This was my first introduction to Invincible Universe (or any of the Invincible comic characters or books.) I enjoyed meeting all the characters. Until they died. Invincible Universe #4 Written by Phil Hester Art by Todd Nauck and Gabe Eltaeb Image / Skybound July 2013 Best Tiger - a Deadshot/ Daredevil/ Grifter amalgam - is sick with a gun and apparently capable of taking out this massive super hero team all by himself. In this stand alone issue, we find Best Tiger out-witting, out-shooting, and out-fighting a ton of his teammates. A dark fantasy what if that I suppose most creators must envision occasionally: if I were going to kill this character off how would I do it? It's no [SPOILER - but you can stop here if you like] to suggest that not everything is at it seems and even a new reader such as myself recognized that there is no way a comic book was going to kill off all the characters of a team - and this was before I even knew that Best Tiger was on the team! It just doesn't happen. (Even if this is Skybound, home of infamous Robert Kirkman who has been known to kill any of his characters from the Walking Dead.) As a stand alone, this story worked for me. In fact, it would have worked for me if Best Tiger had killed all these unknown, colorful Legion of Superheroes knock-offs. I've never been a big fan of books with more than half a dozen characters. They are all so crammed in the same 20 something pages with so little room for development and fit so many stereotypes that I'm usually unsatisfied by the lack of depth. But - and this is a big one - if such a large cast was in a book where we focused on one or two members at a time and rotated through with excellent stand alone stories I could bite. Nauck and Eltaeb's work is consistent and up to par with where the comic world has seemingly been stuck since the mid-90s. Serviceable, overly-bright, overly-lined, overly-buff heroes with square jaws and fierce grimaces abound. Nothing special, but definitely not bad. (The crying scene was over the top, though, and didn’t work for me. Emotions other than anger are tough to pull off apparently.) If the other Invincible Universe books are like this one I could definitely go for them. I'm looking forward to the next one.