoughts on an ‘Invincible’ Movie

But don’t hold your breath for more specials like Atom Eve.

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Are there any plans for any more specials, like Atom Eve?

AUDIENCE: Rex Splode!

KIRKMAN: Rex Splode? Anybody want a Rex Splode special? [Applause] Alright, so exclusive announcement here today: we’re not doing a Rex Splode special. But we had that pesky, horrible gap between Season 1 and 2 that we all hated. Everybody hate that gap? I hated that gap. So, to kind of mitigate the delay between Season 1 and 2, we did the Atom Eve special to put it in first production order so that we could get something out while we were finishing the rest of the season.

Since then, we’ve just been firing on all cylinders and producing the show and getting the show out every year. So, we haven’t had any free time or any window to do any more specials, but we definitely hear that you guys would like some of those, and I think that they would be cool and we’d love to do them. There just hasn’t been a window where we’ve been able to make it work just yet. But we’ll see.

There was talk for a while about an Invincible movie.

KIRKMAN: Yeah, for a while. Talk.

The show is so awesome, and one of the reasons it’s so good is that you have time with characters to breathe. What I’m nervous about, if you were ever to make the movie, is it’s going to be two hours, 2.5 hours, and it’s going to be a lot of action and not a lot of those small character moments. So is that something you’re concerned with if you were to actually ever make this?

KIRKMAN: But what if it was three hours? What about four? What about five? No, don’t sell Invincible short. You’ve experienced it in television form and so I can see that it’s somehow difficult to be like, “Okay, now I don’t know if I can picture it in that form.” But we’re trying. Maybe at some point we’ll have more to talk about, but these these things do take time. But I think that Invincible could work as a feature film at some point in the future. Who else feels that Invincible could work as a feature film? [Applause]

No, I definitely do.

KIRKMAN: So, you’re wrong.

I hear that every single day. That is not a surprise.

How ‘Invincible’s Cast Stays So Stacked

Though Kirkman has a lot to say to Bryan Cranston.

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There are 245 fans in this theater…

KIRKMAN: I didn’t know it was that many people.

[Laughs] What do you think might surprise the fans that are in this theater and the people that are watching online to learn about the making of the show, or what goes on behind the scenes?

KIRKMAN: I mean, so much, but we can’t talk about it.

RACIOPPA: There are scenes that we didn’t have space for that we pulled out, some stuff that would be really cool, but we just can’t do it or don’t have time to do it.

KIRKMAN: Most of the show is old episodes of G.I. Joe with just the colors changed, and people have not noticed. That’s surprising. I don’t know.

The question went nowhere.

RACIOPPA: People know how TV is made now.

KIRKMAN: If only we had read these questions ahead of time and maybe prepared something. I’m sorry.

You’ve always had amazing voice actors. Are there still people saying no?

KIRKMAN: [Bryan] Cranston says no every season?

This is bullshit.

KIRKMAN: It’s made me not like him. I’m never rewatching Breaking Bad.

Better Call Saul is better.

KIRKMAN: The guy’s a piece of crap.

I was joking, by the way. I love both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad.

KIRKMAN: I think Better Call Saul is better because it’s got less Bryan Cranston.

I’m gonna get a video response to that, by the way. I’ll send it your way.

KIRKMAN: Great! Can’t wait. Why don’t you get a video response on, “Will you be in the next season of Invincible if we’re lucky enough to make it?”

I am going to work on that.

KIRKMAN: Piece of dirt.

You think I’m joking? I’m actually working on that.

KIRKMAN: Let’s do it. If anyone sees him on the street, ask him about Invincible. We hung out once. I thought we were bros. I sat next to him at the Golden Globes because Walking Dead was nominated for a Golden Globe for the first season — and then never again — and he was the coolest dude. I thought we were friends, and he still says no every season. We’re not recording this, are we?

RACIOPPA: No, no, no. There are no cameras.

KIRKMAN: He got Aaron Paul to say that he didn’t want to come back to play more Powerplex. That’s dirty. That’s real dirty. I’ve gone too far. I’ve gone too far.

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Or have you gone far enough?

KIRKMAN: Now Cranston is not going to be in it. [Laughs]

It is crazy with the amount of people. You’ve got amazing people, amazing actors.

KIRKMAN: We are very fortunate.

