Time and again, as Impossible starts to get metaphysical, he pulls up just short of a meaningful conclusion. Rather than using the character as a vehicle for commentary on heroism, or comic books for that matter, Grossman keeps the discussion right at surface level. I was constantly disappointed by this too, because I always felt the trajectory of the Doctor's thoughts were headed somewhere profound. Instead, they always seemed to crash into a punchline. While I suppose that could be reflective of his constant failure to take over the world, I think it ended up just shortchanging the character.
Fatale, the book's other narrator, did little other than move the plot forward. I was pleasantly surprised at first that Grossman picked a less than traditional hero-type to contrast with a pretty standard evil genius, but the farther I read the more disenchanted I was with the decision. Fatale was severely underdeveloped as a character. By her own admission she is uncomfortable in her own skin and so, as a reader, I simply couldn't settle down into her narration the way I did with Doctor Impossible. There are several strands of her story which never really go anywhere. When the reader meets her, she's a B or C list hero who has been called up to join the elite Champions super group. How she landed on the Champions' radar is never fully explained, nor do we get any conclusion on a budding romance between her and the character Blackwolf.
Likewise, there are questions about her origin which are raised and have the potential to go interesting places, but lose steam by the end of the novel. As the secondary narrator, she is thrown into immediate juxtaposition with Doctor Impossible, yet there is little to no conflict between the two in the plot. I would think that if you are going to divide a novel's story between two tellers of opposing persuasion, there should be some sort of showdown in the story to establish final dominance. Otherwise, one narrator is suborned to the other by virtue of who gets the final chapter, which is Doctor Impossible in this case.
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