Among its many virtues, both the Image comic book Invincible and the Prime Video animated series are celebrations of superhero tropes and history. Mark Grayson, a.k.a. Invincible, is an amalgam of Superman and Spider-Man, and the series goes on to include riffs on the Justice League and the Avengers, the Hulk, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and more. Case in point: Tech Jacket, a teen hero who borrows elements from Iron Man, Green Lantern, and Firestorm.
Yet, when Tech Jacket finally 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 very similar to Mark,” says Kirkman.
First introduced in his self-titled comic from 2001, written by Kirkman and penciled by E. J. Su, Tech Jacket helped expand the Invincible universe by showing the war between the Gelderians, wise but physically weak aliens who invented the vest, and their arch-enemies, the war-like Kresh. After the end of his first series, Tech Jacket became a regular in the mainline Invincible comics, helping Invincible and the Coalition in the Viltrumite War, which is how Zack, now Zoe, comes into the animated series.
Rather than simply give Zoe in the cartoon the same attributes as Zack in the comics, Kirkman and Racioppa took the opportunity to reimagine Tech Jacket. “We decided early on that it would be interesting to gender swap this character,” reveals Kirkman. “We started thinking about who Zoe would be instead of Zach. There are some exciting things that come up when you change that character.
