One of the great ones passes….

Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis dies at 85

Anthony Lewis @ Wikipedia

candybowl

Oh, if only. 🙂

Finished this book today, very entertaining read and right up my alley. It is a ‘generic superhero’ story (meaning no Marvel, DC, etc. ‘traditional’ superheroes in there) – not *too* far removed from The Incredibles, but not focused on a family or played near as much for laughs as TI was.

The story is told from two first-person points of view; the perspective of Dr. Impossible, the smartest/greatest/most powerful/you get the picture supervillain of them all, and Fatale, a female cyborg and most recent new member of The Champions, the current ‘Superfriends-like’ group who protects the world from villains like him. Both characters are developed far more than the rest of the others – either villain or hero – but the others are pretty interesting too, as their origins and back stories are revealed throughout the book.

While this book has more than a few similarities to the ‘traditional’ superheroes of yore (The Avengers, The X-Men, and even the far more cheesy Saturday-am ’70s cartoon Superfriends) it also invokes the more nerdy tastes of The Watchmen in more ways than one. It also goes further than most traditional hero stories in that these heroes and villains inhabit a world with TONS of heroes and villains, most with superpowers (and several charlatans on both sides to boot) – the only series I’ve seen that implied this were the X-Men movies to my knowledge (world ‘full’ of mutants beyond the X-Men themselves).

I don’t want to spoil anything – of course this book has the usual superhero story touches (supervillain is bent on taking over the world, crazy technology, freak accidents that create superpowers, etc.) – all the right stuff. If you liked The Watchmen (graphic novel, movie or both), or other superhero/comics, you will like this story. In other words, you’ve seen this story before in other forms, but this is yet another page-turning way to tell it, and is pretty darn good. Enjoy!

candybowl