What is it actually like nowadays if you’re trying to cast someone new for Season 4, Season 5? Is it so much easier now to get someone? Talk about what goes on behind the scenes in terms of deciding on who’s going to voice what?

KIRKMAN: Everyone is busy, so no matter how big a show gets, it’s still about timing and scheduling and things like that. So it’s not like we can get anyone, but it seems like we don’t often…

RACIOPPA: No, we got kind of drunk with power on the first season. We locked in Steven, Sandra [Oh], J.K. [Simmons], and that was a good cast. Actors get attracted to projects that other actors that they like are in, and they’re like, “Oh my god, Sandra and Steven and J.K. are in that. I should go be in that too” And that’s kept on snowballing.

KIRKMAN: We offered a role to Tom Cruise, too.

RACIOPPA: Yeah. We were like, “We can get Tom Cruise!” We could not get Tom Cruise. We could not. We tried — we could not. In fact, I don’t think we even got a response.

KIRKMAN: He said, “Do not ever ask me again.” And I said, “Yes, sir.”

RACIOPPA: You showed up at his house, though. That was why.

KIRKMAN: It was a mistake.

RACIOPPA: It was weird.

KIRKMAN: I do have regrets. Nice pool, though.

Serious question. When an actor is voice recording for a season, are they doing it through the course of months? Is it you trying to get everything done in a few days? What is the actual process like and who is directing them in the room?

KIRKMAN: Meredith Layne, our amazing voice director, is directing them in the room. Every now and then she is scheduled, and there will be a session where Simon or I will try to muddle through. When I do it, I absolutely hate it.

Except if it’s Peter Cullen.

KIRKMAN: I couldn’t do it with Peter Cullen. I’m too busy crying. I have my camera off, and I’m just weeping at the joy of being in his presence. None of that was a joke. So, anyway, no, we schedule episode to episode. There are some actors that have such complicated schedules that we try to do blocks to get through as many episodes as possible with them. But for the most part, we’re doing Episode 1, and we just have everybody come in and do their session. Sometimes people only have like five lines in an episode. You don’t really notice. There are characters that can be in like 20 minutes of an episode doing all kinds of stuff, but they only talk like four or five times, so sometimes we get some pretty quick sessions. But a lot of the more prominent characters in the show are hours-long sessions. But it’s usually, what do you think, an eight or nine-month process?

RACIOPPA: Yeah. We record about an episode a month usually. Then we bring them back in later on. Not everybody, but when we get the final animation in, sometimes the scenes change. The blocking, the scenes change, or maybe we want a line to come in a little differently, or maybe that actor had a cold the first day they came in, and we just want to pick stuff up again, so we want to redo it. So we bring the actor back in, we show them the picture, they can see it now, and they have a mic and we just do it live against the picture.

KIRKMAN: What’s that called?

RACIOPPA: That’s ADR.

KIRKMAN: We brought it back, baby!

RACIOPPA: Steven will come back in and we’ll redo maybe 20% of his lines, sometimes more, sometimes less, because he likes to see the scene and be like, “Oh, okay. I really see it now.” And he’s like, “I can do this better. I can do this better.” And we’ll redo it.

Do you guys ever do read-throughs of scripts with the actors?

RACIOPPA: Impossible with the schedule, because everybody’s off shooting other shows, shooting other movies. We can never get everyone together.

KIRKMAN: Everyone’s like, “Oh, the cast is amazing.” Yeah, that’s why we can never get them in the room. They’re always busy on. We get people in the craziest countries.

RACIOPPA: In Europe. We’ve done records at three in the morning.

KIRKMAN: Oh, I think Lee Pace was filming Running Man, and he came in on a Saturday morning after filming all night just to help us out because we had to get recording. And sometimes for Christian [Convery], we’ll do, like, 6:00 a.m. records on a Saturday morning.

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RACIOPPA: Walton [Goggins], when he was doing White Lotus in Vietnam, we tried to get him in Bangkok and we just couldn’t make it work, but we were like, “We need him!” And he was shooting in a tropical island somewhere. He’s having fun.

KIRKMAN: We had a session with Jeffrey Dean Morgan; it was some recording studio in the middle of nowhere, and it was like a 2.5 hour drive for him, and he texted me and said, “The door’s locked. They’re not letting me in.”

RACIOPPA: This is true.

