Soon I Will Be Invincible

For those of you who don't know anything about me, let me say one thing that has been a big part of my self-definition since I was old enough to recognize letters: I love to read. I read a lot and I read voraciously. It has been this way most of my life; in class, on the bus, in bed, to the exclusion of the world around me, I read and read and read.

Since I have a touch of ADD (who doesn't these days?) I'm usually in the middle of 2-5 books at a time. Right now, I'm in the middle of The Help, Treasure island, New Moon (yes, the Twilight book, I don't watch the movies and the books are like playing minesweeper as opposed to chess, very little focus involved but it's still amusing) and Soon I Will Be Invincible.

Admittedly, my brand-new Kindle helps with the whole jumping from book to book thing, but I will never lose my love for real paper books. Maybe it's the smell of the pages, maybe it's seeing the spine of an old favorite crack from constant re-reading, maybe it's the tiny rush of superiority you feel when you're reading next to someone playing solitaire on their iPod, whatever.

And perhaps that is why I am currently most interested in Soon I Will Be Invincible, a comic-geek wet dream of a book in which Superheroes and Supervillains are a part of normal everyday society, as told from the point of view of the world's most diabolical arch-nemesis, Doctor Impossible, and the newest half human-half machine addition to the ultimate superhero team, Fatale.

This book, while being thoroughly entertaining and imaginative, explores the deeper character elements of these supreme beings. It humanizes them, which, in addition to making a better book, draws a main common trait between the two extremes of good and evil: Some amazing ability, be it inherent or from an accident, physical or mental, something sets these people apart from society.

The question is: Why does one grow up wanting to fight injustice and stand for peace, while the other is hell-bent on world domination and destruction? What makes one evil or good? The trend in the book seems to be that while smart, the heroes have nothing on the villains. Somehow, the burden of having a needle sharp intellect is what drives them to be misunderstood, isolated, and therefore revengeful. I don't know if that is true in real life (there seem to be a lot of really evil stupid people out there, not naming names) but I do know that the smart evil people are definitely the most dangerous. **coughANNCOULTERcough**

As artists, we have talents beyond the capabilities of most. It's what enables us to define and understand what many can't, lets us tap into the human condition. Mostly, we want to do good with these talents; we want to enlighten, to share, to enhance.

But what if we didn't?

Perhaps we are lucky that most artists want to tell the truth, and that truth, while hard, is beautiful. But just like the superheroes, we must use our powers, for it our responsibility, and use them wisely. We must use them to fight the modern day supervillains that want to perpetuate the idea that people are evil, that it is better to be selfish, that art is superfluous, that some people are not equal to others because of what they were born as, and that physical appeal or possessions are all that matter.

I guess that Heart guy in the Captain Planet team wasn't so useless after all.

Soon I Will Be Invincible is Austin Grossman's first novel, available wherever.