SkullyFlower

Another thing I like: SkullyFlower

I met the artist, Dragon Green, at a not-very-successful art festival(*), and I bought the SkullyFlower books. I suppose the writing could use some polishing, but folks who like NerkyMarg's surreal observational comics will probably enjoy this too.

Oh, and Dragon has terrific merchandise. Seriously—If your daughter is not wearing hand-made felt SkullyFlower barrettes, what kind of parent are you?

(*) Note to artists: Publicity. It's not a dirty word.

Final Impression of "Soon I Will Be Invincible" by Austin Grossman

I finished reading Soon I Will Be Invincible, and although I was a bit disappointed, I still recommend the book on the grounds that:

• Austin Grossman (who has a blog, by the way) has a Douglas Adams-y gift for ending paragraphs with terrific gag lines.
• It's the closest thing you're going to find to The Tick: a novel.
  
• Cyborgs! With boobies!
  

For some folks, those three points alone will be enough to ensure their interest. For me, though, the book took its first misstep in Chapter 11 "Invincible" with the paragraph:

[The Pharaoh] wasn't much of a supervillain at all, just a crank, a nuisance in a costume. I think he called himself the Mummy for a while before I met him. He pulled a few bank jobs in the late 1970s, claiming to be the reincarnation  of the pharaoh Ramses. His most notable feature was that he'd chosen the same name as a famous hero, but he wasn't important enough for them to fight over it. Some villains make you embarrassed to be a villain.

Now, there is nothing wrong with that paragraph in and of itself. It's just that all of that information had already been covered previously (and better) in Chapter 5 "Free at Last", and that kind of repetition is hard to justify in a first-person narrative. That was the first symptom of a basic choppiness in the plot... unnecessary repetition in some places and missing information in others. It's the sort of stuff that a good editor would flag. Maybe I'm just sensitive to that because so many of my friends are such good editors, or maybe it's because I see that same choppiness when I look back at the novels I've tried my hand writing. Either way, it made for a kind of bumpy ride for me. Nothing that derailed the book, though, and there's plenty to enjoy. I'm hoping that the next book is a bit tighter, though.

Cyborg Assassins I Have Known

I'm currently reading and enjoying the novel Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. I bought the book because of the opening chapter, "Foiled Again," narrated by an incarcerated super-villain named Dr. Impossible. It is unarguably in the vein of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and (for me at least) that's a good thing. The other half of the narrative is from the point of view of an ex-government cyborg special agent who is trying to find her place in the world after beating the crap out of a team mate who made the mistake of speculating within ear shot just how much of her anatomy might be original parts. As I mentioned last year around this time, I enjoy a long (albeit wary) friendship with an android kill-bot known as cs10. She gets extremely cross when I don't pass on good reads as soon as I find them, and since she sometimes scans this blog, and since this novel prominently features a cyborg assassin as a principal character, and since making cs10 "extremely cross" can have dire consequences, I am mentioning the book right now, before I have even finished it.

(Special thanks to Forbidden Planet International, from whom I snagged an image of the UK edition of the book, which is waaay cooler than the American cover.)