but the big grand reason is "comics are a never ending story so we can not kill off established villains"
That's the problem. They try to make edgelord comic stories with bad guys who aren't afraid to kill, yet they still want to pad things out and make it so that the hero cannot kill them because it would kill interest in the franchise if they run out of bad guys.
Why not just have the heroes fail to kill the bad guys? Have it so that when defeated, a bad guy who is too evil to be locked in a prison would know when to fold and leave before the heroes capture him? Here's an idea for a serious villain: have this powerful bad guy whom the heroes cannot defeat at first. Then have the heroes overcome him. But instead of him being locked up in prison, he escapes. Or he uses his influence in society and his contacts within the political authorities to force the heroes to leave him alone. Or at most, the heroes get him to a draw, and he leaves before the fight becomes a protracted battle. There's many ways to have a serious villain appear again and again by having him or her be able to escape the heroes' grasp instead of repeatedly escaping a revolving-door prison that no one in their right mind would trust after the bad guys break out of it for the umpteenth time.
That, and if they want to have villains that go through revolving-door prisons, have some comic relief villains who do minor crimes on the side. That way, it makes sense for the heroes to repeatedly just capture them and send them to jail instead of attempting to kill them because their crimes are minor.
that's just the nature of the business. even if everyone got what they wanted and Batman straight up killed Joker, do you think Joker is really going to stay dead? So why ruin Batman's character for it?
Batman's character is already ruined. He makes no sense whatsoever. The old Batman still had PTSD from his parents' death, but even the one from the Michael Keaton Batman films has no problems killing bad guys like the Joker. The new Batman just seems too arbitrary. He's the kind of nutball who will continuously save someone who will kill thousands, perhaps even millions, in the future, just to satisfy some moral code that makes him sleep better at night. It would just be better if the Joker manages to get away when his plans go awry, since that would show him as an elusive mofo and a skilled strategist who knows when to leave once he's lost the game.
Both the animated series and comics are pretty good. In fact, I'd argue the former is just straight up better than the comics. Say what you will about Kirkman's weaknesses and barely disguised fetishes, but even he knows his pacing could have been much better and how much more interesting pre-insect "fan" Omni-Man is if he actually showed conflict and humanity even as he's busy empire-building.
He's obviously gotten better with time, and he's trying to edge out the flaws in his previous work with the animated series. If I were to put a word to describe it, the comic series is a sort of outline, or prototype, and the animated series will be the final, more refined version, made after the author has seen what works and what doesn't work.
The woke shit and teenage romance stuff? Still the least interesting parts. Look, I'm here for the character analysis and big ideas, not for an insipid love triangle. Thank god the stuff that happens later on is more galactic in scale.
Yeah, the teenage and woke stuff was the weakest part of the show. Hopefully they focus more on the upcoming Viltrumite War and the larger-scale events with the story.
Still, I'll take it over the Boys (either version, although I do think the graphic novel is enjoyable to read in the same way a train crashing into a schoolbus of autistic kids is), Irredeemable, or Watchmen any day.
It depends. I don't think it outranks Watchmen, since that book actually has a lesson to teach about the dangers of superheroes' effects on society at large. Invincible, for all its good parts, just seems like your run-of-the-mill superhero show with some twists and turns thrown in for good measure.