Among its many virtues, each the Image comedian e-book Invincible and the Prime Video animated collection are celebrations of superhero tropes and historical past. Mark Grayson, a.ok.a. Invincible, is an amalgam of Superman and Spider-Man, and the collection goes on to incorporate riffs on the Justice League and the Avengers, the Hulk, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and extra. Case in level: Tech Jacket, a teen hero who borrows components from Iron Man, Green Lantern, and Firestorm.
Yet, when Tech Jacket lastly appeared in Invincible‘s fourth season, co-showrunners Robert Kirkman and Simon Racioppa put a small twist on the classic character, changing him from the high school guy Zack Thompson into the high school girl Zoe Thompson, voiced by Zoey Deutch. As Kirkman and Racioppa explain to Den of Geek, they made the switch for the simplest reason. “When it came time to introduce Tech Jacket, I realized that if we had brought him straight to comics, he’d be similar to Mark,” says Kirkman.
First launched in his self-titled comedian from 2001, written by Kirkman and penciled by E. J. Su, Tech Jacket helped develop the Invincible universe by displaying the warfare between the Gelderians, smart however bodily weak aliens who invented the vest, and their arch-enemies, the war-like Kresh. After the tip of his first collection, Tech Jacket turned an everyday within the mainline Invincible comics, serving to Invincible and the Coalition within the Viltrumite War, which is how Zack, now Zoe, comes into the animated collection.
Rather than merely give Zoe within the cartoon the identical attributes as Zack within the comics, Kirkman and Racioppa took the chance to reimagine Tech Jacket. “We decided early on that it would be interesting to gender swap this character,” reveals Kirkman. “We began enthusiastic about who Zoe can be as a substitute of Zach. There are some thrilling issues that come up while you change that character.
