Rhapsodies

I guess I always find myself being drawn to super heroes. As a cartoonist one of my dreams growing up was to be part of the Marvel Bullpen drawing all of my favorites. I made up my own characters and teams and their adventures within my imagination were epic. I moved on I gradually discovered Frank Miller, Walter Simonson and Alan Moore dabbled with as many different approaches to the super hero as my favorite genre and the superhero as modern mythology until I looked too hard and lost interest. (More of this recurring rant can be found in my Megamind review.)

But even so, I still like the genre and am frequently find myself drawn back to it. And every now and again I find myself taking another crack at it. These day’s I find the best approach is to not take it too seriously… accept it as fantasy and embrace the camp approach of the sixties and seventies. Keep in mind you still have to respect it, don’t do it as parody, in the end that’s almost as bad as many creators attempts at dark revisionism.

I think that’s why I enjoyed Austin Grossman‘s Soon I Will Be Invincible so much. Most superhero novels I have read treat it all like science fiction try and put four color characters into a real world setting. Rarely have I seen it work at all. “Soon I Will Be Invincible” embraces the absurdity treats it with respect and runs with it all through the eyes of the arch villain, Dr. Incredible.

I bring this up because just recently I was looking around Youtube and stumbled upon this clip of an actor’s audition based on some of Dr. Incredible’s narration from the novel and thought I’d share.
http://youtu.be/oSnTOaQgq3w
Enjoy.