What will you have after 500 years

“What Will You Have After 500 Years?” A Look Back at “Invincible” and How I Got into Comics

By Reed Hinckley-Barnes | April 10th, 2018
Posted in Longform | % Comments

With the final issue of “Invincible” having come out earlier this year, and the final trade paperback being released a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to look back on the series. “Invincible” is, without hyperbole, the reason that I read comics. Like many things that people find in their early adolescence, “Invincible” shaped my tastes and is something that, after all these years, I have a hard time looking at critically. What I can do, instead, is look at how “Invincible” affected me and got me involved in the world of comics.

Three warnings before we get started. The way that I’m grouping these issues to talk about them is silly, arbitrary and makes sense only in the context of my life. Second, there are going to be a number of spoilers for pretty much the entire run of “Invincible” in this essay. If that’s something you’d like to avoid, please watch out. Last, but not least, I’m going to be talking about the book in a way very personal to me, so if you don’t like reading anything that gets mushy or nostalgic, I’d suggest just skipping over this one. If you think you can handle all of that, then let’s dive in.

“Invincible” #1-13 – End of junior high, beginning of high school

When I was 14, in the last half of my 8th grade year, I moved. It was just me and my mom, and this wasn’t the first time we had moved. I went to a total of three different elementary schools and three different junior highs, all of which were in different states. This move was from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, and it was the last serious move we would make while I was living with my mom.

None of these moves were much fun for me. I was a quiet kid that had a hard time making friends. That last move was from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, just as I was about to transition from junior high to high school, and it was one of the hardest. I was shy, but on top of that, I had a hair cut and a build which left me with an unfortunate resemblance to Shaggy from Scooby Doo, though without the peach fuzz. I was close to a total of one person in Wisconsin during the back half of eighth grade, and that person was my mother.

I never made friends easily, but the ones that I did make I hung onto. One of the few close friends I made over the course of my moves was Dalton. We had gone to elementary school together in Wyoming and he moved around a lot too. He was one of the few people I was still friends with no matter where I lived. We talked on the phone almost every day. It was in these conversations that I learned about “Invincible.”

That summer, after the end of my eighth-grade year, I was able to go out to visit Dalton. While it was awesome to spend time with one of my closest friends, I also was able to spend part of my time there devouring those first three volumes of “Invincible,” finally getting to actually read the book that I had heard so much about.

Of course, the experience of reading a comic versus having it described to you is incomparable. Cory Walker’s art on the first two volumes and Ryan Ottley’s in the next brought the world I’d heard described to me to life in stunning detail. The dynamic action of both artists, the way the characters moved across the page and Bill Crabtree’s bright, simple colors had me hooked. It was everything I never knew I wanted, exactly the kind of super hero action I had been missing from my life.

Even more than that, in those early issues, “Invincible” was special. The characters, ones that would be important for the entire 144 issue run, were all introduced in these first couple volumes. There was Mark Grayson, the titular Invincible who was born with his powers because of his alien, Viltrumite heritage. His father, Nolan Grayson alias Omni-Man, a Superman analogue. His mother, Debbie, a regular human woman. And there were some of Mark’s peers who were on the Teen team, Atom Eve, who could create pink constructs, Robot, a super smart, if slightly sinister leader. All of these characters started the series almost fully formed and are just a few of the many introduced.

The second volume has Omni-Man killing a Justice League analogue called the Guardians of the Globe, just ripping through them like paper. The third volume spends much of its time in a drag out, beat down fight between Mark and his father. As Nolan is about to kill him, he asks Mark, “What will you have after 500 years?” and Mark replies, “You.” Mark is left broken and alone, and Nolan flies off into space with tears in his eyes.

That fight is one of the defining moments of “Invincible.” It pulled the book away from its basic premise of Superman’s teenage son, allowing it to branch off into something entirely its own. It also includes brutal violence outside of what the reader had come to expect in the regular series. While most of the fights in “Invincible” for these first couple volumes keep things at a standard super hero level of blood and gore (i.e. not much of either) for big fights in the series, punches actually leave a mark. When I reached the page where Omni-Man and Invincible fought and Mark is beaten to a pulp, the amount of blood and violence compared to what came before made those moment so much more impactful. After this fight, with his father gone, Mark had a lot of growing up to do.

