Soon I Will Be Invincible - Style and Themes - Genre

Genre

Soon I Will Be Invincible takes characters, settings, and storylines generally associated with the comic book format and re-casts them using the novel's prose format. This use of superhero fiction in an alternate format was compared to other similar, successful attempts, like Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films, Brad Bird's The Incredibles, and the TV serial No Heroics. Several reviewers contrasted the novel's elements of realism with Alan Moore's Watchmen and Rick Veitch's Bratpack which portrayed a darker side of more realistic superheroes. Novels cited as being similar included Donald Barthelme's Snow White, Robert Coover's Stepmother, and the works of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem. The novel format allowed for more character development, which Grossman took advantage of by portraying them as "real, human characters, with all of the foibles that come with the territory" in what one reviewer called a "hybridization of character and genre". Grossman described it as "a book about real people who happen to be superheros or supervillains" and that if it were a comic, it would be "page after page of thought balloons". Compared to comic stories, the reviewer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote "The common denominator for most superhero comic books is that they don't make fun of themselves - the believability of their stories is never called into question. They take the heroes seriously. Not so in literature. When a novel appears with comic books as its focus, its author will undoubtedly believe that his or her theme is far more important - far more serious - than the comic books that inspired them. ... tries to do it all, combining humor and comic-book adventure with a literary sense of character. ...The result is a postmodern, inventive, comic-book plot with literary aspirations, and its only problem is that it isn't entirely successful as either humor or as straight adventure."