The season 2 finale of Invincible hit Prime Video yesterday and, while we were forced to wait a long time for those new episodes, it proved to be worth it (and we've been left with plenty to discuss heading into season 3).
However, one big distraction this week was the news that D.A. Sinclair, a character voiced by The Flash star Ezra Miller in season 1, was replaced by Eric Bauza for season 2. Many have put that down to the controversies surrounding the troubled actor, but creator and executive producer Robert Kirkman says otherwise.
"Like we saw with the Rick Sheridan role that was played by Jonathan Groff in Season 1 and Luke Macfarlane in Season 2 and similar to 'Game of Thrones' when you have a cast that’s this large and you’re recording in different times, sometimes availabilities are going to shift and recasting is going to be necessary," he tells Variety.
"I think it’s going to be something that’s going to happen from time to time with this show. I think that Eric Bauza is an immense talent and I am loving working with him, it’s a real opportunity to work with somebody that is so experienced in animation and has the skills and wealth of experience that he has."
Admitting that splitting season 2 was a necessary, albeit unpopular, decision for Invincible, Kirkman shed some light on what fans can look forward to when the series returns with its next batch of episodes.
"I don’t want to reveal exactly what we’re doing. There’s a lot of great stuff with Cecil Stedman. We get to see a little bit of his backstory and get to know a little bit more about him as a person," the prolific comic book writer teases. "The relationship between Mark and Eve is evolving in some really exciting way. It was very important to us in Season 2 to show that this is the Mark Grayson-Invincible show; it’s not the Omni-Man show."
"Omni-Man was very present in Season 2 and he’s a really big part of the show, but I worried a little bit coming out of Season 1 that people were like, 'Oh, I love that Omni-Man guy. I want to see more Omni-Man.' So we took a little bit of a pause on Omni-Man for Season 2. He’s gonna be in Season 3 a little more."
While some creative means had to be used to incorporate "Spider-Man" into Invincible's season 2 finale, Batman showed up in a slightly more obvious manner. Well, aside from the fact that's not Batman and Prime Video definitely didn't get DC's permission...
"Listen, I think that sequence might seem to imply a certain thing that isn’t there. That’s not Gotham City. That’s not Batman," Kirkman told the trade. "That’s a completely different bat character that Mark is referring to. If the audience is inferring a certain thing from it, I don’t have control over that. The audience gets to take from it what they will, but it was never our intention to imply anything remotely close to the Batman character."
Check out not-Batman's Invincible cameo in the X post below.