An enjoyable use of comic archetypes and their incident-packed narratives as a both a superstructure and a shorthand, allowing Grossman to work up his two alternating voices as literary characters.
Almost inevitably, the male character (the villian Doctor Impossible) fares better in characterisation terms than the female hero (Fatale), something that unintentionally underscores the gender imbalance in the comics books industry itself.
Smart and affectionate but unlikely to linger like the book it reminds me so much of, Alan Moore's Watchmen.