Soon I Will Be Invincible is a realistic novel that takes superheroes and super villains as its subject. Chapters alternate between first person points of view: first Doctor Impossible, the super villian, then Fatale, a cyborg super heroine. Doctor Impossible has been around the block a few times, and when the book opens he is in prison: "I've commanded robot armies, insect armies, and dinosaur armies. Fungus army. Army of fish. Of rodents. Alien invasion. Interdimensional alien invasion. Alien god invasion. Even a corporate takeover, Impossible Industries, LLC. Each time, it ended the same way. I've been to jail twelve times."
Of course he doesn't stay in jail long, and his escape from prison coincides with the disappearance of his nemesis, CoreFire. Cyborg Fatale is a newcomer on CoreFire's old superhero team, The Champions (now The New Champions), unsure of her origin and seeking to find a way to fit in.
The plot of the book is fairly thin, and while it strives for a certain amount of psychological realism, I didn't find the characters to be all that deep. It's not as dark or as deep as Watchmen, which covers some of the same territory (I'm sure that Grossman must be sick of every reviewer with a blog and a keyboard comparing his work to Watchmen).
But Soon I Will Be Invincible is a lot of fun and very enjoyable to read. I felt like Grossman hit just the right tone with Doctor Impossible and his endless futile attempts to take over the world. Many comic books have tried to humanize or complicate or demystify superheros, certainly all the way back to the Marvel comics of the 1960s and 1970s. But the first-person narrative novel form seems to bring that technique along just a little further, with Doctor Impossible telling us what it feels like to take a punch from a superhero and Fatale puzzling over the history of the once-great, now semi-disbanded and demoralized Champions. I also admire how Grossman was able to create a whole world and history of superheroes in a relatively short book without the luxury of drawing explicitly on exisiting brand-name superheroes. Of course, he does have decades of cultural knowledge of superheros to draw on, and he does that expertly.
Find Soon I Will Be Invincible in the Prospector library catalog
Find Soon I Will Be Invincible in a library near you (Open WorldCat)
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