Last week, a fistful of the folks responsible for Skybound Animation and Prime Video’s megahit Invincible gathered at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, California to celebrate the release of The Art of Invincible Season 1. You can check out our exclusive coverage of their panel presentation at the event here. After the panel, the team – pictured below and consisting of (from left to right) Invincible Co-creator Cory Walker, Season 1 Character Designer (and Season 3 Art Director) Dou Hong, Co-showrunner and Executive Producer Simon Racioppa, and Supervising Producer and Season 2 Art Director Shaun O'Neil – answered questions from the attending Invincible fans and signed copies of their new book. Here are the highlights of their Q&A…

On comparing Prime Video’s Invincible to The Boys…

Simon: [Creator] Garth [Ennis] has a different approach. The Boys is one of his books, obviously. In the original Boys [comic] books, the idea is that power corrupts. Basically, superheroes are terrible. [Executive producer] Eric Kripke has carried that paradigm into the show. It's a little more of a cynical view of superheroes. All of the superheroes in The Boys come from Compound V. Nobody else gets it. There's no unions or anything like that. So it's a very specific point of view. Invincible doesn't have that… Invincible has a more optimistic view of heroes. It’s like the classic Golden Age of heroes in a way. There's good ones and there's bad ones. It doesn't have that very specific theme that's baked into The Boys.

On character besides Atom Eve who they’d like to see get their own special episode…

Simon: Anyone’s character could support it. It'd be super fun to do a villain like Machine Head, something like that. How’d he get that machine head? Where's his other head? Was he born like that? Probably not… Yeah, that’d be fun.

Cory: The obvious answer is Rex Splode. But also, I wouldn't mind Immortal. I feel like Immortal is probably the least liked of the heroes. So maybe trying to make people like him would be a fun challenge.

On whether we’ll see the Eve’s powers expand on screen…

Cory: I like to think that the things Eve does take energy from her. So just assuming she can do whatever all powerful thing [is needed] at any moment is not really accurate. Though she did go pretty hard in her own special. Hopefully, we’ll see something to that extent again, and I think we will… How I explained it to myself is that it takes it takes a bit of something for her to really wreck people. She could just turn the air in their lungs to cement, but then that's boring. And do you really want to watch that? I guess… [Laughs.]

On the passage of time in the show…

Simon: From a writing perspective, when we break the episodes, we put them up on a big board in the writers rooms and we kind of know, “Okay, this is a week after that happened… This is the next day… Two weeks probably passed between here and here…” Then between seasons, we write down, “Okay, this is probably a month later…” Mark is 17 in the first episode, and you can figure out that the first season is eight or nine months in real time. Then we do that sort of tracking. We try to keep it a little loose, just to give us some flexibility. But the characters talk about things like that – “That happened two years ago…” And we want to make sure that makes sense for the show. So we track the characters and track ages. Sometimes we cheat a little bit. Like, we cut to black, and then we come back up slowly. Was that a day? Was that a week? We do keep track and try our best to [have it] make sense.

Cory: Any drastic change, when possible, will take place between seasons.

Simon: In Season 1, the end of episode six to the end of eight is like a day. Not even a day. You could track it in hours. Time moves fast then.

On the fans’ response to the show…

Shaun: I'm happy for the positive response that we have in general.

Dou: Before I worked on Invincible I didn't understand how invested people were in it. I'm a huge, huge comic fan, but I think I was in my own little DC Comics bubble. Then when I would tell people, “I’m working on Invincible,” they were like, “Really?!” They knew about it before I did, so it’s just really cool to work on something people like. But it's so interesting that when people talk about Invincible, they talk about Omni-Man. [Laughs.] Like, it's never about Invincible. I feel like in this weird sort of way that Omni-Man is the most popular character because I see him everywhere.

Simon: I've worked on lots of shows that have no response, where, once you're out there, nothing comes back. So I think any kind of fan response is amazing. I mean, obviously the “Thing Mark” stuff was crazy because that went everywhere. That's delightful… Someone had drawn a whole bunch of Cecil with his shirt off. [Laughs.] Nothing X-rated. He was just about to work out. One of the drawings was… You know that thing people do where they hand sideways on a pole? It was him doing that. People were excited more than I thought! [Laughs.] No, honestly, any kind of response from fans… All that stuff is incredible. It's amazing. It's nice to know that people care about the show.

Cory: The fact that it was so ripe for memes was surprising altogether. Any meme-able moment took me by surprise. And the reaction to the show altogether. Because, working on it, we didn't know what the reception was going to be. When it came out everybody was locked in their houses. We didn't get to experience the reception of the show at comic conventions or anything like that. So all of this stuff was a great surprise to me.

On the biggest change made in adapting the comic to the show that made the show even better than the comic…

Cory: The biggest thing that comes to mind for me is the fight between the Guardians and Omni-Man, the way that plays out in the show versus the way it was handled in the comic. Because in the comic, we wanted to have that final page turn reveal who was doing it. That presented its own limitations. Then in the show, it was just, “This is about to happen.” And it did! For me, that's the that's the biggest thing.

Shaun: I was gonna say runtime. We're there for longer. The shame of comics is you can flip a page so fast. It’ll take you a whole day to draw whatever content somebody needs to get from top to bottom and then move on to the next one. Runtime changes anything. Because the amount of time that you spend with the content has to change, and that affects like everything.

Simon: Sometimes you're adding to the material right, but it has to feel like it should have been there all along. Or could have been there all along. The one we worked really hard on and I think worked out is Debbie. We give Debbie a lot more time in the show. That comes from conversations with Robert and Cory. We opened up the panels and gave her a little more time. When you have Sandra Oh, you don't want to waste it. That's something we spent a lot of time on and I'm pretty happy with how that came out and hopefully will continue to come out.