"Soon I Will Be Invincible" by Austin Grossman

http://tinyurl.com/5qm8tt

The thing with authors, they can get really damn good before their first published novel.  In retrospect, I feel bad for waiting the months I did for Austin Grossman’s debut novel, “Soon I Will Be Invincible” to come on paperback.  It is the first novel in a while (and I read a lot of novel), that I read through as frivolously as I did with this one.

A few years ago I actually had a girl in my bedroom.  There were 20 seconds spent between the time she entered my room and the time she, on her exit, called my a bloody nerd.  I really like superheroes, and I really like books, and I really like having 30+ posters and 200+ holes in my drywall - a portion of my posters are used to cover up the holes from other posters.  Naturally, my friend at the bookstore (Black Bond Books) recommended this to me.  Naturally, I bought it.

It took me 2.5 chapters to notice the two different icons rotating through alternating chapters.  The ray gun denotes a point-of-view from the hilariously-stereotypical villain, Dr. Impossible; wherein, the eyeball denotes the cyborg-heroine Fatale. It is a really well done use of two different point-of-views, their connection is not mysterious at all, a la Lost, but are very nicely placed.

Soon I Will Be Invincible doesn’t so much play with the clichés of superhero comics as bathe in their pulpy froth.
— Austin American-Statesman

I have tried my own, but this quote really does describe this novel to a tee.  I described this book to a friend as a well written B-movie in superhero form.  They aren’t pulling any a Deadpool here and talking to the reader, but the characters acknowledge and sometimes argue about their character cliches, even while being interrupted mid-evil-scheme monologue.  It is almost Heroes-esque, in the sense that we see more of these lives and the group dynamics than we would in a regular comic.

Take an example from CoreFire, the main super-hero in the book is an all-American, straight A student who got his power saving his writer girlfriend.  His myriad of powers are listed in Wikipedia by a link to Superman’s powers; invulnerable, superstrong, superfast, he can fly and he possesses Heat- and X-Ray vision.  Wherein Mr. Mystic, the resident magician, also found his powers on a trip to Tibet, a la Dr. Strange.   By far, Doctor Impossible was my favorite character in the story, as it just brought a hilarious side to supervillainy.

The novel is a homage to comic books, featuring a mad genius supervillain, Doctor Impossible, who suffers from “Malign Hypercognition Disorder” (”evil genius” syndrome).
— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Grossman

But it was during a discussion with a friend regarding the odds of Peter Petrelli regaining his body, I think I got the idea down.  Stories are nothing to do with the beginning or the end.  In the case of Peter, the idea is not just that he gets out, it is how. In the case of The (New) Champions, it was not a story of a bunch of archetypal meta-humans and superpowers, it was the personality behind them.  As is the case with this genre in general, a good comic is not about the power in itself, but the power is used to add a more grandiose quality to the telling.

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