Not-so-recent reads

Super-folks, by Robert Mayer. It's amazing, sometimes, what you can find in a library's stacks of unwanted donated books. Take this one, for example. It's a somewhat battered and soiled book-club edition. The rather crude cover art seems to be inspired by comic books, complete with flamboyant typography, exaggerated "action" poses, and speech balloons. The pages inside are thin, almost the consistency of newsprint, and bedecked with 1970s style borders, pageheaders, and goofy-looking chapter numbers straight from the same school of animation that produced Schoolhouse Rock and The Electric Company.

And yet it represents one of the more innovative works of "superhero" fiction of the past few decades, and may be the progenitor of one of the most successful animated motion pictures of last year.

From the bookjacket:

There were no more heroes. Kennedy was dead. Batman and Robin were dead. The Lone Ranger was dead. Superman was missing. Even Snoopy had bought it, missing in action over France.

In this fading pantheon of heroes, the very last to give up combat against the forces of evil had been the most powerful hero of all, unseen in almost a decade since, unknown the world, his Superpowers had begun to fail.

Slipping into the humdrum routine of middle-class life, using the humdrum secret name David Brinkley, he was now forty-two years old, married, with two children and a third on the way....

If that sounds a bit familiar, give yourself a prize. To a great degree, it's the same scenario as The Incredibles. There's even a reclusive and eccentric tailor-to-the-superheroes, although in Super-Folks he does not proffer a discourse on the hazards of capes.

There are differences between Super-Folks and The Incredibles, of course. The latter's tongue-in-cheek explanation for the demise of superheroics is absent here. In its place Mayer supplies a sinister but plausible explanation for the gradual disappearance of his protagonist's superpowers, one perhaps more in line with public concerns of the late 1970s. Although both feature superheroes experiencing midlife crises of some kind, Mayer's take on the psychological and social lives of superheroes is considerably darker and more cynical. His protagonist, although gifted with superior strength and other superpowers, is not exactly an intellectual giant and is dogged by all-too-human worries and compulsions.

Even if one isn't particularly interested in whatever intellectual chain of influence may connect Super-Folks and The Incredibles, it's a worthwhile fun read, and one that I wish were more readily available.