Confessions of a Supervillain

by Laurel Maury, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 6/12/2007

Superhero comics like Spiderman and the Fantastic Four are dominating Hollywood movies. But in Austin Grossman's first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, the superhero genre takes aim at literary fiction. Alternating between the first-person voices of the evil Dr. Impossible, a typically brainy superpowerful sociopath out to rule the world, and Fatale, a super-human cyborg (with amnesia about her past) who joins a superhero group charged with bringing him to justice, Goodman's new novel is a thoroughly entertaining comic book that's written in the form of a literary prose novel. PWCW spoke with Goodman about his personal taste in comics, how he came to write the novel and how being a graduate student is a lot like being a supervillain. Pantheon published Soon I will Be Invincible this month.

PW Comics Week: How did the novel come about?

Austin Grossman: One evening, in '97 or '98, I was driving and the voice of Dr. Impossible occurred to me. There was this voice, this Dr. Doom-style voice.... I literally pulled by the side of the road and jotted down a bunch of sentences.

PWCW: Inspired by what?

AG: A kind of itch that goes along with reading about a supervillain. Seeing them shuffled on-and-off stage without really getting their story told. They're so much more enterprising than the heroes. The way they build stuff—they're so much more intellectual. The heroes just kind of stare at the wall until some kind of fabulous invention lurches out of the ocean to destroy the universe.

PWCW: How did Dr. Impossible develop?

AG: Early on, I got a picture of this old Flash Gordon panel of Ming the Merciless and blew it up on my computer until it was really big. He was clearly an older guy. You could see the wrinkles on his face—man, he must have been a bit tired at that point.

At the time, I was a graduate student [in English]—I still am, at Berkeley—and there was this whole graduate student feeling where you're supposed to be really, really smart, but you're kind of a loser. The world doesn't care about you and people your own age who are equally smart are making millions of dollars. You feel both smart and important, and frustrated and obscure, which matches the position of being a supervillain really, really nicely.

PWCW: And Fatale, the cyborg woman, the other narrator in the book?

AG: She showed up second. I was trying to balance the book and needed a voice that made sense to me as a superhero. I needed a superhero I believed in as much as Dr. Impossible, so I ended up with someone kind of traumatized and numb, who had to emotionally feel her way into what it would be like to have superpowers.

AG: Obviously she was needed because Dr. Impossible never goes out. Never talks to the heroes.

PWCW: Where the heroes hang out, is it based on DC Comics' Justice League of America headquarters?

AG: Yes, the picture in my head was actually from the early 1970s Justice League animated cartoon. So I wanted to give my heroes a big, gleaming fortress.

PWCW: What kind of research did you do?

AG: [I looked up] a bunch on Golden Age villains, crazy stuff. People like the Mole-Man, the Withered, the Gentleman. People you'd never hear about. I didn't read their comics, but I read their Wikipedia entries. When you read their story set in prose, it's really entertaining because these villains have been recycled through the [comics story] continuity many, many times, and it builds up these crazy life-story arcs. They weren't meant to be taken seriously as real people, but when you start to think of them as such, they become interesting characters.

PWCW: What do you like to read?

AG: I like The Ultimates a lot, and Ed Brubaker, Jonathan Letham. Martel, who wrote The Life of Pi. Donald Barthelme, Edward Gorey. I'm a big fan of William Gibson. Frank Miller and Alan Moore were huge for me. And Kelly Link, who wrote Magic For Beginners. I love Kelly Link. Also I read a lot of 19th-century stuff for my dissertation. My topic is the disappearance of magic in 19th-century British literature. I'm doing stuff on Byron and Tennyson. If I have time, I'll work in J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. I'm trying to trace the lineage that lays the groundwork for 20th-century fantasy.

PWCW: Do you think that part of the interest Pantheon had in your book was that comics are hot right now?

AG: Yeah, there's no question that was part of the hook. In fact, I was afraid of being seen as an opportunist, as somebody who wrote about superheroes because it seemed like a hot subject, when actually, at first I saw it as something that would never see the light of day. Something that would only live in my notebooks. In 2001, I had three to four linked short stories and showed them to my twin brother, Lev Grossman, a novelist and one of the book critics for Time magazine. He showed them to his agent, who thought it would work as a novel.

PWCW: Did the fact that the book's genre is hard to place help sell the book?

AG: Yes, I think people saw it as distinctive.

PWCW: How would you describe the book's genre? How much is it a comic book written in novel form?

AG: Very much so—it's very much a comic book written as a novel. I guess for me, the big question was, how were the people who bought the book going to deal with it—would it be science fiction? I got the impression that Marty Asher [head of Vintage Books], who bought the manuscript, is not the biggest superhero fan in the world. And Marty very much took the high road, presenting it as mainstream fiction. I liked the fact that Marty is not, in fact, a comics guy. He really doesn't read comic books. As for genre, I'd put it maybe in magical realism, hopefully somewhere near Kelly Link.

For more about Soon I Will Be Invincible, check out the Web site.

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