KIRKMAN: I said, “Oh my god, what do we do?” We’re making calls and we’re like, “Okay, they misscheduled something and they don’t have a technician, but the technician’s on his way, driving in, and it’s going to be like 30 minutes, if you could wait in the parking lot.” And he was like, “Buddy, I got things to do. I’m already on the road. I can’t do this.” We had to reschedule. It was just a nightmare. These scheduling things can be crazy. Then he came in some other time and we got him. But yeah, they just forgot to schedule it. So he showed up after a 2.5 hour drive to just a closed studio.

RACIOPPA: Yeah, we apologized.

KIRKMAN: It was the absolute worst.

RACIOPPA: I think we sent him booze. We’re like, “We’re sorry!”

KIRKMAN: He hasn’t spoken to me since.

RACIOPPA: Like Cranston. Another one just off the Kirkman list.

How Peter Cullen Inspired Robert Kirkman’s Whole Career

“The shock of losing that character has informed everything I’ve been chasing.”

Image via Prime Video

I’m actually going to be completely serious. I know how much you love Peter Cullen. What was it like actually bringing him to the show and having him play such an important role on the series?

KIRKMAN: That guy was such a huge part of my childhood and a huge part of my work and my career. I’ve talked a lot about the ‘86 movie and my experience as an eight year old seeing that in the theater and feeling numb at the death of Optimus Prime — spoiler alert for the movie — and how the shock of losing that character has informed everything I’ve been chasing. I want to watch film and television that make me feel that way because I’ve never really felt that way since that moment. I try to write things that make other people feel that way, for better or worse. It’s almost a religious experience in entertainment, to have that feeling of loss from a work of fiction, that I’m just kind of chasing that feeling with everything that I do.

So, to have him play Thaedus, he’s huge in this season and such a pivotal part of the show, and to be able to hear him saying words that we wrote, I don’t know. I joke about how I’m totally crying all the time, but I can’t believe this is happening. This is the greatest stuff. Oh my God. I record it on my phone — don’t tell anybody — and I listen to it over and over and over again. I just love it. It’s like one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to me.

And you still haven’t asked for his autograph?

KIRKMAN: I have not, but I do have his autograph. I have purchased his autograph. [Laughs]

That’s just crazy.

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Have any of the voice actors improvised lines that made it into the final cut?

RACIOPPA: Oh, yeah. I wouldn’t say a huge amount. Jason Mantzoukas has done lines, Ben Schwartz all the time. He comes in and he just spits out crazy stuff, and we’re like, “Oh, put that in.” And Steven once in a while.

KIRKMAN: I think in Season 2, Mantzoukas came in and we were talking about Family Matters, and he just started making Urkel jokes. He would just be like, “Did I do that?” And so we threw out a challenge. I was like, “I want you to, at some point during this record, naturally work, ‘Did I do that’ into the line of dialogue. Just surprise us.” And he was like, “I accept the challenge.” And he did it, and it is in the show. There’s a scene in Season 2 where Rex says some joke, and then he goes, “Did I do that?” It’s totally improvised and totally because of that.

RACIOPPA: These sessions are long. We have to make our own fun sometimes.

When adapting the comics, what’s the hardest scene to bring to life without losing the impact?

KIRKMAN: If anything, adding motion and sound increases the impact naturally, so it’s not necessarily how do we keep from losing the impact of scenes when we adapt them? It’s how can we navigate how much we’re increasing it, I guess, if that makes sense. I’m sorry to answer a question seriously. I’ll stop doing that.

Have you ever written a scene and thought, “There’s no way we can actually animate this?”

RACIOPPA: Oh, yeah, that happens.

KIRKMAN: We’ve been told that many times.

RACIOPPA: They’ll be like, “We could just do this scene if you don’t want the rest of the episode.” With every show, you have this much money and this much time, and part of the job is deciding where to spend that. So you can put a lot of money and a lot of time into a very complicated scene, but then you’ve got to take it out somewhere else. So, it’s trying to find the balance across the episode.

But look, it’s a hand-drawn show. It’s drawn by people, not AI in Korea, so if you have two characters in a scene, all that has to be drawn. Those characters moving has to be drawn. Now you have five characters in a scene. Well, that’s three more characters that all have the same amount of work. So, once you start layering things like that, like moving characters and scenes, it adds up to the work that needs to be done for that shot. You do that over multiple scenes, and suddenlhy you’re like, “We just doubled the amount of time it will take to do these scenes.” So, you have to take that into account.