“Invincible” #14-59 – Fall and Winter, Freshman year

The first of these collections was all about Mark coming into his own as a super hero. Dealing with the world that his father had left behind, Mark was now the most powerful person on the planet. Just as important, if not more, we see Mark start dating Amber, who becomes his long-time girlfriend. Mark graduates from high school and decides on what college he wants to attend. These issues dealt with Mark taking up his father’s mantle, trying to be a better man than he was, and growing into his own person.

The third Ultimate Collection is out of this chunk of issues the one most important to me. While I’ve read through all of these collections numerous times over the years, my copy of the Ultimate Collection Volume 3 is practically falling apart from use. In one of the stories collected there, Mark is taken off Earth to help save an unknown planet. Unbeknownst to him, the person calling for his help is his father, Nolan. And what’s more, he finds out his father has had another son. They are attacked by a pair of Viltrumites, who destroy the planet and take Nolan captive. Mark is then left with his new, younger half-brother that he takes back with him to Earth.

This story, where Mark is able to see his father again, affected me more than it probably had any right to. That’s not to say that when Mark and Nolan reconnect it isn’t a beautiful moment in the story. I’ve included a few of the pages here to show it. The clenched fists, the anger in both their eyes, that moment of embrace. These two characters coming back together hit me in a way I never expected this series to hit me.
Continued below

Of course, there are more than forty issues worth of material I’ve lumped together in this time period. Of all my categories, this one is definitely the most arbitrary. While those first three volumes work to set up the entire series and some of my later categories fit pretty nicely into the structure of the series as a whole, this is really just a lumping together of a bunch of issues I read in very quick succession, all in the same format.

It also includes Mark moving away from the structures that his father existed in. It turned out, a giant government agency that Nolan was working for and that Mark took up his mantle in, is actually bad. Mark tears himself free from this agency’s clutches, though not without a fight. These stories show Mark gaining independence. Between my birthday in September of my freshman year and Christmas a few months later, this was probably when I was at peak “Invincible” reading. I had such a wealth of content to tear through, and I would read it over and over again. But that spring, when I was dying for more “Invincible” content, I ran into a problem. The next Ultimate Collection, the sixth volume, didn’t come out until April of that year.

Invincible #60-78 – Spring, Freshman year

Luckily, I was able to move pretty smoothly into the regular trade paperbacks. These only cost half the price of an ultimate collection, and over the course of that spring, I was able to scrounge together the 16.99 twice to buy volumes 12 and 13 and again just in time for volume 14, ‘The Viltrumite War’ to be released.
Continued below

As I said before, this period had some of the most serious battles yet for Mark and his family. With these new battles, the series also switched to a new colorist. The colorist for the first 50 issues, Bill Crabtree left the series, to be replaced by FCO Plascencia. While Crabtree’s brought a bright, simplicity to the colors, Plascencia added a depth to Ryan Ottley’s artwork. It pulled the series away from the pop art sensibility that define Crabtree’s run on the title and toward a style that felt a little more serious. What’s more, Plascencia was especially talented at coloring blood, a useful skill for the stories to come.

There was a group of alternate dimension Invincibles brutally attacking Earth. And while still cleaning up the mess that these alternate versions of him had left, Mark is attacked by a Viltrumite named Conquest, whose only goal was to cause as much destruction as possible and kill Mark. After these fights, which Mark barely survived, the series transitions into the build up to and culmination of all the problems with the Viltrumites the series had been dealing with so far.

With a group of his strongest allies, including his father, Mark wages war on the Viltrumites, destroying what was left of their civilization. In this space epic of an arc, Mark confronts the danger that had loomed over his head from the beginning of the series, going out into space to face the Viltrumites and Thragg, their leader.

