Invincible Fight Girl will soon be making its highly anticipated debut with Adult Swim, and we got to talk with series creator Juston-Gordon Montgomery all about the new series ahead of its premiere. Invincible Fight Girl has been in production for quite a while, and was one of the animated series left in flux during all of the changes happening at Warner Bros. Discovery over the years. But thankfully, it’s gearing up to finally make its debut after all this time and soon fans will be treated to a new kind of action series mixing the fun of anime and wrestling together into a new experience.
As Invincible Fight Girl is finally going to make its premiere on Saturday, November 2nd at midnight with Adult Swim with its first two episodes (and then streaming with Max the next day), ComicBook got the chance to speak with series creator Juston-Gordon Montgomery about the new action series. Montgomery opened up about the anime influences that went into the new animated series, incorporating wrestling into the storytelling, that tease about its power system and more. Read on below for our full interview (which has been edited for clarity).
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NICK VALDEZ, COMICBOOK: I first remember [Invincible Fight Girl] being announced back in 2022, and it’s probably been in development long before that. So how do you feel seeing it that it’s going to finally premiere on Toonami, the big anime showcase block for Cartoon Network and Adult Swim?
JUSTON-GORDON MONTGOMERY: It’s surreal. It sort of surpassed my wildest hopes and expectations. I think when I started this project, it was just an opportunity to create maybe a different type of show that we had seen in the West, and do something that who knows how big of an impact it would it would have. It would be something different in the space. So the fact that it’s been sort of elevated to this level where it’s gonna be viewable by everyone and it’s gonna be on Toonami, this place where that personally kind of has a lot of meaning for me. It feels surreal. It’s not something that if you would ask me in 2022, I would have said it was in the cards for us, yeah.
Toonami feels perfect for it too because, as you just mentioned, it’s got kind of like an anime flow to it that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in an action cartoon over here in terms of inner monologues, a lot of dust thrown up everywhere, stuff like that. And so I wanted to know, what are some of your direct anime influences that went into how you’ve laid out this show, and its action, and its world?
MONTGOMERY: Dragon Ball Z is a place that I always start, because that’s kind of like the granddaddy, just for tone, for intensity. You may have noticed some of our sound effects are even kind of like…we’re dog whistling to people who know that a little bit to be like, “Hey, you hear that sort of flying sound?” But then as we sort of get into kind of the genetic makeup of the show, Naruto is a big, big place that I start personally. That being one of the first anime outside of Dragon Ball Z as a kid that I found, and just being sort of mystified by this blend of sort of goofiness and at the same time, like, really heavy adult themes.
You know, we’re deal dealing with this main character who has this insane, oppressive loneliness that he feels, and he’s ostracized from his community. And at the same time, has to constantly sort of do this, to your point of the inner monologue, he has to constantly self talk to get himself to this place that he can be like, “No, I am gonna be someone that people respect. I am gonna achieve this dream that seems improbable and impossible” and the world view, world building of that.
One Piece, same for that world building. Hunter x Hunter is a big one as well. That was more of a recent sort of discovery for me, like, in the past 4 years. And as someone who had watched a lot of anime and for some reason had missed that, and had even seen Yu Yu Hakusho, I don’t know how I missed it. I was just so blown away by the twists and turns and the ways that the show almost seemed to be speaking to people who viewed Shonen and being like, “I know what you think is gonna happen. I’m deliberately gonna subvert that.” Oh, you think we’re gonna follow these characters? Nope. We’re gonna cut away to this other side of the world. We’re gonna follow these guys.
And you’re gonna be like, “Who the hell are these people? Why am I following them?” And then you’ll be like, “Ah, shit. This is really compelling. Okay.” What’s gonna happen, you know? So that was big. Just as a way of even rethinking what it meant to make a show and what it meant to create the focus of a show, world building, and the intricate-ness and all of that stuff. Then finally, I would say Hajime no Ippo was a massive one. As someone who loves boxing myself, I did boxing for a lot of years.
The show is beautiful in its ability to, whether you are familiar with boxing or not, convey to you the stakes and the why everything is meaningful, and the struggle, and the grind of it all. Again, whether or not you have a background to understand boxing or not. And so just that storytelling ability was huge in us looking at that and being like, well, we’re doing something like wrestling where, obviously, we want people who have a background and understand it to be able to appreciate it, but we sort of assume that a lot of our audience might not. So we want to convey to them why things are meaningful, why wrestling is awesome, but why moment to moment certain things they should feel a certain way about.
That’s interesting too because, wrestling is also a very much a storytelling focused art. And so, what era in particular of wrestling were you drawn to the most? Are you keeping up with anything right now by chance?
Not as much now. For me, my kind of formative era was Attitude Era. I’m a nineties kid. So, it was interesting too because that, to my perception, was when wrestling really kind of occupied a lot of the public spotlight. You know, even people who weren’t into it. It was kind of inescapable. It was sort of a perfect time for me as a kid to find it. There was something about the pageantry and the heights to which they would push the storytelling. The characters, the personas, and mistakes that felt, to your point, like a type of storytelling that was rivaling and surpassing anything that we could see that was written in terms of TV shows, sitcoms, movies or anything like that.
It’s cool seeing Andy too because Andy is such a character that combines all of that. She’s got the underdog wrestling story as well as that Shonen hero vibe of wanting her to overcome and eventually achieve her dreams. So what went into developing Andy as your main character for this series?
Andy, I like to sort of think of her as this stand in for the spirit of youth. So in this sort of grand metaphor that is the show where we’re talking about people following their dreams and following their passions, I think that there’s a sort of universal truth in anything that you pursue. There’s you kind of coming into this space that you’re unaware of, and then there’s the space itself, the institution that has these pre-established hierarchies. It has these dynamics. It has these big top dominant players already. Everything is sort of already sorted out.
Then here’s you who’s coming into the space as a young person who has to sort of fight for your spot. And a lot of that, I think, has to do with this sort of audaciousness. The audacity of youth and the hunger of youth. The ability to, while you have reverence for what came before, also kind of be ignorant of it and be like as a boxer, “Yeah, one day, I am gonna be as good as or better than Mayweather.” I think once you’ve lived a little bit, those sorts of claims seem kind of crazy.
But for young people who are looking to sort of establish themselves and make their mark, that is their lifeblood. That’s what fuels them. And so to me, that is Andy. Andy is that sort of young, audacious hunger that has this reverence for this world that exists already, is fascinated by it, is in love with it, and at the same time, is like “I’m gonna come in and find my way to be out on top of it.” There’s a combination of lots of different complex things that have to go into someone to be able to say that and stick to that. They experience a lot of different obstacles and adversity, still push through and decide, “Yes, this dream is something that’s possible for me.”
Speaking of dreams Quesa Poblana — great name, by the way — she’s got an aura. Speaking to how we talked Dragon Ball Z and One Piece earlier, she has a literal aura that has the kind of Dragon Ball Z visual and sound. Then it’s got a little bit of the One Piece Haki with just basically knocking everybody else out. So as a tease for the future, is this something that Andy can potentially do? Is it just specific to Poblana? Is this something that if Andy’s able to train, she can unlock?
Flat out, I would say yes. I think, for audiences who catch it, we are teasing a power system that exists in this world. Quesa Poblana is not the only one who can do it. She’s just the only one that we’ve seen do it. Andy will eventually get there, but there’s a bit of a secret to it beyond just developing your strength to a certain level. Quesa Poblana is kind of like a great window in our world, into what some of the higher level matches and higher level battles will be. So she exists both as a character and as a window into what the ceiling of this world looks like. How much room there is between that and where Andy, and some of the people she’s fighting, are currently.