The Super Review
A WRITER'S HERO
Soon I Will Be Invincible
by Austin Grossman
Of all the superhero novels out there, Austin Grossman’s “Soon I Will Be Invincible” is perhaps the most well-known and well-received. It is arguably the preeminent superhuman fiction story.
Grossman is actually better known as a game designer, but he comes from a family full of writers: his father was a poet, his mother an author and professor, and his brother is an author and editor for Time. So you’d expect him to know what he was doing, right?
And indeed he does - if anything, he was too aware.
SIWBI reads like a list of comic book allusions, designed more to conjure up connotations of the graphic art than to work as a novel in its own right. Readers new to the genre will struggle to see the relevance of many of the sub-plots and asides, or possibly the plot as a whole.
I’ll try to break it down for you: Fatale, a female cyborg joins the Champions after the death of the greatest superhero, Corefire. Instead of considering a new threat, or doing any investigative work whatsoever, the Champions decide Dr. Impossible is responsible despite the fact he was in prison at the time. Dr. Impossible then escapes, causing an international manhunt during which the Champions go to a number of places the supervillain isn’t, using as much deductive reasoning as your average Joe looking for car keys.
'If I were a supervillain where would I be?'
Here come the spoilers: after a bunch of unrelated reveals, we discover that Corefire isn’t dead, Dr. Impossible gets beaten up for no apparent reason by a character whose true identity was a mystery we weren’t even aware of, and the Champions act smug about winning. Nobody mentions the goose chase they went on to find Corefire’s killer, or the fact they’d all been defeated and imprisoned at the time Dr. Impossible was finally taken down.
For Dr. Impossible’s part, he dithers here and there thinking about how smart he is and his tortured genius childhood. His plan is to use ridiculous McGuffins to change the orbit of the moon and force the world to surrender to him, which he acknowledges won’t work. So he goes and retrieves a doohickey that makes him nigh invulnerable, except for the fact that it’s broken.
If that all sounds a little senseless to you, it’s because it is.
It’s possible I missed something that will become apparent on rereading and everything will come together, but I doubt it. It’s just a whole lot of not much happening for a whole lot of new things to end it. It wasn’t so much a plot twist in the final chapters as a total plot overhaul.
In truth, the book is everything literature critics hate about comic books. All the tropes and cliches that prevent the graphic novel from being taken seriously are here in abundance. Time travel, people ‘returning from the grave’, inexplicable magic and completely unrealistic science, all thrown together in a plot which isn’t entirely cohesive.
Large sections of the story add nothing to the overall narrative and, as will be pointed out in most every review worth its salt, the voices are largely indistinguishable. The plot revolves around a team of superheroes who jump to the wrong conclusion, with no attempt to look at other possibilities, go off on a jolly goose chase and get themselves captured while someone else saves the day.
On the other side, the villain does a similar amount of running around and thinking about his childhood for no obvious reason, before his plans come to naught. Again. Yet, somehow he still believes himself to be a genius.
For an extra dose of senselessness, Grossman throws in a pointless love triangle that evaporates almost as suddenly as it was introduced, and a remarkably undeveloped sub-plot that attempts and fails to act as motivation for the redundant protagonist.
According to wikipedia (see the depth of my research?), Grossman cites Frank Miller and Alan Moore as influences, and yet completely disregards anything he might have learned from their comics. There’s no interesting subversion of the superhero, no political undertone, no dark gritty realism.
The whole crux of the story is a false alarm!
I suppose it’s possible that Grossman was attempting to show superheros as everyday people - not mythic overlords, nor depressed alcoholics, but whiney irresponsible men and women who make mistakes and have arguments over little things.
Admittedly, it’s far from “Watchmen”, but it’s an attempt. And it has its fans.
SIWBI was the first original-character fiction to come to my attention, and among the first I read. So it’s fitting that it becomes the benchmark to which all others are held. And don’t get me wrong; as many flaws as there are, it’s still a fairly enjoyable read and a worthy introduction. More importantly, it’s a great example of what not to do.
So lets take a closer look, shall we?
Chapter 2 - Welcome to the Team
Chapter 3 -