Impossible Mission
A book review!
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
This is a book I judged by its cover, and bought it on those merits - full of brightly coloured superheroes, you'd think this could conceivable work as a graphic novel, and I think that's part of the novel's intention. I'd seen it in the store several times and thought it could be OK, so grabbed it with a discount voucher. The checkout guy said "Hey, this one's pretty good!" I told him I knew nothing about it, and had picked it up purely based on the cover. He said he'd done the same, but had enjoyed it a lot.
So... down to the nitty gritty. "Soon..." is set in a superhero comic-book world - there's a huge number of powered humans, aliens, time-travel, magic, ancient artifacts, giant robots and so on. Basically every single comic book superhero cliche rolled into one. The novel is told in first person from the perspective of two characters - the smartest man in the world, supervillain Doctor Impossible, and a rookie superhero cyborg Fatale, who's been lucky enough to be drafted into the re-formed superteam The Champions.
A lot of the heroes have close parallels with those in the DC and Marvel universes (Blackwolf == Batman, CoreFire == Superman, for example) which you think would make it ripe for Grossman to turn the cliches on their heads, and take the parody angle, or do the exact opposite, and make the characters flawed and believable human. However, this doesn't seem to be his agenda - and the story just lives by all standard comic book universe rules - and nothing stands out as particularly original. Despite one of the protagonists being a supervillain, his narration/internal monologue didn't contain enough to convince me of his motivation - the reasons Doctor Impossible gives/explains for his constant desire to take over the world don't seem to cut the mustard - and it's not like he's an insane villain (which I could understand), nor are the reasons that petty... they just seem.... rather weak for someone who's supposed to be an intellectual genius. If you're going to take over the world and not be insane, then you've got to think of the practicalities of it - ruling the world is a bloody tough job. Fatale's inner monologue isn't much better. She's unsure of herself as a newcomer to a well-established team, and she has a past (pre-accident and cyborgisation) that she doesn't know about, but the emotional involvement just doesn't come through in the writing.
There's only really two big mysteries in the story, and the big revelation points are interesting, but not all that shocking, and the explanation that comes afterwards doesn't really make the mild suspense all that worthwhile.
For what had the potential to be either a great parody or a serious, realistic take on the superhero genre in novel form, this has ended up just a rather average retread through standard genre cliches, without taking them to either extreme. This story could probably have been a much better exploration if it were done as a limited run comic book series (where you expect all the cliches to exist) rather than a novel. Even then, it wouldn't have been quite as interesting as the examination of a superhero-universe as say, "Watchmen" is.
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
This is a book I judged by its cover, and bought it on those merits - full of brightly coloured superheroes, you'd think this could conceivable work as a graphic novel, and I think that's part of the novel's intention. I'd seen it in the store several times and thought it could be OK, so grabbed it with a discount voucher. The checkout guy said "Hey, this one's pretty good!" I told him I knew nothing about it, and had picked it up purely based on the cover. He said he'd done the same, but had enjoyed it a lot.
So... down to the nitty gritty. "Soon..." is set in a superhero comic-book world - there's a huge number of powered humans, aliens, time-travel, magic, ancient artifacts, giant robots and so on. Basically every single comic book superhero cliche rolled into one. The novel is told in first person from the perspective of two characters - the smartest man in the world, supervillain Doctor Impossible, and a rookie superhero cyborg Fatale, who's been lucky enough to be drafted into the re-formed superteam The Champions.
A lot of the heroes have close parallels with those in the DC and Marvel universes (Blackwolf == Batman, CoreFire == Superman, for example) which you think would make it ripe for Grossman to turn the cliches on their heads, and take the parody angle, or do the exact opposite, and make the characters flawed and believable human. However, this doesn't seem to be his agenda - and the story just lives by all standard comic book universe rules - and nothing stands out as particularly original. Despite one of the protagonists being a supervillain, his narration/internal monologue didn't contain enough to convince me of his motivation - the reasons Doctor Impossible gives/explains for his constant desire to take over the world don't seem to cut the mustard - and it's not like he's an insane villain (which I could understand), nor are the reasons that petty... they just seem.... rather weak for someone who's supposed to be an intellectual genius. If you're going to take over the world and not be insane, then you've got to think of the practicalities of it - ruling the world is a bloody tough job. Fatale's inner monologue isn't much better. She's unsure of herself as a newcomer to a well-established team, and she has a past (pre-accident and cyborgisation) that she doesn't know about, but the emotional involvement just doesn't come through in the writing.
There's only really two big mysteries in the story, and the big revelation points are interesting, but not all that shocking, and the explanation that comes afterwards doesn't really make the mild suspense all that worthwhile.
For what had the potential to be either a great parody or a serious, realistic take on the superhero genre in novel form, this has ended up just a rather average retread through standard genre cliches, without taking them to either extreme. This story could probably have been a much better exploration if it were done as a limited run comic book series (where you expect all the cliches to exist) rather than a novel. Even then, it wouldn't have been quite as interesting as the examination of a superhero-universe as say, "Watchmen" is.