schemingreader

I have been reading comics, among other things. I got most of the Matt Fraction/Salvador Larroca Iron Man series from the library. I am in a place with the comics, like many others on my flist, where I'm enthralled by the parallels with fan fiction and the discrepancies in the ways that different people write the same character. (I'm also reading some of the current issues of Marvel--same deal.) I love it that multiple realities and multiple universes are reality in this universe, if that makes sense. As I wrote to timetiger, there is no Masoretic text of Marvel comics.

(There's a reason I brought that up, but it exceeds the focus of this investigation.)

I wanted to rec two books to people who like fan fiction or comics, or fan fiction about comics. One is Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. I learned about it when Grossman's identical twin brother Lev Grossman linked to a funny blog post about how weird it is that there are these two tall bald identical twins doing cool things with genre. Anyway, Soon I Will Be Invincible is a total tribute to the soap opera aspects of comics. The book has two POV protagonists, Dr. Impossible (sad supervillain) and Fatale (reluctant, traumatized superhero.) Austin Grossman has the same issues about Narnia in this book as Lev Grossman does in The Magicians and The Magician King. (Which I know you've already read. Right? Yes?)

My library only had the first book in Susan J. Bigelow's Extrahumans trilogy, Broken. I've been following this author on Twitter, @whateversusan. I had no idea that she wrote genre fiction--I was following her because she's a snarky librarian and she cracks me up. Broken is this incredibly moving dystopian science fiction. It's not dark in the sense that the Grossman book is dark, because she's not being funny here--she's committed to these characters and this world-building.

Anyway, as different as these are, I recommend them.