None of these issues affected me in quite the same way that Mark meeting his father again had. But that didn’t stop Dalton and I still talking about them excessively. I became a little obsessed with the fact that Thragg, the leader of the Viltrumites, was the spitting image of Freddy Mercury. I started listening to Queen because of it. I would walk around the halls of my high school, greatest hits playing on my Zune, creating my own super heroes and stories while I should have been listening in class. Of course, while this seemed like the climax of the story, “Invincible” wasn’t anywhere close to finished.

Invincible #79-114, High School

After I got ‘The Viltrumite War,’ the wait for the next trade was almost eight months. If I was unwilling to wait a few months that spring for the next Ultimate Collection, waiting until the new year was going to be an eternity. With that in mind, I took the only action that I could and started visiting my local comic book shop.

This was the summer after my freshman year, and as an awkward teen I had absolutely no idea how to talk to strangers. My anxiety being what it was, I actually visited my local shop three or four times before I bought what I wanted. The variety of different books and shelves left me almost unable to operate. And while the owner of my local shop was a nice man trying his best to be helpful, actually interacting with me was the quickest way to send my heart racing and make me want to bolt out of the store.

Those first couple visits I would walk in and look around for a minute or two before he asked me what I was looking for. Panicking, I’d either mutter, “Just looking” and runaway, or grab something at random off one of the shelves and buy it. Eventually I worked up the courage to actually ask him where he kept the Image comics and was able to buy the two or three back issues I needed to be current with “Invincible.”

This was the Summer and Fall of 2011 and as far as times to become a comic reader went, it was a pretty good one. I started by dipping my toes into Marvel’s revamped Ultimate line that had just launched, and soon all four titles were added to my pull list. This was also pretty close to the beginning of the New 52 at DC, and I was easily able to catch up on back issues of Batman and a few other series. A year later, with the Marvel Now relaunch, I made my way into the Marvel universe proper. At that point, I was in my local comic book shop every Wednesday after school, spending more money than my mom wanted on comics, and leaving them in ridiculous stacks all over my room. Organized stacks, of course, but a stiff breeze through my bedroom would have turned it into a disaster zone.

Somehow, I’d managed to time my reading of “Invincible” to catch up with individual issues right after the climax 75 issues in the making. When the story took a breather and slowed down, my reading slowed down too as I was only able to consume a single chapter per month, or less considering delays. Looking back on this point in the series, the book feels like it was meandering. With the main plot the book had been building toward at least partially resolved, the series moved around aimlessly, trying to find a new footing.

For my part, reading it at the time, I didn’t notice it was moving so slowly. I thought this was just what reading a book month to month was like. When you move from being able to read six chapter at a time to having only one, I just assumed the pacing would be a bit off.

Re-reading though, I can say this portion of the series is my least favorite. It was clear that after ‘The Viltrumite War,’ Mark as a character and “Invincible” as a series couldn’t go back to being a regular super hero book. But for a little while, that’s what it tried being. On top of that, FCO Plascencia left the book after issue #78, and the colorists that followed were fine, the next long-term colorist, John Rauch, never quite captured the feeling Plascencia and Crabtree brought in their runs.

I took all of this in stride. I was reading a lot of comics, and “Invincible” was now just one of them. While it was a pretty big part of who I was, I’d moved from someone who read “Invincible” almost exclusively to someone who read comics in general. I had an “Invincible” t-shirt, but mostly because I thought it was cool to know about an independent super hero book that other people didn’t. That was pretty much how I felt about the series most of my way through high school. If in my freshman year I was at peak Edgy Teen, this period over the rest of high school was when I was at my most gatekeeping of nerd culture.

During my senior year, “Invincible” went through an arc where Robot, one of Mark’s long-time allies that had always been a bit sinister, tried to take over the world. With an army of robots built to withstand even the most powerful of the super heroes on Earth and a plan to get Mark out-of-the-way, Robot was able to. Genuinely thinking that he was doing the right thing, and seemingly making the world a better place, Mark is stuck with the fact that Robot now controlled the world. With Eve and their new-born daughter, Mark decided his best choice was to leave Earth.

