Like his twin brother Lev Grossman (author of The Magicians), Austin Grossman is also a novelist. While Lev’s books have gotten a lot more press, I actually like Austin’s one book more than any of Lev’s books. Austin’s sole publication (he does have two forthcoming books) is the superhero adventure Soon I Will Be Invincible. The story is Watchmenesque in that it has a history of multiple superhero teams with handoffs between them and personal issues causing friction between members. And while it is nowhere near as good, it’s still a fun and interesting read. So, let’s check out the story.
The story bounces back and forth between two man characters: super-villain Dr. Impossible and rookie superhero Fatale. There’s a little icon at the beginning of each chapter which gives a quick indication about which character that chapter is dealing with. Dr. Impossible was a physics student who started investigating a mysterious zeta force. An accidents in the lab actually cause the create the worlds greatest superhero Corefire. Dr. Impossible ends up getting his own (limited) set of powers and sets out to do what all great super-villains want to do: take over the world.
Meanwhile, Corefire has disappeared. To compensate, the New Champions superhero team has added to new members. Lily, who’s from the future, fairly see-through and super-strong, and Fatale, a cyborg who had been working for the government in secret before moving to be a superhero. Fatale is excited and nervous about joining the team and worried about being expected to replace the greatest superhero ever. Her teammates include the leader Damsel (Wonder Woman analogue who’s the daughter of one of the original superheroes and a princess from another planet), Blackwulf (Batman analogue), Mister Mystic (Dr. Strange), Feral (Beast…kinda), Elphin (one of Titania’s fairies who was left behind) among others. Fatale is working with the new Champions to investigate Dr. Impossible who they believe orchestrated Corefire’s death, even though he was in prison at the time.
The book alternates between chapters with Dr. Impossible escaping prison and working his next plot to do what he does every times he’s free…try to take over the world and then having Fatale and the New Champions investigating Corefire’s disappearance and Dr. Impossible’s escape. Along the way, we find out the history of a lot of the characters, the history of the super hero teams and, eventually, the fate of Corefire. While a lot of what Grossman writes has been done before, he packages it together well and makes the characters interesting. There are some issues, such as Dr. Impossible trying to take over the world, simply because that’s what super-villains do (but he does have some nice asides on how difficult it is to actually take over the world and hold it).
Fatale is a great superhero character. And I don’t mean that she’s great at fighting crime and superhero stuff, but Grossman does a great job showing her doubts and fears along with her successes. She is the perfect conduit to see the internal dynamics that the team has. Grossman also does a good job with Dr. Impossible. He gets the reader inside the super-villain’s head and shows some of what made him turn to evil and let’s us see how he really sets up the complicated undertaking that is taking over the world. Overall the plot itself is decent, but the characterization more than makes up for that. It’s an interesting take on comic book superheroes and you can tell that Grossman really loves the superhero genre. Recommended.