One of the things I alway wondered as a teenager was why there weren't more superhero books in the science fiction/fantasy section of the bookstore; the licensed properties section was dominated mainly by Star Trek novels and role-playing game based-novels; if you wanted to read a Batman story or a X-Men story, you had to head for the comic book rack. During this time, you had the short-story-based anthology series
Wild Cards, and a few years later another collection of shorts called Superheroes.
Managing to publish a superhero book today isn't easy. Publishers would rather be pushing out books about alien civilizations or elves, but it's probably gotten a bit easier with the release of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
and the success of supers at the movies lately, as well as Marvel and DC putting out novels about their most mainstream heroes.
In Soon I Will Be Invincible, the story takes the point of view of two different characters: the evil genius Doctor Impossible, and the newest member of a super team called the Champions, a female cyborg named Fatale. The whole book has a feel of being ripped from the pages of a 1940s era comic book, where villains and heroes are fairly simply defined; villains try to take over the world, heroes try and stop them. Part of the challenge of this book is creating the myriad of characters needed to populate a superhero universe, and creating the history behind them.
I don't recall if the book's author, Austin Grossman was a DC reader or a Marvel reader, but it's obvious that he enjoys reading comics, as there are plenty of homages to those familiar archetypes; Blackwolf is more or less Batman, Mister Mystic bears similarities to Doctor Strange or Doctor Fate, and there are names of superteams that ring all too familiar.
In the end I think the book tries to be too many things; it wants to encapsulate a whole superhero universe, and has to tell the origin stories of this cast of characters, and it is much too short to do it all within 280 pages. My disappointment with the book is not the writing; the prose itself is very readable, it's the lack of innovation and content involved in the book, in a storyline which feels much too predictable.
3.5/5
Video of Austin Grossman Talking at Google:
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