Home
sign up| features / interview |
 content by: editor |
 austin grossman 'soon i will be invincible' interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Austin Grossman's superpowerful debut novel. It's hard being a supervillain. Even Dr Impossible, the smartest man on the planet, can't fathom just why people keep opposing his plans to take over the world. Robot armies, fungal invasions, moving the moon… eventually they all fail."Most supervillains are incredibly gifted individuals", says author Austin Grossman. "They could be scientists, Olympic athletes, Nobel Prize-winners. Instead, they're hiding in abandoned warehouses or sitting in jail. Villains are people who have picked the losing side and try to make it work." Dr Impossible's megalomaniacal misadventures drive the plot of Soon I Will Be Invincible, Grossman's first novel. It's a perceptive, affectionate take on scenarios familiar from countless smudged pages of comic-book lore, as volatile superhero team The Champions try to thwart the evil genius' latest world domination bid without falling apart themselves.  Inside cover by Brian Hitch (detail) and Austin Grossman. Grossman comes from a literary family: his parents are Allen and Judith Grossman, poet and novelist respectively. But college jottings fell by the wayside in favour of a career designing computer games. He started writing again in a workshop at Berkeley, where he is an English postgraduate. "I wanted a way to write literary fiction but somehow fuse it with the geeky, pulp writing I liked. I felt I was a closet nerd, and I wanted to throw it in their faces." So why has this self-professed fan of the smarter end of mainstream comics — Powers, Ultimates and the landmark Watchmen — written a novel and not a comics script? "Taking superheroes out of their native medium that privileges the visual gives what I think is a richer experience of superhero characters," he explains. "It lets us dwell on what it feels like to live in a superpowered body, brings in the sense of touch and taste and sound." Not that he's saying that comic characters are necessarily two-dimensional. "I do worry about that, that it will be yet another ‘look, comic books grew up' moment. Or that comics fans will think I'm doing that, which would be even worse." Although he denies that Dr Impossible is based upon himself, there is some evidence that Grossman too may be a candidate for Malign Hypercognition Disorder — aka Evil Genius Syndrome. "My parents are both college professors and incredibly smart. There was always the sense that we were supposed to be smart, but also that being smart made us weird... different... evil. Why did it feel that way? It's one of the problems the novel tries to unravel."
Abi Bliss
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman, out now published by Michael Joseph.
 conversations
Read members' comments.
|
 |
related info
 useful links
note: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
see also
books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
access 1000s of articles
