My thoughts:
An enjoyable quick, funny and witty read. The artwork is beautiful. I'm interested to see more work from this author.

I'm a fan of the central conceit here. Obviously the hero's main power is invincibility. More interestingly, he can step outside of his panel. He climbs between rows, takes tings from earlier or later in the story in order to resolve his inciting incidents. The whole thing is a fourth wall break as he comments on arriving too early in the strip or other elements of reality within the graphic novel genre. It's fairly easy to understand and fairly tongue in cheek. Easily understood and a surface and deeper level.

I enjoyed this comic a lot. The art was fun and the author uses the superhero tropes to make this an enjoyable read.

I loved it! It was a wild card, with this strange and childish and ended up being a fantastic surprise. Pascal Jousselin plays with all the clichés of superheroes´s stories and does so by subverting the structures of the narrative across the page.

Incredibly groundbreaking, Pascal Jousselin Surveys us even when he thinks we've seen everything there is to see in BD. Magnificent.

Invincible was originally published in French in 2017.

Invincible claims to be the only true comic book superhero. He does, in fact, have a unique superpower: he can jump from one comic book panel to an adjacent panel. When he spots a crime in a panel below the panel in which he’s standing, he jumps into the lower panel to intervene. He might instead shoot a pop gun into an upper panel or travel to the Arctic by walking into the next panel.

The strip turns “the magic of comics” into a superpower. Usually featuring one story per page, Invincible is sort of a gag strip, but it’s more of a one-gag strip, with each page revealing new variations on the same gag.

The gag is based on the notion that space and time are the same thing, which allows Invincible to do something later in one place and produce the result earlier in a different place. Or vice versa. That’s cool for about five pages, and then it starts to get old. I think it would be easier to enjoy Invincible in the traditional way that gag strips are experienced: reading one every day. That would alleviate the sense of sameness that comes from reading a bunch of them at once.

Some stories run longer than a page, including one that adds a character who illustrates the power of words by bashing characters with word balloons. Again, clever idea the first time, a bit wearing in its repeated variations.

Invincible mentors another superhero, Two-D Boy, who stands outside of panels and reaches in to affect the drawings. I admire the creativity of turning comic book art into a superpower, and most of the strips are amusing, even if they don’t produce belly laughs.

'Invincible Vol. 1: Justice and Fresh Vegetables' by Pascal Jousselin was a fun approach to breaking the fourth wall and playing with perspective.

Invincible is an odd hero. In a series of panels, he can reach in to future panels and fight crime. This means things are moving vertically between panels like a stolen work of art. In one gag, a cat in a tree is brought down by Invincible reaching down in to the tree from a panel above. Along the way, he meets a young hero who has two dimensional powers named Toodee who can play with objects in the background of a frame.

I thought it was a lot of fun. The pages work best seeing them all together, and there is a lot of play with the art and panel layout. I liked Invincible's costume which consisted of a series of boxes like comic page panels.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Europe Comics and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

Kudos, I suppose, to the makers of this book for so blatantly breaking the fourth wall of comics – or at least the guttering. Our hero is the only character able to manipulate the entire comic form, so an action he does in row three image two of one page is actually seen to bear fruit in row four image one, or vice versa. It's really hard to define in written form, but trust me, it's a great gag, when something from the future of the strip is shown before now so that now is changed, making for a new now in when the something can happen.

The problem is, it's one of two gags this book has. The other is an 'intern' our hero adopts, who can pick things from one perspective and use them in his, which again is impossible to put into words (unless you're Father Ted explaining cows). This visual tomfoolery has to cover a welter of uninteresting baddies and situations, but however well they're used they don't get over the once-is-enough feeling. So much so that when pages really had to be used in double-page spreads, I gave up, knowing this is only an e-book and never will equate to the original French entity. Lower your expectations, get used to repeated ideas over and over again, and the actual paper format will be right up your street. This tiresome repetition of the same joke, in a format that kills much of the experimentation stone dead, is just unfortunate.

Not quite my type of graphic novel. The art is decent, but the wording is a little awkward to read and decipher.

Each page of Invincible contains multiple panels. The result is a colorful and cartoonish experience with many images to consider. A likeable and inviting graphic novel to read.

A Sly Meta-Comic

O.K., I thought this would be a collection of adventures about a goofy quasi-superhero wannabe, or a similar sort of character. Well, that's about as wrong as wrong could be. This comic is a sly, good-humored, and remarkably creative deconstruction of the entire idea of cartoon strip story telling. It's also amusing and laid back, so it doesn't beat you over the head with its intellectualalityness.

Here's the deal. The book is really divided into four parts, and each part toys with a different aspect of cartoons-in-sequential-panels. (This is where the French word for such cartoons - "bandes dessineés" - is more descriptive.) The book is generally laid out in the standard 4 panels by 4 panels per page grid. That means that the bottom of panel 1 sits right above the top of panel 5, the bottom of panel 2 sits above panel 6, and so on.

In part one, through a number of distinct stories, we find that Invincible derives his powers from being able to move from panel to panel. He can simply reach down from panel 2 and pluck a kitten from the top of a tree in panel 6. He can shoot a gun from panel 10 and disarm a mugger in panel three. That also means he can move back and forth through time, since he can know from panel 12 that he needs to do something in panel 3 that will help him in panel 13. This is all a total hoot and generates all sorts of time travel, paradox, and causation problems, each of which is neatly tied up by the end of the story.

I thought that would be, more or less, the gimmick for the entire book, but Jousselin works three other angles. In the second part a character controls the movements of his thought balloons through the words he uses, and the thought balloons push and pull and hammer and generally cleverly act like independent characters/actors. In the next part we meet 2-D Boy, who runs away from things until they are far enough away to appear small enough for him to pick up. The stories all turn on manipulating the cartoon's visual perspectives and depths. The final part, well it's in the same vein, but is a mystery, so I won't say more.

Anyway, this ended up being a thought provoking, amusing, and wildly rewarding examination of the whole idea of sequential story-telling and visual story-telling, in the company of a deadpan and charmingly modest hero. What an excellent find.

(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)