Invincible #115-126, College

As Mark was leaving Earth to live on an alien world, I was leaving home for college. College would help me come out of my shell a little bit, but at first, I was just as closed off when I came to college as I was during any of my previous moves. Part of my unwillingness to make new friends led to me being unwilling to find a new comic shop in the city. Instead, I had the owner of the store in my home town keep my pull list. During those first couple years, I visited home about once a month, and in those visits I would stop by to pick up my comics.

It seemed Kirkman had realized that post-Viltrumite War, “Invincible” couldn’t quite work as a normal super hero comic. So, it transitioned into something else. For a little while, the book became about Mark and Eve living on this alien world, trying to raise their daughter the best they could.

I still enjoyed “Invincible,” when I got around to reading it. It had turned into an alien slice of life book, interspersed with an intense fight between Thragg and a character called Battle Beast. The book was not quite a super hero book, but it still followed all the characters that I had grown close to and cared so much about.

Then two things happened. First, I moved out of the dorms and into an apartment I was renting with one of my close friends. For the first time in my life I was actually paying bills, worrying about cash, making sure that I actually bought food for myself. That meant, as far as spending money went, I had close to zero. Second, my mom moved away from the town she’d been living. When visited her, I was no longer visiting my local comic book shop.

I canceled my pull list. It had whittled down to only a few comics at that point anyway, but it was a strange step away from something I’d had for years. And at that same time, “Invincible” had just finished an arc called ‘Reboot?’ where Mark was taken back in time to decide whether he wanted to change his decisions. Even after seeing that the world would be a better place if he changed things, Mark realized that to do so would mean he’d lose his family and wasn’t willing to take that step.

Looking back on this arc from a distance, it’s a refutation of retcons of the sort that happened to Spider-Man in ‘One More Day.’ Looking at it through that lens, I think it works well enough. But at the time, it seemed like the kind of floundering around that I’d hoped “Invincible” had moved passed. The sort of non-event that had characterized the title while I was in high school. Now that I was older, better read when it came to comics, and pretty short on cash, I wasn’t willing to pay for something I wasn’t sure I wanted to be reading. It was the reason that I dropped off the book.

Invincible #127-144, Graduation

It was a couple of years before I read “Invincible” again. In fact, I dropped off monthly comic books almost all together. I bought myself a subscription to Marvel Unlimited to read some of their back catalogue. I got a lot of reading done on runs I’d always meant to check out, seriously expanding my knowledge of comics history. The only things I read outside of Marvel Unlimited came from Humble Bundles, one of which would give me months of reading, and my school’s library, which had a small selection of comics.

Of course, like all habits, I eventually, piece by piece, started coming back to comic books. I started picking up on new series as they came to Marvel Unlimited six months after the fact. When the first trade of DC Rebirth came out, they were added pretty quickly to Hoopla. With this, I quickly got current on comics once again. I didn’t have that much more money, but I had gotten better at budgeting. Slowly but surely, I started reading DC comics digitally as they came out, and other independent series that peaked my interest. When my Marvel Unlimited subscription was due, I let it expire, the need to be current on comic books once again an important part of my life.

The book’s final confrontation is what it always had to be. Mark finally finishing off Thragg, taking control of the Viltrumite empire. Kirkman, throughout the series, never left a thread dangling. Even when I’d thought he forgot about something, he always circled back to it eventually. We knew that Mark was going to go to space with the Viltrumites from issue 54 of the series, it was foreshadowed that he would rule the Viltrumite empire, and that’s exactly how the book ends.

But the final issue is so much more than that. In interviews and in the backmatter of the collected editions, Kirkman always said that he wanted “Invincible” to continue for forever. That he wanted it to be like a normal super hero book, that when he was done with his run, someone else could take the reins from him. Instead, the ending is almost perfect. We see Olivia, his daughter with Eve and his son Marky, the offspring of Mark and Anissa from Mark being raped, as they grow up. There is the tension between these two, and the tension between Mark and his son. We see Mark take over the Viltrumite empire, making it a force for good. We get hints of stories that could have gone on for years to come. The last page we see Mark and Eve with their daughter, standing together after 500 years, having made the universe a better place. And then it ends.

