Superheroes know that with great power comes great responsibility. But for Mark Grayson in Invincible Season 2, those lessons come at a great cost — and every minute it unfolds is riveting.

Now on Prime Video, Invincible Season 2 is back for a second run of episodes, clearing a high bar of quality to maintain its position as one of the best animated television shows airing now (albeit with anemic competition). While fans are frustrated by its staggered output and long development cycles — a fact Invincible is very aware of, with an outrageous semi-meta gag that grazes the fourth wall in the seventh episode — no one can, nor should, rush art, especially when it’s this sublime.

April 2022 was a bad time to be in the animation business for HBO Max. The streamer’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, had been quietly purging its cartoon catalog and canceling many of its animated titles for weeks, and the team at independent animation studio Green Street Pictures, which had essentially formed to make the HBO Max original Scavengers Reign, was freaking out.

“We’d been hearing all these rumblings about Warner Discovery, and we had been getting texts from agents who were in the know about ‘Oh, they’re just going to scrap. Max is going to go away. All the originals are going to go away. Everything’s getting canceled,’” Sean Buckelew, the co-founder of Green Street Pictures and co-executive producer and writer on Scavengers Reign, tells Inverse. “It was a very tumultuous time.”

When it debuted on Max in late 2023, it was met with universal acclaim, with critics calling it “​​lush, magnificent, hypnotic… and truly otherworldly.” However, its unlikely success doesn’t hold a candle to its even more unlikely beginnings. That story reveals how a scrappy, independent team managed to make one of the best sci-fi shows of 2023, and it all starts back in 2016…