So you can 100% write big stuff that you’re just like, “It’s great on the page, but we’re never going to do that. Or we can maybe do it, but it’s not going to look great.” Like maybe the people in the background aren’t going to move very well, or they’re just going to be still a lot of time.” So, do you want to do it and have it not look great, or do you want to maybe rethink what you’re doing and find a different way to do it that will look good and still get you what you want?

Image via Prime Video

What’s a scene that you want to point out that you guys did, even though you were told it was going to cost a ton and you’re going to put too many resources in, but you had to have the scene?

KIRKMAN: We called it the Monaco sequence when Conquest pushes Mark through. That took a lot of iterations just to figure out how it was doable. Because the subway sequence that we were trying to top and send up with that was very controlled because it was a subway train and the shots made sense and everything. Moving through locations as you move through a city was very difficult to navigate, and so that changed from how it was scripted because what was scripted was impossible to do.

RACIOPPA: Well, also, we’re a 2D show. There’s 3D animation, 2D animation, and we’re a 2D show, so there’s shots you can do that maybe people expect because they’ve seen great 3D shows that you can’t really do in a 2D show. Like, we can’t move the camera anywhere. We can’t do these crazy camera moves that they can do in 3D, because that’s not the style of animation that we do in our show. So, that’s part of it, too, is you can write “the camera swoops down and goes between all the Flaxans,” but that’s really hard to do in 2D and make it look good, so we don’t do that.

Our two supervising directors, Shaun O’Neil and Dan Duncan, are great at looking at the script and being like, “Hey, this is really cool, but we don’t think that’s going to look good. But what if we did this instead?” And finding those moments. We’re like, “Yeah, that sounds great. Let’s do that instead.”

Finding the Perfect ‘Invincible’ Season 4 Needle Drops

Kirkman and Racioppa discuss the Season 4 opening montage.

Image via Prime Video

I truly love the beginning of Episode 1 of Season 4. You have this great song with this great montage, and it’s summing up the shit Mark’s going through and the desperation on the planet. How’d you guys come up with that song and montage, and how did you pick the song?

RACIOPPA: We went through so many iterations. Sometimes when you’re looking for needle drops, as opposed to score, which is done by our composer, sometimes you find the perfect one right away and you’re like, “Oh, this is the perfect song.” And we have a great music supervision team who helps us and gives us possible songs. That one took a lot of time. We were almost out of time on that to find the right one for that.

KIRKMAN: But it sounds like it worked out. But yeah, I remember seeing that with a lot of different iterations.

RACIOPPA: We tried a lot of different songs. That one was really hard. But it’s the start of a new season. We usually like to start a new season by reminding you where we are, which is basically the end of Season 3. This is only a few weeks after Season 3 ends, but we want to be like, “Hey, we’ve been away for a year. This is just a reminder of where we are, where Mark’s head is at, where the world is at. This is where we’re starting from in Season 4.”

Radiohead was fast, actually. We had, like, five songs we got and then we plugged that one in, and we’re like, “Oh, man, that one. That one,” right off the bat. So, that was easy. The Billie Eilish was the second round of tracks. But once we dropped it, we were like, “Yeah, that one. Obvious.”

One of the things that people don’t realize is when you’re making a montage like that, you have to figure out what the hell’s the montage?

RACIOPPA: That is the screenwriting job.

Exactly. But it’s really well done, so give props to whoever wrote the beginning of Episode 1.

RACIOPPA: That was Helen Leigh, who’s one of our writers who’s been on the show since Season 2. She’s great. She’s excellent.

KIRKMAN: Yeah. She worked on Outcast with me, and then she worked on Severance. She’s fantastic.

Besides who you just mentioned, there’s so many people behind the scenes that work on this show…

KIRKMAN: Yeah, but this is really about us.

Exactly. For each of you, who’s an unsung hero that you want to shine a light on, someone who’s really done some great work that maybe doesn’t get the flowers that you guys get?

KIRKMAN: I swear to god, if you say Ross Stracke.

RACIOPPA: [Laughs] Ross is one of our other writers.

