The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy is a three-part book series written by William Boniface parodying comic book superheroes.
The story takes place in Superopolis, where everyone has a superpower with the exception of the main character and narrator, Ordinary Boy. He is a member of a team of superheroes (read: five fifth graders) called the Junior Leaguers who want to one day join the League of Ultimate Goodness and fight beside OB's hero and idol, the Amazing Indestructo.
The books are: The Hero Revealed, The Return of Meteor Boy?, and The Great Powers Outage.
The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy provides examples of:
- The Adjectival Superhero: The Amazing Indestructo.
- Alliterative Name: Comrade Crunch.
- Badass Normal: Ordinary Boy is indeed an ordinary, unpowered boy. However, he is still a badass Guile Hero.
- Brought Down to Normal: The plot of The Great Powers Outage involves The Red Menace taking everyone's powers by depriving them of the potato chips that empower everyone.
- City of Adventure: In Superopolis, everyone has superpowers, resulting in this.
- Chekhov's Gun: The machine in the Multiplier's lair whose purpose is unknown in the first book.
- Cloudcuckoolander: The Commune for Justice, a group of villainous hippies.
- Comically Oversized Butt: Major Bummer's name is a double meaning; he is not only constantly gloomy, but his bum is enormous.
- Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: Played straight with nearly everyone. It is explained that every successful superhero has to have a corporate sponsor of some kind, which is often heavily limiting. Amazing Indestructo is largely more concerned with appeasing his sponsors than saving the city.
- Department of Redundancy Department: The New New Crusaders.
- Disability Superpower: Lobster Boy, who has lobster claws instead of hands.
- Dirty Commies: The Red Menace is an open communist who wants to remove everyone's powers in the name of equality.
- Foreshadowing: Ordinary Boy makes a few wild guesses in the first chapter as to where everyone's power comes from. His guesses are radiation from a meteor or something in the water, after which he points out that everyone in Superopolis eats a lot of potato chips, but doubts that has anything to do with it. The cause of the superpowers? Potato chips fried in water containing radiation from a meteor.
- Everyone Has Standards: The Amazing Indestructo is an utterly craven and cowardly Corporate-Sponsored Superhero, but he's genuinely very guilty over Meteor Boy's apparent death at his hands, and he refuses to create merchandise for him out of respect for a very long time.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Inverted, as Ordinary Boy wants to be the opposite of normal.
- Innocent Bystander Series: Unsurprisingly, as OB has no superpower and is effectively helpless.
- Kid Sidekick: Went out of style with the death of Meteor Boy.
- Large Ham: AI and, to a lesser extent, the Tycoon. Professor Brain Drain has his moments of hamminess as well.
- Non-Powered Costumed Hero: OB as Meteor Boy has a jetpack but no powers.
- One Person, One Power: Stated in the first chapter.
- Powers for a Day: In the second book, Ordinary boy gets his hands on a jet pack, allowing him to fly for three days.
- Self-Made Man: AI, who actually started his own company with the Tycoon to fund his heroic exploits.
- Something Person:
- Ordinary Boy
- Plasma Girl
- Fuzz Boy
- Superhero Trophy Shelf: the Junior Leaguers use an empty aquarium as this.
- Superpowerful Genetics: Typically, characters' powers will be similar to their parents' but not identical. Ordinary Boy guesses that his lack of powers comes from his dad's heat power and his mom's cold power "canceling out."
- Tall Poppy Syndrome: This is The Red Menace's motivation to remove everyone's powers; this will make everyone equal.
- Time Travel: Brain Drain builds a time machine in book 2. It works way differently than it should. Instead of causing the user to alter the past, the user is and always has been part of the timeline. So Ordinary Boy was Meteor Boy the entire time.
- The Unreveal: Although the idea that Ordinary Boy may have superpowers after all is teased, it is never elaborated upon.
- You Will Be Beethoven: Ordinary Boy goes back in time to warn Meteor Boy about Professor Brain-Drain's plot, but instead he actually becomes Meteor Boy. This means he was a part of the timeline all along.
