Still this is all small potatoes until Ryan's friend Ken is arrested for possession of a joint and becomes a test case for the latest "get tough on drugs" law. The superheroes make a public announcement that they will not allow Ken to be jailed -- which only increases the determination of the authorities to "bring him to justice." Meanwhile the socially conscious groups who'd first embraced Flyboy and Ms. Place are falling into their own morass of legal wrangling, perfectly willing to enter a long-term legal battle which has everything to do with publicity and nothing to do with helping Ken.

Munroe is playing with a lot of plot strings here and generally he succeeds in keeping them from getting tangled and knotted off. Ignore the cover blurbs: If you pick this book up expecting lots of action, you'll be disappointed. Munroe keeps the story at a much smaller, more intimate level. As a first person narrator, Ryan is intelligent and easily believable. His hip exterior hides a shy and awkward male who isn't sure he'll ever fit in with the rest of humanity.

Munroe has a real gift for smart dialogue and brisk wordplay, but his plotting seems less sure. He often avoids showing us the "big" scenes, preferring to skim over them or reveal them via quick flashback -- or just never do anything with them at all. We never, for example, get enough information to come to any conclusion about Cass' daughter Jessy, which feels disquieting, even if Munroe intends it to be that way. The novel is fast-paced and humorous, with enough satire to complement the bittersweet plot. "There's nothing worse than seeing a fly bang itself against a wall again and again," Ryan notes early on. At it's simplest, Flyboy is about hope, about getting past the dead ends we've all faced, and getting on with life.