"He kept using the word literature, I can't stop using the word hilarious..."

I don't know any other way of putting this but having the opportunity
to meet and see the author - put his work in a completely different
context for me. I started this book thinking it was going to be a
story of some naive kid as he matured through life and watched his
goal of becoming "invincible" transcend the boundary between what he
thought he could expect out of life and what he actually got. Yeah,
that was what I thought this book was going to be about...To a point,
that "kid" ends up being Dr. Impossible, but the hoops Grossman puts
him through were, for lack of a better word, hilarious.

Seeing Grossman in person you can definitely see why this book is as
funny as it is. It's sort of akin to hearing the funniest joke in the
world and waiting for the punchline, but the telling of "it" is so
funny that the whole process makes the punchline irrelevant. It's
almost impossible to put it in terms of a compliment even though
that's what I'm trying to do because I can't even come close to
defining it. Some people are just f'ing hilarious standing around,
and they get even funnier if their sense of humor matches up with
yours, or vice versa. Mr. Grossman is a perfect example of that case.

He's a diabolical genius. He is a genius, and probably left to his
own devices (like any of us), very diabolical. I can't imagine anyone
having a hard time thinking that if he decided to take over the world
that it would be a bad idea. At the very least it would be a funnier
place to live. Sure, he'd ask for ransom money but we wouldn't pay
him because we'd all be waiting to see what would happen next...

But back to the academic critique...I think we can only hope that his
"personality" doesn't get lost between the book and the movie. I
watched Blade Runner and Minority Report, again, after reading Sheep
and Philip K. Dick's short about Building a Universe, and both films
take on a whole new meaning once you realize how many oars short of a
crew Dick really is. I think they all jumped ship and went over to
the S.S. Grossman, but that's a personal opinion.

Anyway, thank you Mr. Grossman! The content of what we were talking
about was interesting and I especially appreciated the reference to
Scott McCloud because that's all I could think about while reading
through Invincible. But the awkward pauses, the ticks, pretty much
everything, brought the book to life, the situations into focus, and
my appreciation for authors that can fill a "gutter" to a whole new
level.

PS - use the 10% to add in a politically correct metahuman named
Ambiguous. Non gender specified, non affiliated, and to a point,
completely ineffectual but always involved somehow. That way readers
can imprint/project whatever they want that character to be without it
being defined for them, and yes, I understand that not having things
spelled out was part of the problem but it's funny how seriously a
play on the genre is being critiqued which makes the process itself an
exercise in transcending/blurring the line between what defines
literature. Besides, my impression of who these characters were is
going to be different from someone else's impression of who these
characters were. For instance, aside from reading the general
descriptions of the characters I saw Dr. Impossible as a cross between
mini me and magneto, fatale was janine garofalo as the terminator,
blackwolf was a modern day beowulf, and Feral being gay, well, tigers
are dramatic but wolves are scary. Installment two can introduce a
Dog/Human that ends up being a total mysoginistic and chauvanist
dinosaur. Then installment three can include a meeting of the two
where allegiances to one or the other spell out the metaphor that
everyone seems to need to have stamped into the pages.

-- jason