Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible

I totally ignored this book when it came out last year, because "that novel about superheroes" did not sound all that appealing. If I want to read about superheroes, I have comics! This is not my attempt to police boundaries--I really like being able to see action and costume design and so on, instead of getting brief descriptions.

Grossman's book is extremely light. It's an easy and pleasurable read, especially for someone like me, who's comfortable with all the superhero tropes and can accurately predict the major plot twists. The dual first-person narratives are attempts to play through some comic book ideas in a new setting. Comics readers are used to the gritty narrative box, but we really don't spend a lot of time in characters' heads. Much more of our comprehension of characterization comes through the body language of the figures. The book makes us ask what it would really be like to be a super-villain or a new team member.

The most enjoyable section involves two perspectives on a fight between the Champions, earth's prime protectors, and Doctor Impossible, a recently escaped evil genius. First we hear about the fight from Impossible's pov. He has respect for the heroes' abilities and fears the encounter. From his perspective, he escapes by the skin of his teeth. When we get the heroic recap of the fight, it's a different picture. Dr. Impossible appears to have easily beaten back the entire team. This example teaches us that Dr. Impossible's high standards and low self-esteem fuel his villainy, which the Champions reinforce by viewing him through a narrow lens. This is not the most insightful observation about the mechanics of hero-villain interaction, but it is a solid foundation that could be built upon. I imagine that similar ideas could be presented by "showing" them in a comic, but it certainly seems like much more of an uphill battle, narratively.

Unfortunately many of the plot points peter out, and throughout the book there is a decided lack of gripping subtext. As many writers on comics have pointed out, superheros supply subtext that is as obvious* as it is durable. Everyone knows Superman is a godly figure, and it will always be fascinating to think about religion through him (even in Superman Returns, which at least stressed that increasing technological sophistication need not produce secularization).

Grossman seems aware of the dangers of stating the open subtext, so his big rhetorical flourishes, buried in his characters' minds, involve resilience towards taking over the world, rather than resilience in general. I'm sympathetic to this decision, but it renders the novel all-surface.

* there's got to be a good term for the kind of subtext that we're completely aware of, that requires no digging, but at the same time couldn't exactly be called text either. I'm going to use "open subtext" for now, kind of a play on "open secret".