Austin Grossman
Pantheon, 280 pages

So, you’re about to start a new book about superheroes by an author who is a doctoral candidate in English specializing in Romantic and Victorian literature. Sounds about as promising as if Danielle Steel were to pen the new Hulk film. But the cover (designed by book jacket master Chip Kidd) is bright and colorful and shiny, almost lickable, making it super appealing to geeks and crows. It’s like they’ve been telling us for years—hardly any people end up working in the field in which they got their degree anymore.

Good thing for us. Austin Grossman has taken essentially everything we know about Marvel superheroes and villains, broken it down into novel form, created his own cast of characters, and still managed to make it fun. All without illustrations!

It starts with Dr. Impossible, an evil super genius. After 12 foiled attempts to take over the world, he’s landed in jail. The book starts off with a first person account of Dr. Impossible’s life. He hasn’t always been evil. Like all people with super powers, it started with a horrific accident (he blew himself up in a lab). After that, he got himself a cape, a mask and a secret island lair, and things just fell into place.

“To be a supervillain, you need to have certain things,” the book reads. “Don’t bother with a secret identity, that’s a hero thing. Not that it wouldn’t be convenient to take off the mask and disappear into the crowds, the houses, the working world. Perhaps too convenient—why become the most audacious criminal mind on Earth (or at least in the top four), only to slink off in the other direction when things get difficult. It wouldn’t mean as much if you could just walk away. When I’m arrested, they read the litany of my crimes at the trial, longer and gaudier each time. I’ve been tried for crimes on the Moon, in other centuries, other dimensions, and I’ll be damned if I won’t put my name on them.”

Now Dr. Impossible spends his days in jail, sleeping on the concrete floor of his cell, eating the bland food and frightening the prison’s general population. (The occasional tough guy who confronts him is quickly turned into pulp.) He even gets regular visits from the prison shrink, who asks him routine questions like, “How was your childhood?” “What did you really want to steal?” and “Why did you try to hypnotize the President?” Dr. Impossible has learned to tolerate it to the best of his evil abilities. “I try and relax and remind myself of the situation,” he says about the shrink. “If I kill him, they’ll just send another.”

Dr. Impossible also spends a lot of time thinking about his 35th century ex-girlfriend, Lily. Appearing to have been made out of Lucite and water by a rapidly vanishing human population, Lily was sent back in time to undo the chain of events that led to the devastation of Earth’s people. But upon returning home after successfully completing her mission, Lily found that she hated the new world she helped create. She traveled back once again to the 21st century to wreak havoc and try to set the disastrous circumstances of the future back into effect. “She’s what your sort might call a supervillain,” Dr. Impossible says, “although she might quarrel with the definition.”

Enter Fatale. She’s a rookie superhero who just joined the Champions, the world’s most famous superteam. Fatale is a cyborg. Once human, she lost 43 percent of her body mass after being dragged for miles by a runaway dump truck. Now, with half a body made of metal and plastic organs, she’s equipped to take on Dr. Impossible and Lily. (C’mon, you didn’t really think he was going to stay locked up, did you?)

Told from two different perspectives, Grossman takes the words-and-pictures storytelling conventions and transmutes them into pure, flowing text. In losing the cartoony visuals that accompany a comic book, “Soon I Will Be Invincible” becomes a serious story. You identify with the characters, who seem less like colorful gymnasts with strange abilities and more like regular people with hopes and dreams—even if those dreams are to sink the world in a cosmic wormhole.

There is also more room to experience the characters’ thoughts and feelings. You can express so much more when you don’t have to keep it contained to cartoon bubbles above your head. In novel form, they’re more fleshed out. (Well, metal-and-fleshed out, in this case.) Also, the concept of good and evil is more deeply explored. Dr. Impossible spends a lot of time pondering the decisions he’s made in life, noting that the bad guys always seem to end up in jail. “I’m the smartest man in the world,” Impossible proclaims. “Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes ... Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could with his life.”

With a writing style reminiscent of Douglas Coupland in his good days, Grossman is off to a flying leap with his first novel. He has taken the idea of grown men running around in leotards and capes and made it extremely believable—and very funny. Without the help of visuals, and paired with his deadpan narrative style, images that would have once seemed alarming become quite amusing. “Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone’s problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor.”

Austin Grossman himself may be a super genius. In trying to knock our tights off, he delves into the world of the invincible and unkillable, tapping into a market ripe for sequels. Fitzgerald could only kill Gatsby once.