What will you have after 500 years?

While there were problems with the series, I’m too close to really notice them. I have such an attachment to the characters, I know the series so well, it’s hard for me to look at it critically. But one of the strengths I know is true of “Invincible” is that Kirkman always knew how to bring things back around. And on the final page, it calls back to what is probably the most defining moment in the entire story.

Rereading the entire series, new things hit me. When I was younger, Mark going to college felt like a change of scenery, now it was something real I could relate to. Similarly, the parts where he would fight with his girlfriends, arguments that seemed almost illogical to me when I first read them, now look like something I might have with my long-time girlfriend. And I’m excited to reread the story in the future. I wonder how those issues where Mark and Eve are new parents will affect me when I have kids of my own. I wonder if that ending, the legacy of Mark and his children will be even stronger when I’ve watched my own children grow up.

A lot of who I am and a lot what I’m interested in is because of “Invincible.” I’m sure that wasn’t meant to happen, I’m sure it’s not what Kirkman, Ottley and Walker were going for while they were creating the series. But for about a third of my life, I’m able break it up into periods based on my relationship to “Invincible.” The call back to what his father said when he was about to kill him, “What will you have in 500 years?” is meant as a nice bow on the end of the series. But when I think about my relationship to “Invincible,” and I think about my future, I know that for the rest of my life I’ll have the things I’ve taken from this series, and the ways I’ve grown because of it.

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Despite his name and degree in English, Reed never actually figured out how to read. He has been faking it for the better part of twenty years, and is now too embarrassed to ask for help. Find him on Twitter

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What Will Earth Look Like in 500 Years?

By: Robert Lamb | Jan 24, 2020

If you could travel back in time five centuries, you’d encounter an Aztec empire nearly at the end of its run, fresh paintings from Raphael, Titian and Durer, and cooler temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere. This was a world in the midst of the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850 C.E.) and a period of vast European exploration now known as the Age of Discovery.

But what if we could look 500 years into the future and glimpse the Earth of the 26th century? Would the world seem as different to us as the 21st century would have seemed to residents of the 16th century?

The answer to this question largely depends on the relationship between human civilization and our natural environment — its past, its present and, of course, its future. We’ve been altering Earth since at least the Agricultural Revolution of the Neolithic Age, and scientists disagree on exactly how many animal extinctions from even before that point should be lain at our feet [source: Boissoneault]. We manipulated the evolution of domestic plant and animal species, transformed the landscape and burned fossil fuels to power our way of life.

As a result, the planet’s climate has changed — and is changing still. Some experts date the beginning of human climate change back to the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, others to slash-and-burn agricultural practices in prehistoric times. Either way, overwhelming scientific consensus indicates that human activity is almost certainly responsible for climate-warming trends over the last century.

According to NASA, carbon dioxide levels are up to 412 parts per million as of December 2019, up from 316 ppm in 1958 when scientists first started tracking CO2. Global temperature was up 2.07 degrees Fahrenheit (1.15 degrees Celsius) since 1880, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Meanwhile, Arctic ice declines 12.85 percent per decade, and sea levels rise 3.3 millimeters per year, says NASA.

In other words, our planet is warming, extreme weather continues to increase and our natural surroundings are changing. These changes threaten the balance of already highly exploited natural resources. The United Nations warns that the resulting droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires will only speed up land degradation and accelerate the danger of severe food shortages. Such shortages are exactly the catalyst that historically leads to social unrest, mass migration and conflict.

So, on one level, 26th-century Earth will have had to come to terms with climate change. According to some computer models, melting Antarctic ice could cause sea levels to rise by 1 foot (0.3 meter) by the end of this century and 26 feet (8 meters) by the year 2300.

