Robert Kirkman on What Makes a Good Comics-to-TV-to-Game Adaptation

You’d better not play Invincible VS at a zombie’s pace, lest your playable Mark Grayson will become very vincible.

Invincible VS is an action-packed fighting game from Robert Kirkman, the guy behind The Walking Dead, and his new game-development studio, Quarter Up, a subsidiary of his Skybound Entertainment. Kirkman’s latest comics-to-TV-to-games adaptation is available today on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC; the three-on-three fighter boasts a roster of 18 characters from the Invincible universe, including an all-new original fighter.

I got my hands on the game a bit early, and — when my kids weren’t looking — beat the blood out of heroes and villains in its mixed-tag action. Hey, somebody’s got to protect Earth from Omni-Man.

Read The Hollywood Reporter‘s Q&A with Kirkman and Invincible VS executive producer Mike Willette below.

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What comic makes for a good TV adaptation and in turn makes for a good game adaptation?

KIRKMAN I think the only thing that, in my experience, really helps is a long-running comic. You know, Outcast was kind of happening while we were making the show, and that was a much more difficult process. With Invincible and Walking Dead — I think we had 80 issues of Walking Dead when the show started, and with Invincible, we had the full 144-issue run. And I think that the monthly format of comics necessitates action, progress, intrigue, cliffhangers, because there’s these month gaps between each issue. You’re trying to excite your audience as much as possible and leave them with a moment that is going to sustain them over that month-long gap. And I think that comics, because of that function, naturally translate well to television. When we sit down to adapt Invincible, we have three possible cliffhangers in almost every episode. We have four possible finales in every arc of the book that we’re adapting, and so we get to just pick and choose, like, “OK, where are our big moments going to go?”

As far as how that plays into video games, it results in a very high-octane, action-based story that translates very well to any number of kind of genres, especially fighting games. I think in particular, the thing that you need [most for a fighting game] is an expansive cast. One of the things that fighting games do exceptionally well is focus in on individual characters and show you how cool they are, let you get to know them a little bit more. Every character in a fighting game is essentially the main character if you choose to play with them.

Why three on three? And were there any specific challenges that came with that many characters in a fight?

WILLETTE When we really wanted to start working on this game, they’re like, “Mike, what do you want to build?” I’m like, “I want to build Invincible as a badass, brutal tag-battle fighting game. Like, tournament quality, it’s gotta be the shit,” right? It’s not just one character and you’re learning a kit — your kit is actually three characters, and the combination of those characters together is an expression of personality and self. It’s also the lore that you want to develop. When I think about Invincible, I always think about like the Teen Team and The Guardians and The Order and The Lizard League and The Viltrumites — you have these factions that are always battling. So it made perfect sense to combine these concepts together.

Even fundamentally, I go back to my childhood playing on the carpet, whether it was like with my He-Man, or my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or my Transformers, my G.I. Joes — you get to play with them and set up scenarios. And it’s almost you’re looking at it in a 2D plane, because you’re playing left hand, right hand. The one hand bashes the other. To me, it’s kind of that daydream, exploration — I get to make things happen and I get to do it in this digital space and make my own scenario. So that’s where I think video games kind of take a life of their own, where it’s like as long as it feels authentic and it’s upholding what this franchise means, then we allow people to come play with us. To me, that’s the most honorific thing you can do.

A lot of Invincible characters fly — did that create unique technical challenges in making a 2D fighting game?

WILLETTE You want to have the verticality because it adds another depth to game play: that function of who can fly versus who can’t fly and what does that mean, how does it express itself in anyone’s individual kit? So for example, Eve has an eight-way navigation. She can actually hover, and she can move omnidirectional. But not all of our flyers can because you want to have uniqueness in their kit, so their attack vectors are different. So, why would I play this character versus this character? Well, it’s because of the way I like to move. Some characters have what we call a “triangle jump,” which means I can jump up in the air really quickly, and they dive down immediately. And that presents game play challenges for your opponent. They’re like, “Oh, I have to be very defensive-minded with someone who has these type of abilities, because they’re going to try to lock me down and then call on their teammates to try to what we call “mix me up,” meaning they present me with both high attacks and low attack almost simultaneously.

But in this type of game, we really consider what happens when heroes get hit and when they’re blocking. So you always want to have defensive options, and we always want you paying attention to the screen, no matter what’s happening. In some games, you get touched once and you’re just watching a combo slideshow — but not here. You have opportunities to break their combo. Your teammates can come in and bust it up … It’s like a rock, paper, scissors-type of event where they could try to bait you out and fake that they’re going to come in with their teammates. We have a lot of mechanics that encourage back-and-forth fighting like you’d see in the show. We always want you paying attention to the intensity of the battles, and we try to have brief moments of rest before getting back into the hardcore stuff.

There will be lots of comparisons to Mortal Kombat. Both are fighting games, both are very bloody — and your Omni-Man was a downloadable character in MK1. How did he get in there?

KIRKMAN I’ve been begging Ed Boon for years. Yeah, I had meetings with Ed Boon on Mortal Kombat 11. And, yeah, just, I think it was too late in the game. They already locked in all the DLC characters. And, honestly, I had been years prior trying to angle to get Walking Dead characters in Mortal Kombat. It’s just been years and years and years of begging. Then I guess at some point, somebody had come to them and said, “Hey, this Invincible show’s really blowing up, and people are asking for Omni-Man in the game.” And he was like, “Wait a minute. I think I know that guy,” and it all came together pretty quickly.

You have cooler friendships than I do.

KIRKMAN I’m not friends with Ed Boon, I’ve just been hounding him for years and begging him [to get my characters in Mortal Kombat]. I would love to be friends with Ed Boon, to be clear. I don’t know why I had to get that on the record.

Was Omni-Man in Mortal Kombat a proof-of-concept for the development of Invincible VS?

KIRKMAN [They were] mostly unconnected. I think if anything, it was just, “Oh, this guy does work in a fighting game.”

One of the reasons I was always begging him to put some of my characters in Mortal Kombat is that I’m a huge fighting game fan. We were thinking about doing an Invincible fighting game anyway — before the television show, actually. The timing was just never right [before now], but it was all just kind of in the ether.

What are you guys playing these days in your free time?

WILLETTE I was checking out the the latest [patch] for Tekken 8. So I dabble in there. I play a little bit of Bryan (Fury), but I typically get my ass kicked. So I’ll cycle through some of the fighters, depending on what patches has come out. I haven’t played wrestling for a while, so I jumped into the new WWE (2K26), yeah, because I saw the Monday Night Wars Edition. I was like, “Ah, shit.” I just had to do it. That was my peak wrestling fandom.

KIRKMAN I play Apex Legends a bit — I’m terrible at it. I’ve dabbled at Fortnite. Mostly I spend my time playing Mario games when I’m not playing Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter 6 or the big fighting game that’s going right now.

Same, Robert, in terms of being terrible. A frustrating piece of modern gaming for us old men with jobs and families is an inability to compete with literal children online. I’m killed or defeated so easily it’s not even fun.

KIRKMAN Recently, I hopped on Apex. I’m playing against randos, and an angelic voice goes, [high-pitch to mimic a child] “You suck!”