Soon I Will Be Invincible

Soon I Will Be Invincible 

By Austin Grossman, with illustrations by Bryan Hitch (Michael Joseph/Penguin)
ISBN: 0-718-15291-8

WARNING! THIS IS A NOVEL. IT HAS VERY FEW PICTURES.

It seems that the signature genre of comics – the super-hero – has finally gained some literary legitimacy. If you ignore the pulp exploits of Doc Savage and the Shadow, the novelisations and prose experiments of the bigger comic publishers with their key brands and the success of such series as the ‘Wild Cards’, costumed do-gooders and crazed masterminds have finally broken into mainstream publishing with this novel.

Told from the alternating viewpoints of arch-nemesis Doctor Impossible and neophyte super-heroine Fatale, in our terms it’s a fairly standard battle of goodies and baddies in the ‘realistic’ vein best used by the likes of Alan Moore, Warren Ellis and Kurt Busiek (Astro City, not Marvels). As such it will be pretty familiar territory to comic fans, should they choose to read all that text – and a word to the wise for the paperback edition; Bryan Hitch’s illustrations are lovely, so why not intersperse them through the text as they did with George Lowther’s 1942 Superman novel, rather than shove them at the back of the book as if you’re ashamed of them? – but I wonder if it will advance the interests of the comic aficionados and publishers as much as a blockbuster movie or TV series.

Still any literary notice and approval would be nice and the book reads well enough. How many of you are going to wait for the comic adaptation though?

© Austin Grossman, 2007. All Rights Reserved.