Comics are literary too!

The cover of this novel immediately conjures images of a realm in which fictional characters endowed with mystical powers and enhanced features run rampant. The lead characters will espouse cheesy slogans, they’ll all have some unique, mysterious history, and ridiculous get-ups (underwear on the outside?) will be donned by all.

What you don’t expect is a witty super villain who opens the novel bemoaning his time behind bars, seething at the triumphs of CoreFire, his superhero arch-nemesis. It also comes as a complete literary surprise when the story jumps tracks from the perspective of foiled evil mastermind to the tale of a rookie champion of justice.

Welcome to the off-beat, unpredictable writing of Austin Grossman. His debut novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, is laden with comic book lore and built upon the foundation of all things Marvel and DC. If you’re a novice to comics, this book will seem intimidating at first. Names like Blackwolf, Stormcloud and Mister Mystic become the Tom, Dick and Harry of Grossman’s world.

It’s important to draw the distinction between the world of Invincible and the world we occupy. The world of this novel is hard to place until late into the story, because there are references made to the timeline being well past the 35th century, though there are repeated allusions to modern-day New York City and Chicago, among other major U.S. cities.

Doctor Impossible is what makes this book great, though he also serves as the novel’s worst feature. His snarky, pointed asides about life as a diabolical super villain are great, keeping the narrative fresh and making you crave more. But his storytelling and self-glorification ruin it. He spends a good amount of time calling himself one of the smartest minds to ever roam the earth, yet he was foiled by a rag-tag team of do-gooders named Rainbow Triumph, Elphin and CoreFire. This could have been a great bit of dialectic, but Impossible’s personality turns out to be mostly pompous and annoying.

He spends his time dreaming of the outside world, where he was able to plot schemes of nuclear terrorism, world domination and the eventual downfall of the good guys, called The Champions.

This is where the second half of the narrative comes in. The Champions’ newest recruit, a rebuilt cyborg of a young woman who calls herself Fatale, tells her tale of joining the world’s heroes in a fight against evil. Her story doesn’t come with a lot of background, though she does add some interesting twists here and there. She was recruited to join The Champions after Galatea, a powerful lady warrior of both body and mind, died during a certain event years before the canon of Invincible.

Did that sentence bother you? The “certain event” bit? If so, you won’t want to read Invincible. Grossman has done an exemplary job of using bits and pieces of the comic book writing style and blending it with something of a Kerouac-esque narrative style that should have really spread the jam on the toast.

However, as you read the story, you can’t help thinking that Grossman left so many loose ends and foreshadowing sentences in the first half that even he forgot about them all. There are literally dozens of sentences in the first three chapters that feel like a key, important sentence you’ll want to remember later. The trouble is, when you get to the end of the novel, none of those loose ends are tied off.

Grossman takes a few jabs at the comic writing genre, though he does it in a very light-hearted way. Much like the dual narratives, this self-deprecating humor falls short because Grossman never seems to commit. Instead, it feels like he had a dozen great ideas/jokes at once, wrote them all down as introductory anecdotes and then forgot the punchlines before his fingers could transcribe the words. The result of all of this build-up and no follow through is a feeling that he just ham-fisted the latter half. As though he began writing with a case of Red Bull and an eight ball of coke, only to run out of both by about page 200.

The book is 300 pages long, and, lack of follow-through aside, it isn’t a bad read. I recommend this to anyone who wants a quick jaunt that has some hilarious lines in it, especially if you’ve ever spent a night (or more) in jail. Grossman nails the character outlines, and the supporting cast is a veritable mineshaft of comic book goodness. Even if you view comics as sophomoric and inane, you’ll catch some laughs in the few hours it’ll take to finish this novel.