KIRKMAN: Don’t even mention him. I’ll talk about this. This is terrible. This is terrible. I have this running joke where I like to say, “Shut up, Ross,” in front of the actors, because I think it’s funny. So we’ll be introduced to people, and they’ll be like, “So Ross Stracke, one of the writers is on here,” when we’re introducing everybody in the Zoom, and then I’ll just go, “Shut up, Ross,” and just see how the actor reacts.

RACIOPPA: The actors are not in on the joke.

KIRKMAN: No, they’re not in on the joke at all. So I think it’s funny because they’re probably like, “Is Robert a jerk?”

RACIOPPA: “Why is he so mean?”

Image via Trent Barboza

KIRKMAN: “Is Robert not a cool dude? I don’t understand.” It makes me laugh, so I keep doing. I shouldn’t have talked about that. I have a really weird sense of humor that a lot of people find offputting.

But anyway, unsung hero: Dou Hong is our art director, and our art director is one of the most important jobs on the show. They define the look of the characters and they manage the whole team to look at the environments and everything. Cory Walker was our art director for Season 1 — you may have heard of him, co-creator — and really established the look at the show. Shaun O’Neil was the art director on Season 2, and then Shaun O’Neil moved into supervising directing with Dan Duncan. They became a team. And then Dou, who had been on Season 1 and Season 2, came into the art directing role and has been on it ever since. She’s just an absolutely essential part of the team.

RACIOPPA: Yeah, I would say Ross and Helen. I know, it’s terrible. Ross has been on the show since day one. He was like the third hire on the show, so he’s been around forever.

KIRKMAN: I have regrets.

RACIOPPA: Maybe he’s key to its success. I’ve never figured that. Like, he’s the one thing that’s been around since the start. No, our writing team is great. Everybody helps on everybody else’s scripts, too, because we work in a writers’ room. So you see a script that maybe I wrote, but what you don’t see is that everybody else helped contribute to that, gave me ideas for jokes. I do that for everybody else. They do that for each other. Everybody works as a team. Robert comes in and he’s like, “This is all terrible. Get rid of it all.” No, he’s got great ideas too.

KIRKMAN: No, I do that.

RACIOPPA: Yeah. So, the writing team, across every season.

Robert Kirkman Didn’t Even Know About These ‘Invincible’ Easter Eggs

“Oh, man. Look at that. That’s pretty cool.”

Image via Prime Video

You already mentioned the dog, but are there any Easter eggs?

KIRKMAN: Let’s not bring that up again. I think between the dog and the “shut up, Ross,” I have turned everyone against me. Please still watch the show. There’s so many people that aren’t me that work on the show. Sorry. Go ahead.

Are there any Easter eggs or any little visual details that you want to point out that people might not have noticed?

KIRKMAN: Oh, I’m bad at this… I will be honest, I didn’t notice there’s a skull face that I didn’t notice until the trailer was released and people freeze framed it. I was like, “Oh, man. Look at that. That’s pretty cool.”

RACIOPPA: Another win for Kirkman!

KIRKMAN: Yeah, it’s great…There’s the Val quarter that shows up in the silo. The Val quarter is from the Atom Eve special, when Atom Eve is showing her powers to her friend Val, and she puts her on the quarter. Then it shows up again in Season 3, and I didn’t know that was in until it was talked about online by the fans. I was like, “Oh, we did the Val quarter. Okay, cool.”

RACIOPPA: The memorial wall, when we did the Chicago memorial, has got people’s names on it, so most of those are names of the crew.

KIRKMAN: Yeah, you can see one Ross Stracke’s name on that memorial if you’re so inclined.

RACIOPPA: One of the names is like Glacier Peanut Freeman, and people are like, “What’s that name?” It’s someone’s dog. Someone on the crew’s dog apparently died in Chicago. I mean, that’s sad. So, that’s two dead dogs in the show already.

KIRKMAN: Not enough, I say!

The ‘Invincible’ Creators Share Advice for Aspiring Creators

“Just start writing.”

Image via Trent Barboza

There are a lot of people in this audience and watching online who would love to do what you guys do. I know that you’ve probably answered this a number of times, but what advice would you like to share if they’re interested in writing comics or if they’re interested in working in animation or showrunning an animated show at Prime Video?

