Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187252 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 390 pages

Customer Reviews

Therapy for super heroes
It's been established that we're all too sophisticated for the simplicity of good versus evil that makes up the formula of classic super hero stories. This was the work of Alan Moore and Frank Miller back in the 1980s with the explanation that anyone who put on a cape and fought crime had to be seriously disturbed. Nobody since has dared suggest that might not be the case. This has led to some good stories and some bad stories.

From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain is in this vein, and it's a good story. A group of superheroes, members of the Fantastic Order of Justice, have been commanded to attend therapy due to various mishaps. There is Omnipotent Man, a superman-type, who talks like a hick and makes numerous mistakes. Flying Squirrel, a fascist Batman who owns half the world's businesses. Ice Goddess, a Wonder Woman with mother issues. Power Grrrl a narcissistic self-absorbed media icon. Brotherfly, a Spider-man crossed with the Fly (from the movie of the same name) as played by the Fresh Prince of Bel Air era Will Smith. X-Man is the only character without a direct analogy, but he's a black right activist with the power to manifest his words as physical objects.

The therapy of these characters is highly amusing but Faust is clever enough to realise that's not enough to carry the whole novel so he adds a plot that starts with the death of iconic hero, Hawk King, and culminates in apocalyptic events centred around a conspiracy seen only by the paranoid X-Man. With this, Faust is able to take potshots at therapy and self-help gurus, the media, celebrities, the rightwing philosophies of early superheroics, Afroamerican culture and the War on Terror. There's a lot to chew on, and the story does not lionise even the hero, who is shown as a flawed individual. Dr Brain as narrator is quite unreliable, obsessed by psychoanalytic techniques that shield her from what is actually happening, although she does get results.

The only small fly in the ointment is that there are resemblances in the plot to Watchmen. It's played entirely differently, for laughs, but there's even a Roscharch analogue. It doesn't make the novel any less enjoyable, though.