CANDIDATE SPECTRUM Needs a More Solid Platform
Candidate Spectrum
Written by Brian Cato
Published by BC Studio
September 2020
Trade Paperback, 355 pages
What if Superman ran for president?
That’s basically the premise behind Brian Cato’s Candidate Spectrum, wherein the superhero known as Spectrum decides that saving people handfuls at a time isn’t good enough. He feels like he can do more, that he should do more, to help humanity on a more systemic level. So he dumps his superhero persona and runs for office using his civilian alter-ego of Grant Goslin, formerly of FEMA.
On its face, it’s an intriguing notion. Especially when you consider the question of how a superpowered being can act with restraint and work within a system such as a government. It’s hard enough for regular people to maintain self-control in the face of the bureaucratic mentality.
Unfortunately, while the idea is interesting, the execution isn’t. The book starts off with Spectrum performing various acts of heroism, but when he finds himself not able to save everyone in a train wreck, he starts to question his purpose. After discussions with Ma & Pa, he decides to run for office. And that’s where the book sort of crumbles. The rest of the narrative — all told in third person present tense — feels like I’m reading transcripts of interviews with white papers.
One of the fundamentals in good storytelling is “Show, don’t tell” and this book needed a judicious amount of that here. Certain passages gloss over the inner workings and machinations of a political campaign, while in other places emphasis is placed on minutiae. And the conversations that Grant has with people about various topics come across as research papers for a college class instead of real conversations. People talk in short sentences, most of the time, and that’s missing here. They also move. And they react. And they change posture. There are a thousand little things that happen in the course of a scene that should give the reader a sense of the space these characters occupy, and that’s strikingly absent from Cato’s narration.
The frustrating thing about it is that at its core, it’s an interesting premise for a story. What would happen if a superhero ran for elected office? Would the power set become a campaign issue? Would there be pushback because of the whole “secret identity” thing? Would there be questions about some kind of registry similar to the Sokovia Accords over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Ultimately, Grant’s powers don’t factor in much after he starts his campaign, and there’s an entire branch of story that remains unexplored.
I also think the choice of present tense narration is a mistake, but I think that every time I run across it (looking at you, Wendig), so it’s not a complaint that’s unique to this book. I can’t stand present tense narration for a story. It barely works for oral presentations, and even then it has to be done “just so” in order to be effective.
The story also suffers from the lack of an antagonist, or at the very least the lack of a ticking time bomb. There’s no urgency. Grant spends all of his time in conversations and interviews, and there’s no real drama such as you would expect in a story about a political campaign. Especially after the drama that we’re seeing play out in real time now. Politics are ugly. The people immersed in politics can be just as ugly. There’s drama in almost every development of a campaign, and that’s missing here. There are no stakes. You get no sense that the election matters, except every now and again Grant worries about how he can do more to help humanity, and figuring out what that means.
It’s a decent B-plot, but there’s no main story here. Ultimately, the book suffers for that. Lots of potential here, but it’s never fully realized.