KIRKMAN: Well, I feel like I’ve, tonight, done a masterclass in how not to handle a Q&A, so learn from my mistakes. I will think of a real answer while Simon talks.

RACIOPPA: Step one: Be Robert Kirkman. No, just start making stuff. Just start writing. If you want to be a writer, you can download scripts for every show now online, like the real scripts, not transcripts. Start reading scripts. Start trying to write them. Find other friends who want to do the same, online maybe, and just keep on doing it. The people who succeed in this are the people who don’t stop. You don’t give up. You’ve said that for comics, too, I think, basically. Just write them.

KIRKMAN: There’s really no excuse with YouTube and the internet and everything. It was much harder in the past. You can shoot short films on your phone. You can make comics, you can write scripts, and do all kinds of stuff. So yeah, if you want to be a writer, be a writer is really the advice. I don’t know why you would. It’s terrible. But if you do want to be a writer, that’s fine.

This is actually a serious question. Five years ago, everyone talked about AI, and I was like, “I’m not worried about AI, but talk to me in five or 10 years.” Now we’re at that five-year mark.

KIRKMAN: I’m pro AI. I’m kidding! I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I’m kidding. What am I, Ben Affleck? So we really wanted to get him on the show…

I was going to say, Ben is not on the show. But I am legitimately curious how you both feel about what’s going on with AI right now and all these different companies trying to make generative AI. It does feel like we’re on the precipice of something crazy.

RACIOPPA: Guys, don’t use AI. Don’t use AI to write your scripts. Seriously. One, it’s built on stuff stolen from other artists, other writers, other creators that are fed into a machine. It’s for people who want to be writers but don’t want to actually write, or people who want to be artists but don’t want to actually draw. They want to take the humanity out of that. So, don’t do that. Just write your scripts, draw your pictures, make your movies. Just do that. Do that.

KIRKMAN: Round of applause. I agree with Simon, so I’m going to assume half of those applause were for me. Recently, there was that fight scene between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise where everybody was like, “Oh, Hollywood’s cooked.” That fight scene is such dog shit. I could not be more disgusted with people acting like that was anything other than trash. They came together and they completely killed all momentum, and then there’s like three seconds of literally rapid slap fighting that is absolutely insane, and it just shows you the limitations of this stuff.

I think that it makes videos that look somewhat real, and so that can be kind of scary, but I think that it it has so many limitations to it that I don’t actually think it’s going to be as dangerous — famous last words — but I don’t think it’s going to be as dangerous as the industry seems to think it is right now, because I don’t think it’s going to be able to do anything longer than half-watchable short clips for a very long time because it is a plagiarism machine.

Oh, absolutely.

RACIOPPA: Slop is the right word. If you want slop, you can have that. But if you want good stuff, practice your craft.

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AUDIENCE: What’s your favorite death in Invincible so far?

RACIOPPA: It’s gotta be Rex.

KIRKMAN: Debbie, right?

RACIOPPA: Oh, wow. Spoiler!

KIRKMAN: Oh, shit! What season are we on?

RACIOPPA: Robert, why did you say that? Oh, no!

KIRKMAN: Oh no! [Laughs] Favorite death? Yeah, Rex. Rex is a good one.

RACIOPPA: Rex is the best.

KIRKMAN: It’s weird to have a favorite death. Which one made you the saddest? You go ahead real quick.

AUDIENCE: Is there a character from the comics you’re most excited for the show audience to finally meet?

KIRKMAN: Thragg, for sure. And Dinosaurus, but Thragg.

I actually have one other question. Is there any cool upcoming merch?

KIRKMAN: Do you count the Invincible VS video game as merch? Because I couldn’t be more excited for this 3v3 tag fighter that comes out on April 30th. It’s going to be absolutely excellent. It’s just this amazing Invincible fighting game. It’s got 18 fighters. It’s going to be awesome.

Which company is putting it out?

KIRKMAN: Skybound.

Is this a video game that’s going to make the release date?

KIRKMAN: It is going to make the release date, April 30th. It will definitely make its release date. It’s coming up. It’s very soon. We’re in a very good shape. And it’s on Steam. It’s on PlayStation 5. It’s on Xbox. It’s on everything.

Invincible Season 4 premieres on Prime Video on March 18.

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Release Date

March 26, 2021

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Network

Amazon Prime Video

Franchise(s)

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Invincible

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