Perhaps our 26th-century ancestors will look back on their ancestors and see that we rallied before the flood. Perhaps they’ll see that we made the sorts of technological, cultural and political changes necessary to prevent mass extinctions, political upheaval, environmental destruction and even civilizational collapse. Certainly, courses of action have been set in place to begin the work, as long as we can remain culturally and politically obliged to follow the course.

Or perhaps they’ll look back on a people who willingly drove the world into ruin.

Along the way, however, our descendants will advance their technology — and while technology created the risks of anthropogenic climate change and nuclear warfare, it also provides us the potential to change course and improve.

Theoretical physicist and futurist Michio Kaku predicts that in a mere 100 years, humanity will make the leap from a type 0 civilization to a type I civilization on the Kardashev Scale. In other words, we’ll become a species that can harness the entire sum of a planet’s energy.

Wielding such power, 26th-century humans could be masters of clean energy technologies such as fusion and solar power. Furthermore, they’d be able to manipulate planetary energy in order to control global climate. Still, futurists disagree on the timing of such a hypothetical upgrade in our technological prowess — and the upgrade is far from assured. As noted skeptic Michael Shermer pointed out in a 2008 Los Angeles Times article, political and economic forces could very well prevent us from making the great leap.

Technology has improved exponentially since the 1500s, and this pace will likely continue in the centuries to come. Physicist Stephen Hawking proposed that by the year 2600, this growth would see 10 new theoretical physics papers published every 10 seconds. If Moore’s Law holds true and both computer speed and complexity double every 18 months, then some of these studies may be the work of highly intelligent machines. Then again, he also predicted that overcrowding and energy consumption would make the Earth uninhabitable by 2600.

What other technologies will shape the world of the 26th century? Futurist and author Adrian Berry believes the average human life span will reach 140 years and that the digital storage of human personalities will enable a kind of computerized immortality. Humans will farm the oceans, travel in starships and reside in both lunar and Martian colonies while robots explore the outer cosmos.

These technologies may come in handy, at least for a privileged few, if serious changes aren’t put in place to deal with climate change.

What else does the future hold for us? Explore the links below for even more predictions about Earth’s long-term future.

What would bloodstains look like after 500 years?

I realise this is a bit of a strange question, but what would bloodstains look like after

500 years? Specifically, what would a text written on parchment using (human) blood as ink look like after 500 years?

Arterial, venous, and capillary blood all have different colours/characteristics, but is there any likelihood that when used as ink, they’d stay a vibrant red after half a millennium? I assume that blood-ink would go a kind of brownish colour after any length of time after it’s dried? I want a manuscript with really crimson-red ink, but would my only options be something like red lead, vermillion, or brazilwood (your standard ingredients for medieval manuscript rubrics)? If blood on its own wouldn’t work, is there any way it could be treated so that it stays really bright red?

I’ve read fantasy stories where there’s some kind of creepy old magical text written in blood/made out of people, but to be honest it doesn’t seem too far-fetched for reality. I’d just really like to know whether it’s possible without magical intervention!

For context, I research late medieval European culture, so while I know a fair bit about manuscripts, I don’t know much about blood. I’ve asked this as a ‘hard science’ question because I’d really like a citation that I can follow up, but that might take the form of «here’s an example of something definitively written in blood, tested by science», or «here’s a forensics paper that shows what blood looks like after different lengths of time», rather than the physics-heavy answers that this tag tends to get! I’m struggling to find an answer, because all my searches seem to come up with images of blood droplets in manuscripts, rather than actual literal blood used as ink.

EDIT: I’ve been alerted to the existence of this question, about what a deep pool of blood would look like after 500 years. While it’s definitely interesting, it doesn’t answer my question here, especially on the hard-science bit.

I also want to clarify that the parchment I’m talking about is either in a codex (standard book) or roll form, so it’s not a single page that would be subject to massive wear-and-tear. Sure, 500 years takes its toll, but there are some amazing medieval manuscripts that survive really well, and they haven’t degraded or decomposed.

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