#invincible bulletproof

bonus:

Rex Splode X Bulletproof hcs

this might be a little short but that's solely because there's like fuck all on Bulletproof as a character rn

Thank you for the ask I absolutely loved writing it!

Hcs below the cut!

Warning: Spoilers of the Invincible comics

In the Anissa rant I made some days ago, I promised the last negative thing about the comic I would rant about was the character of Bulletproof. So here it is, just to take get it off my chest lmao.

For the record, I will be exclusively talking about the comic version of Bulletproof. I have nothing against the show version of the character for now. Quite the contrary, I think he's neat, and fun, which is something I never found the comic version to be (I felt most of his jokes weren't creative at all, I can't even remember any). I am actually interested in how they'll adapt his more serious important stuff in the future, because oh boy if I would need changes to like it.

So anyway, when it comes to comic Bulletproof, other than the mentioned fact that I don't like the jokes made with him, I think there are three points to cover about his character, that will hopefully examplify why, in my opinion, he's a character that went nowhere (I don't think Kirkman had any idea of what to do with him tbh):

First point: Cheating drama

Probably the most known aspect of his character. To reflesh the memory of comic readers, a big source of drama coming from this character is that he's a cheater. He had already cheated on his girlfriend, Carla.

And despite his words, we as readers are aware he has been willing to do it again at least a few times.

Just an example

Now, we can see that he's meant to be a very flawed character, who goes back to bad habits despite seemingly trying to improve on them and hurts his loved ones in the process, and bla, bla, bla.

I don't want to waste my time describing this soap opera drama, for a simple fact: what's its resolution?

Absolutely nothing. I don't think the subject is ever even brought up after that dinner he had with Carla, and she just disappears off the face of Earth after issue 97, this being her last panel:

My honest reaction to this plot

Many hate Bulletproof for being a cheater (valid, ofc). I honestly can't even hate him due to how irrelevant this whole deal is, which is bad for his character.

And trust me, this is a symptom of the disease his whole character suffers of things about him going nowhere.

Second point: Family drama

To reflesh memory again, during the arc of Robot and Monster Girl in Flaxa, we discover that Bulletproof's parents are pretty shit and neglectful, and have always favored his twin brother Tyrone over him.

Not only that, but it turns out that Tyrone was a crazy asshole who tried to experiment on Zandale to try some way to get superpowers he had discovered. Said experiment caused Zandale to become Bulletproof and Tyrone's death, so Zandale decided to pretend to be his brother from then on.

Now, I am not a big fan of this conflict to begin with for many reasons. For example, I can't even hate the parents or Tyrone like the story wants me to, there's something in them that makes then feel cartoonishly bad people rather than relatively realistic like Mr. Wilkins.

However, I have to admit that we have our setup here for a conflict, it could lead to interesting things now that Zandale has revealed the truth to his parents. Where does it lead to? Well, just to this sudden moment of issue 97 I am sure you all remember:

Which may feel out of place to many of us, and Kirkman himself completely agrees according to words of his self-insert in the very next page:

Now, I can't blame Kirkman for trying to experiment with his own comic, of course, but it's a fact that this made the whole family drama which had been set up just end in a sudden, edgy moment. So yeah, for all I care this went nowhere, at least not anywhere which could make me care in the slightest.

But to be fair, as absurd as this moment is, exploring its consequences could have been interesting. Which leads to the final point.

Third point: His alliance with Robot

Let's flash forward a bit, just after the Dinosaurus catastrophe. We have this genuinely interesting moment of Bulletproof relating to Mark's guilt over the whole thing due to his own guilt for his parents' death:

And yet, despite this similarity between the two Invincibles, if we flash forward again, we'll see that they had completely different reactions to Robot's takeover. Mark opposed it with all his will, while Zandale was convinced to join him:

The whole concept of someone of the side of the heroes agreeing with Robot, and it being none other than the one Mark allowed to share his mantle for the record, is just interesting, so something good could come out of this.

And some issues later we have another of Bulletproof's best moments here, after he receives a scar during the escape of many heroes from Robot's prison:

Now, between his guilt and the alliance with Robot, we have the setup for a potentially good development again. And what we receive this time is?

Well, he just becomes a background character, with basically zero significant moments, no fleshing out to why he agreed with Robot (I can imagine his reasons, I guess, but I want to see him expressing and discussing it, as Invincible characters always do), and, look, literally nothing worth mentioning.

The most I can give you are these two panels so you can remember he even existed after the last moment I have shown, because he appears so little after Reboot? that you may have missed his panels lmao:

We don't even know what happened to him after this, dude, it's actually insane.

So yeah, despite the potential this part of his character had, once again it went nowhere.

Closing thoughts

Now, allow me to close this with some extra thoughts, because I was wondering why this guy was even a character, and I think I have an answer thanks to some conversations I've had with cool people in the fandom. From a point of view, his character is basically a great joke, whether it was intentional or not.

See, Bulletproof's is always unfavoured in life. He the problematic child whose parents didn't love as they did his brother. His costume is a discarted one for Mark, and he's a secondary Invincible who isn't even that close to the main one. He becomes basically just a goon of Robot. And finally, to finish the joke, the story itself lost interest in him and lets him in the background.

With robot, he fully decided to do the things he did. They weren't agreed upon by a counsel and society that would kill him had he not otherwise, the exact opposite even.

Rudolph "try to steal the name of a guy who was so much more than him cuz he's fucking terrible and needs things to be about him (even helping his girlfriend as it's "figuring out how to fix this thing wrong with her" first and "helping her" second)" Connors is a egoist petulant monster of a man who decided after 30 years of sitting around doing nothing to half assedly do some herowork, Then after being captured, fully just descending into fascism simply for the sake of personal convenience and then intentionally putting forward the circumstances by which the family that would then attempt to rectify the decades of subjugation, in which he would pretend like them retaliating over just actually being personally, familiarly subjugated as reason why he was right for doing it, ALL of which with ample time to do a lot of good.