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| Superhumanity by Andrew Gladman, available now on Kindle Store. |
This is a book. An ebook, to be precise. And I'm the one responsible for it. After writing about superheroes since... well, since I was about six years old, if you count the comics I used to draw as a child, I have now published the real deal. A collection of seven tales that journey through the heart of a world populated by superheroes.
I started working on Superhumanity before I even knew I was writing it. The first story of the collection I wrote was How to Save the Day and Screw up Everything Else, which became the second story in the book. It was written for a Creative Writing workshop and assignment in my second year of university. The story came about purely because I was running out of time to submit a piece for the workshop and the one idea that had been knocking about in my head was a stream of consciousness from a superhero in the heat of battle. So that was what I wrote. A teenage superhero with her mind wandering as she fights off a gang of armed thugs, inspired partly by the work of Brian Michael Bendis on Ultimate Spider-Man. It went down well in the workshop and I quite enjoyed taking a brief glimpse through prose into the mind of a superhero. That was the spark for doing more.
So, now resolved to put together a small anthology of superhero tales, stories that would look into the humanity of the superhuman, I started on six more. The Light in the Shadows, the second story I wrote (and the last one to receive a title) came from wanting to tailor a superhero story to prose. One piece of feedback I had received from my Creative Writing tutor on How to Save the Day was to make the prose work in a way that comics and movies could not. If you're going to tell a story in prose, particularly the sort of story that would usually be more at home in another medium, there must be a reason for telling it this way. So, when it came to The Light in the Shadows, I wrote a story about a superhero who could vanish into the shadows. It's been an image in superhero mythology since Batman began, but I wanted a superhero who, rather than relying on ninja-like skills and theatricality, possessed the power to literally become part of the shadows. As he steps, or leaps, or falls out of the light and into the dark, he would leave our dimension and enter another, more abstract, shadow dimension, where our laws of reality do not apply. I removed the element of the visual that is crucial to comics and cinema. The shadow dimension exists in the story as a reality in which there is no physicality, only consciousness. There is motion without movement, everything and nothing. It is a world constructed through oppositions that is more concept than reality and as a result can (hopefully) only be done true justice in prose, while the most a visual medium could do would be to provide voices over a pitch black image.
As I went on, I continued trying to take superheroes out of their comfort zone and in new directions, into the abstract and internal world of prose. I was able to get into the mind of the superhero and explain their very human experience as they face their fiercest battles, or battle with the idea of a world that doesn't want them, or learn exactly what their place is in the world. What I hope I have done is to get to the heart of the superhero experience and make the reader consider what keeps a superhuman human and what makes a human superhuman.
At the very least, what I can say I definitely have done is to become an actually published author by making up stories about superheroes. And that alone is enough to make me happy!
