[Bookian Review]:

Austin Grossman: Soon I Will Be Invincible: The Movie (Dystopia Games)

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman, one of the newest, flattest, most comic-book-like written, and most excellent, contemporary translation and update of a paratactic Rabelaisian Le Quart-Livre of Pantagruel, is a true contribution to that canonical and oft-under metabolized taxonomic clade of literature dealing with the inhuman fables of a fictional character... and one of the best examples of this subgenre to arrive. Usually exhibiting symptoms of the referred pain of author-characters such as Micheal Chabon or Art Spiegleman or any of the new, so-called, hyper intelligent graphic comic novelists, Austin Grossman in Soon I Will Be Invincible is a breath of fresh radioactive vapor fumes. He, unlike many of the others in the genre, clearly knows his medium: in a story about comic book characters, questions of authenticity of character must be thrown out the window entirely if any authenticity of character is to survive! As much as we like Chabon, when writing about boyhood, or about comic books, please: do justice to the medium! We dont see world famous sculptors known for the way they apply color to their surface, or the way world-class painters paint three dimensionally, for a good reason: sculpture is about sculpting. Painting is about paint. And stories about childhood topics are not reflective. In an era in which worlds are created and destroyed at the drop of a pin or a brandable buck, and the oracle of the divine bottle is spun in attempts to resolve the question of the marriage of Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus, to her own vows... Nay, but tis for naught? Shall the paratactic hyper-lists of past, fictional, actions of the gods-who-walk-among-us, those bringers-of-us-to-histories, must these lists be created by super-minds who have successfully navigated those very worlds they recreate? The answer to Should superheroes be making their living by charging people to beat them up is clearly a game played by such game players of Titan: The new super-authors of our current generation must be those unafraid to speak in the secret languages of the day- "Born of Fire, Born of God," our ancestors have said, that "Art is born of Humiliation": and for those who cower, afraid to look fully upon the face of our modern lives, and absorb the inherent humiliation when subjecting ourselves to seemingly pedantic roles of Fantastic Literature, or Amazing Stories! or Worlds of IF, or Captain Justice and the Hero League, will become lost as the next generation arises, and recreates the world as it should be: populated by the class of those who wear skin-tight pajamas and attempt, once again, to destroy the world!

- Dr. Impossibles Shysteroo [Jul 20 2007 10:48 AM]