Invincible Season 4 Will Feature its Own Red Hulk, Who’s Also a Dinosaur

In issue #80 of the Invincible comic series, Mark Grayson and Samantha “Eve” Wilkins, better known as the heroes Invincible and Atom Eve, have a difficult conversation about their living arrangements interrupted by an emergency call. “There’s a big red guy—tearing the whole city apart,” Eve tells Mark. “Big red guy?” Mark responds while pulling on his mask, “I can’t narrow that down to less than four people.” Neither can most comic book fans, as cape and cowl are filled with scarlet superpeople, ranging from Red Hulk to Devil Dinosaur to Red Bee.

Anyone who watches the trailer for season four of the Prime Video series Invincible can narrow the list down to one. In between bits of dialogue about Mark’s unresolved trauma and shots of a fresh wave of Viltrumite invaders (including Lee Pace’s Grand Regent Thragg!), we see the big red guy who’s going to make trouble for Invincible, the delightfully named Dinosaurus. A Hulk pastiche (with a little bit of the Lizard and Devil Dinosaur thrown in), Dinosaurus is an example of what Invincible does best, riffing on comic book concepts and taking them in directions that Marvel and DC cannot.

Dinosaurus Is Against Us

When Dinosaurus first appeared in 2009’s Invincible #68, he plays like just another one-off riff on an established hero, in part because writer Robert Kirkman and artist Ryan Ottley focus more on Mark’s wavering moral compass than it does the new threat. The story takes place in the aftermath of the Viltrumite war, with Mark trying to assuage his guilt by helping to a repair a destroyed city. His do-gooding gets interrupted when Dinosuarus arrives, not only preventing Mark from rebuilding but also lecturing him about the evils of humanity in the process.

After trading a few punches, Dinosaurus changes forms, revealing himself to be a chilled-out guy called David Anders. Anders begs Mark for help, explaining that he has no control over Dinosaurus and that Dinosaurus will not stop until he’s destroyed humanity. So Mark does the only reasonable thing when given the one way to stop a all-powerful monster. He wraps his hands around David’s neck, and…

Well, given the Invincible show’s tendency to hew closely to the comics, we won’t get into the details here. But suffice to say, Mark knows he needs to take extreme action against such an imposing threat, which sets it apart from Dinosaurus’s Marvel forerunner.

Marvel’s Monster Problem

The Hulk has always been a problem for the Marvel Universe, especially as the world gets smaller. In his initial appearances by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, the Hulk is a Jekyll and Hyde analogue modeled on Frankenstein’s Monster. When the sun goes down, Banner turns into the Hulk, who creates some sort of trouble. The creative decision to tie Banner’s transformations to his anger certainly complicated things further, but Marvel found ways of keeping the audience’s sympathies with the Hulk. Most of the time, he just wants to be left alone, but he keeps getting hassled by the Captain Ahab-like Thunderbolt Ross or encounters some type of commie saboteur or supervillain, which makes his freak-outs justified.

But every once in a while, Marvel has to deal with the fact that the Hulk is a big, rampaging, and uncontrollable monster. The most famous example is the Planet Hulk and World War Hulk storylines designed by writer Greg Pak, in which the Illuminati—Marvel’s secret group of geniuses and power player such as Reed Richards and Tony Stark—send Banner off-planet, where he becomes a heroic gladiator. Pak played into the tragedy of it all and made Hulk’s vengeful return to Earth feel exhilarating and just, but it only worked at the expense of making Richards, Stark, Professor X, and other Illuminati members seem villainous—something common in those days of Civil War and Deadly Genesis, but not sustainable long-term.

The excellent Immortal Hulk series by Al Ewing and the great current Incredible Hulk run by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Nic Klein return Hulk to his monster roots, making him less of a superhero who pals around with Captain America and Spider-Man and more of a Godzilla-like beast who battles other creatures when not leveling cities.

Great as these are, the solutions are short-lived. Eventually, Marvel’s going to want Green Genes back with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and his cousin She-Hulk (the usual stand in when Bruce is indisposed) won’t cut it. Which means that they can never let the Hulk be a pure monster, nor can they kill Bruce or the Hulk for good. He’s the monster they’re stuck with.

Sincerity and Suffering

When Mark puts his hands around the neck of David Anders, we readers believe that he won’t remove them until that man is dead. And while we may be sad for Mark for having made such as choice, we won’t blame him for it either.

Which is exactly what we love about Invincible. To be certain, Kirkman, Ottley, and original penciler Cory Walker acknowledge the weird and sometimes terrifying parts about superheroes. The entire concept of Omni-Man and the machinations of the Global Defense Agency underscore the scary side of Superman and SHIELD, while oddballs such as Dupli-Kate and Allen the Alien remind us that superheroes are unabashedly silly.

But while satires such as The Boys and The Tick have covered that ground with tongue in cheek, Invincible remains fully sincere in its love of heroes in a way that only Kurt Busiek’s majestic Astro City has matched. It loves the superheroes it deconstructs and reimagines, even while putting them through the wringer.

The coming of Dinosaurus means that the animated Invincible gets another goofy take on an established character. But it also gives the show to take that character to its most logical extreme, testing Mark Grayson’s moral code in the process—which is exactly what makes Invincible one of a kind.

Invincible season 4 premieres March 18, 2026 on Prime Video.