Ain't it Cool News and Variety are reporting that this novel from “Chronicles of Narnia” producer Perry Moore about a closeted homosexual superhero may be Showtime's next cool series. Stan Lee is producer.Booklist describes the book’s premise:
Thom Creed tries not to disappoint his dad, a disgraced caped crusader who now toils as a factory drudge, so he keeps his gay identity and his developing superpowers under wraps. Then he secretly tries out for the prestigious League, joining aspiring heroes in villain-busting adventures that escalate alongside more private discoveries.
Gay super-heroes are almost universally handled badly in comics so this will be a fascinating experiment if it actually comes to pass. Has anyone read the book?
4 comments:
Haven't read it — in fact hadn't even heard of it till this morning — but I'm also interested to hear how it is. I read "Soon I Will Be Invincible" last year, and I thought it was interesting for what it was, but I definitely didn't love it.
The whole concept of a super hero novel is a tough one to pull off, if only because we're all so in tune with the existing super hero universes that have already been created (primarily by DC and Marvel), and building one from scratch that doesn't adhere to one of the accepted rubrics for superhero-dom can take time that novelists don't always have, in one novel anyway. Simple but important questions like, "okay, heros can fly, but how?" are easy to lose sight of, but can make the difference between a fully realized and therefore believable universe and something that just feels slapped together.
I do think it's a little surprising that Stan Lee is getting involved with this project, though. I'm not entirely sure if that should make me more confident or skeptical in the long term prospects of the show.
Personally, I love the idea of a gay superhero, especially for a tv series. I love seeing archetypes deconstructed and depicted in new lights, and this seems like it could be it. There's an interesting indie superhero film out, with Michael Rappaport as a guy who think he has superpowers, when he's just an ordinary schlub in reality. And I love what Showtime's doing. First a serial killer cop, and now a gay superhero.
Jon, I'd agree except for existence of the comic predecessors -- Tarzan, the Shadow, Doc Savage, Wylie's Gladiator. Outside of the pulp era, it does seem harder to do, I agree about Soon I will be invincible. There's large chunks of Chabon that's essentially a super hero book (The Escapist) and there's Lethem's Fortress of Solitude and a short story by him from "supermen and cartoons, that I think is brilliant superheroness-- it's called super goat-man:
"The narrator of 'Super Goat Man' similarly shames himself at a dinner party trying to degrade the titular character, who had retired from his underwhelming comic-book adventures to become a hippie-ish politics professor. The curious superhero's happy assimilation into civilian life ...somehow invokes helpless feelings of sexual inferiority and discomfited competitiveness in the narrator, as if to scorn comics is a fast track to being socially inept."
You should search this one out -- I include it in my course reader.
A gay superhero is always intriguing in concept but almost never in execution. Look at the new Batwoman character -- a lesbian that nobody at DC knows what to do with after the initial news cycle. Marvel seems embarrassed by Northstar, the gay Canadian member of Alpha Flight and then the X-Men, and therefore they keep killing him off. Willow Rosenthal from Buffy is probably the best depiction of a gay/lesbian super powered hero. In fact, I'd agree with you that TV might be a better medium for this concept than comics, just based on Willow.
Funny by the way that you posted this, in that I was sitting almost next to Stan Lee at lunch today. I've seen him a million times, but I still got giddy.
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