As an incredibly violent space drama, the Invincible series introduced a number of deadly alien races throughout the course of its story. While the Viltrumites are arguably the strongest and fastest of those races, one alien species proved that it takes more than strength and speed to conquer the galaxy.
The Sequids may actually be the comic’s deadliest threat, and with their introduction in the Amazon series it can be safely assumed that they will return in the second season of the show, where they are sure to show why they are considered to be so dangerous.
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At first the creatures seem unassuming, apparently amounting to little more than a futile parasite against Invincible on his first voyage to Mars. Invincible accompanied a team of astronauts on their mission and found the Sequids to be a nuisance, with the octopus creatures latching onto him but unable to cause him much damage. But once Invincible came in contact with the local Martians, he learned that there was much more to the creatures than initially met the eye.
The Martians warned Invincible about how deadly the Sequids could be. The parasitic slugs latched onto a host mind and seized control of their body before activating a hive mind with every other sequid in their vicinity. Though Invincible and the Martians had unique bodies that could resist the creatures, once they coalesced into a hivemind their remarkable strength combined with their unimaginable numbers to create a monstrously powerful force. As the astronauts packed up to head back to Earth, they unwittingly left behind one of their number, Rus Livingston, and thus initiated the threat of the Sequids.
The creatures soon proved to be a formidable force and became one of the most terrifying recurring villains in the series. The threat of the Sequids made it necessary for all of the heroes of Earth to work together in an effort to stop them in 2006’s Invincible #38, by Robert Kirman and Ryan Ottley. Although the heroes took careful precautions to avoid the seizure of their minds, none of them were strong enough to resist the sheer strength of their numbers. Like a virus, the parasitic aliens continued to spread, eventually making their way to Earth.
The Global Defense Agency were forced to quarantine an entire city just to contain the Sequid threat, and within the energy bubble used for the quarantine the heroes had to be remarkably thorough in detaching the aliens from their hosts. Their real danger came in the fact that even a single active host propagated their threat, and what made it all the worse was that the hosts were innocent people who the heroes did not want to hurt. In the end it took a cold-hearted decision to murder the last living host and eliminate the Sequids as a population, and the moral cost proved to be a dark moment in the series.
Whereas the Viltrumites proved to be a direct physical threat the heroes could contend with, the Sequids proved beyond a doubt that straightforward strength is not always the most accurate gauge of power.
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