With the current status quo of superheroes becoming our modern American myth in this climate, it is an interesting premise to see a redemption story. With our societal desire to take complex ordeals and strive to villainize people, there has been this lost appreciation for redemption. Granted, most people have been getting in trouble for Irredeemable acts. This leads me into reflecting on the omnibus of Incorruptible, a spin-off series that stems from the world of Mark Waid’s Irredeemable. With Irredeemable, Waid inversed the Superman archetype by taking the world’s greatest superhero and making him the world’s greatest villain. Here, in Incorruptible, the book takes the most wanted criminal (or supervillain) and follows him becoming a superhero.
This book was a lot more fun than Irredeemable, solely for its humor. While Plutonian is predominantly a dour character within his own series, Max Danger is just charismatic with all his swagger. With the book starting at his beginning journey of redemption, we see this person struggle to simply stay devoted to standing up for the world.
Despite a wide variation of artists, the series manages to control itself with each variation. From Jean Diaz to Horacio Dominguez to Marcio Takara and with Damien Couceiro finishing it up, the series artists all managed to properly hold the reader’s attention with all of these wonderfully fun panels that always breathed some sense of levity after dealing with a heavy level of depravity from Irredeemable.
Letterer Ed Dukeshire manages to allow for an irreverent through-line within this visual voice and language of the series. These letter balloons are all perfect accent marks and flourish alongside the art.
Waid’s Incorruptible is simple fun and a joyous book, due to the simple fact that it is capable of having humor. There is such a fun joy seeing this character manage to grow and surpass his depravity to become a better human.
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