Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge, Black and White

Strange Visitor - Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge, Black and White

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Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge, Black and White

[Oct. 13th, 2009|07:49 am]

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I initially approached this one with a bit of caution. It's a superhero novel, which is always a risky proposition. Further, it's a superhero novel by two authors who are already established in the Urban Fantasy genre, a field that has given us everything from the Dresden Files to Trailer Park Vampires and a whole lot of tuff chicks with weapons and tramp stamps staring over their shoulders on the covers of romance novels that just happen to have demons (vampires, werewolves, pixies) in them. So, I wasn't sure what I was going to get.

I felt a bit better when one of the authors dedicated the book to her mom for giving her a mint copy of X-Men #94 as a Bat Mitzvah gift. I felt a lot better about it as I got into the book.

Superhero novels are a tricky thing. Conveying the product of a medium that relies on words and images in only words is no mean feat. Without visuals to fall back on, a writer can overload the reader with detail or fail to convey essential information. Unbound by the limits of comic book length, it's easy to bog down in introspection or long spans of inaction (something Chris Sims constantly lampoons in his annotations of the egregiously bad Anita Black comic adaptations).

At the trickiest thing of all is whether or not the author "gets" superheroes in the first place. Looking back at my reading list this year, this is the fifth prose treatment of modern superhumans I've read this year (the others were Kingdom Come, It's Superman, Captain Freedom, and Busted Flush). Of those others, Captain Freedom stands out as an example of an author who doesn't get it. The protagonist is a whiny jerk and the fact that he's a superhero is nothing more than a flag of convenience to tell a story.

The heroines of Black and White are not in that category, I'm happy to say. The novel is set in a rather dystopian future, about one hundred years from now, where a vast corporation controls many aspects of day to day life. Chief among those aspects is superheroes. The Corp has them and they keep society safe. Chief among the Corp's heroes is Jet, a manipulator of shadow; New Chicago's official protector and the golden child of the media.

Her opposite number in every way is Iridium, a supervillain (in the setting, they're called 'Rabids') with light powers. Of course, given comic book causality, they were once best friends, partners at the Academy.

The novel alternates between an ongoing present plot and flashbacks to their academy days. It also alternates chapters, with the POV switching between the two main characters as it winds to the inevitable climax.

While the plot is fairly bog standard, it's also fairly bog standard superhero stuff. Not Urban Fantasy in spandex. Not bodice ripper with superpowers. While it's not free of the sort of romance novel-isms one finds in a lot of Urban Fantasy this day, they were mostly low-key when they did crop up.

Where the book really shines is in the world-building. New Chicago, outside of its shiny corporate enclaves, is a nasty, scary place. The Corp is intrusive and slightly sinister, but they keep you hoping it's the lesser of two evils. And the supervillain prison as tourist destination was a stroke of genius.

Black and White looks to be the first in a series; I'll certainly pick up the next volume.

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