Astro City was a huge influence on Soon I Will Be Invincible, and this single-issue story about a long-running rivalry between a hero and his nemesis, is a good example of why - it's the kind of hero/villain relationship I really enjoy, where long breadth of that conflict builds to create a sense of something human and deep, and well, novelistic out of pulpy action-driven characters characters. (frankly it's rather too reminiscent of some passages from my book, which makes me glad I didn't discover it until after I published - I would have felt like I was ripping it off) (the same is true of Venture Brothers, which I'm also a huge fan of)
Part of why I wanted to put superheroes into a novel, to explore the sense of depth of continuity unique to the Marvel and DC universes, which Astro City creates as well - the way layers and layers of crazy episodes and adventures build our sense of a characters like Superman and Batman. It's one of the things that make superheroes themselves a unique sub-genre.
Offhand I can't think of another set of characters with the same kind of multigenerational depth, unless it's in classical mythology - this is the kind of interesting stuff that Douglas Wolk talks about so well in Reading Comics.
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