Excerpt
Chapter 1
WHY DO ALL superheroes have to look like Superman?" Vivian Kinneally asked as she studied the interior of her nephew's comic book. She was sitting on the stoop outside her apartment building, her eleven-year-old nephew, Kyle, beside her.
The sun cast its warm rays on the concrete steps and illuminated Kyle's latest hand-drawn effort. In the week that Vivian had lived in Portland, the sun had been out every day. She had no idea how the city had gotten its rainy, gloomy reputation.
"He doesn't look like Superman," Kyle said, craning his neck over the double-page spread that rested on Vivian's knees.
"Yes, he does." Viv traced the hero's chin, feeling the pen marks beneath her finger. "See? He's got the same lantern jaw that Siegel and Shuster gave the original in 1938. He's even got the dimple in his chin."
She loved that dimple. She had always thought—and never admitted aloud—that the Siegel and Shuster Superman, the original, was the handsomest man she had ever seen. Even if he was only a creation of paper and pen.
"Superman doesn't have a dimple," Kyle said.
"Sure he does." Vivian smiled at her nephew. Kyle was thin and bookish, his round glasses sliding to the bottom of his nose. His fingers were stained with ink, and the fleshy side of his palm had traces of the red he'd used to color the book. "Take a look, especially in the first thirty years or so, before he got associated with Christopher Reeve."
"I didn't want my character to look like Superman," Kyle said. "Spider-Man doesn't look like Superman."
Kyle wrapped his arms around his waist and leaned forward, extending his Nike-covered feet down three steps. Vivian's brother, Travers, kept Kyle dressed like the athlete he would never be. Vivian wondered how Kyle would do now that she had relocated here.
"Actually," Vivian said, "they all look like Superman. They have to. They need the muscles and the strong chin. Could you imagine wearing one of those costumes if you had a weak chin? You'd look like—"
"Michael Keaton in Batman," Kyle said before she could. She'd made that argument before.
"You said you wanted to know what I thought," she said.
"After you've read it," Kyle said. "I think this one is really different."
Vivian smiled at him. Kyle's greatest dream was to become a comic book writer. Travers said that was her fault. Vivian had the most extensive comic book collection of anyone she knew—and she knew a lot of comic book fans (although most of them weren't twenty-seven-year-old women).
When she was a kid, comic books had been her escape. In them, she found people with secret identities and super powers, mutants who decided to fight on the side of all that was good and right. She had a super power too, although she had never thought of it as that, at least not when she was growing up. Then it had simply been something else that marked her as different.
She hated being different so much. She was teased by her peers. She used to look at the superheroes and daydream that someday she would meet one, and he would sweep her off her feet.
She could even imagine the panel art: an entire page with Superman or Batman or some other square-jawed (and dimple-chinned) superhero with a cape, carrying her in his arms.
Vivian slid her own round glasses up her nose and stared at Kyle's art. He was spectacular for someone his age. There was a confidence to his work that most young artists lacked. His stories were still derivative, but she knew that originality took time—and Kyle had plenty of time.
She raised her head, seeing if she got a sense of her brother, Travers. She was psychic, and there were some people she was particularly attuned to. Her brother, Travers, was one of them. So was her younger sister, Megan. And, until a few weeks ago, Vivian had been attuned to her Aunt Eugenia too.
"You okay, Aunt Viv?" Kyle asked.
The family question.
