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I needed a laugh
Oct. 28th, 2007 01:42 pmFound via the Suspect Device blog.
Oct. 28th, 2007
This weekend I read my two birthday presents to myself, Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein and Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible. Both are worth picking up, although I'd probably wait for paperback for either one of them.
Crooked Little Vein is Cory Doctorow's noir wet dream: a cross country journey through the "seamy underbelly" of America, with the occasional dig thrown at those who don't let their freak flag fly. It's a fun jaunt, but is also a plot hole singularity from which all logic and structure cannot escape. Needless to say, the denouement is weak, and horribly horribly contrived.
Soon I Will Be Invincible, on the other hand, is an absolute blast. Grossman takes assorted superhero tropes and, rather than turning them on their head, embraces them in all of their occasionally stilted glory. I wouldn't characterize myself as a fan of comics--I've come to enjoy them more as an adult than I ever did growing up, and I can't say that I've ever bought an actual first-run comic book. Still, I had enough friends in the seventies and eighties (especially the eighties) to spot more than a couple references here and there. Grossman never gets anywhere close to mocking his source material, and as a result he comes of with something that's as much The Incredibles as The Venture Brothers, and not nearly the outright parody of The Tick. At the same time, it's not breaking new ground or reinventing a genre, like Watchmen or Frank Miller's Batman comics did.
Crooked Little Vein is Cory Doctorow's noir wet dream: a cross country journey through the "seamy underbelly" of America, with the occasional dig thrown at those who don't let their freak flag fly. It's a fun jaunt, but is also a plot hole singularity from which all logic and structure cannot escape. Needless to say, the denouement is weak, and horribly horribly contrived.
Soon I Will Be Invincible, on the other hand, is an absolute blast. Grossman takes assorted superhero tropes and, rather than turning them on their head, embraces them in all of their occasionally stilted glory. I wouldn't characterize myself as a fan of comics--I've come to enjoy them more as an adult than I ever did growing up, and I can't say that I've ever bought an actual first-run comic book. Still, I had enough friends in the seventies and eighties (especially the eighties) to spot more than a couple references here and there. Grossman never gets anywhere close to mocking his source material, and as a result he comes of with something that's as much The Incredibles as The Venture Brothers, and not nearly the outright parody of The Tick. At the same time, it's not breaking new ground or reinventing a genre, like Watchmen or Frank Miller's Batman comics did.