Ex Libris: Outlawed Heroes

I've always had an on-again, off-again relationship with comic books.

When I was a child, I grew up reading superhero comic books: Spiderman, Legion of Superheroes, The Avengers, Batman. etc. As time passed and I grew older, my hobbies shifted until I favored books. However, that didn't mean that I've forgotten my first love (in reading).

Which explains, I suppose, my occasional dabbling in books about superheroes. Fortunately enough, there are a lot of them out there: the Wildcards series edited by George. R. R. Martin, Fly Boy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask by Jim Munroe, Nobody Gets the Girl by James Maxey, Superfolks by Robert Mayer, It's Superman! by Tom deHaven, to a certain extent Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay...

... and now screenwriter/crime novelist John Ridley's Those Who Walk in Darkness.

It's a simple enough premise. One day, superheroes and -villains emerged from the shadows of the cities and started battling each other. Called metanormals, these powered beings were revered by the general public and supported by the national government-- until one day, a villain named Bludlust managed to wipe out the city of San Francisco and half a million people. The reaction was dreadfully immediate: the US president outlawed superpowers and those with such fled to exile to other countries or else face detention. To enforce this, the US government created heavily-armed police units called MTacs to take down these powered individuals.

In a job with a 50 percent casualty rate, one of the L.A.'s MTAC new recruits is trigger-happy Soledad "Bullet" o'Roark. She's black, female, and fresh from the police force. She's also really smart and she's a bit obsessive about these "freaks" to the point that she's created a prototype gun with different bullets to address each superpower the MTac encounters. However, her obsession may cost her more than she can afford as she finds herself on the bad side of a corrupt police department officer and a vengeful telepath metanormal-- the most dangerous kind ever of superpowers.

This is a quick, entertaining read-- to the point that it sometimes feels like a screenplay. No surprise there since Ridley supposed have created this novel out of a cartoon (with Lil' Kim as the voice of Soledad). The choppy prose sometimes is a hindrance to the reading but after a while, you get used to it like you get used to MTV video-style editing. Characters seem out of a TV show too: shallow, almost cardboard personalities with unbelievable motivations. No dearth of action-packed scenes though.

This, I suppose, explains my mixed feelings about this book. Despite a number of interesting things about it, there were so many things off about it. For example, characterization: Soledad is a great character because she's black AND female in a police uniform. A ripe target for racism, right? And fascinating enough, she has almost a racist perspective when it comes to metanormals, i.e. two sides of the same coin.

Unfortunately, Ridley writes about her defining motivation (why she hates metanormals) and it totally threw me off. Another example is the prose: the machine gun-like language is easy enough to get used to. However, there's still a certain lack of sophistication or fluidity to the words as compared to say, Chuck Palahniuk.

In summary, this book falls in the cracks of what is expected. For those who read comic books, the idea is nothing new, having been taken up a long time ago by Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Likewise, the idea of metanormals being hunted down has been taken up time and again in X-Men and their bloody fights with the robotic Sentinels. Comic books about police men and their involvement with superheroes also abound with Greg Moore's Top 10, Rucka's Gotham, and Brian Bendis' Powers. For those who don't, this will be a good read for those who haven't cracked open a comicbook ever in their life: a crime noir novel with superpowers.

Which sometimes makes me think-- in a cynical weak moment-- that writers should read up on their subject matter before putting pen to paper (or start typing). Granted that writers who don't may be able to infuse a fresh perspective to old tropes-- or at least bring them to a new audience (J.K. Rowling anyone?).

I'm assuming Ridley knew where he was coming from when he wrote this story and I actually admire him for deciding in the first place to write about superheroes. However, I'm also thinking writers who know their stuff somehow respect those who have gone before. It's like that rule about writing: know the rules of writing and THEN you can break them.

However, the question still hangs in the air whether this is a successful move for the writer or not.

(Thanks to Anansi and Dodo for making me clarify my thoughts! Hmmm... I really have to clear my head. No wonder I can't think of anything to post nowadays.)