Heroics

Superman came to life just when the country needed a hero. Facing the still-fresh wounds of the Great Depression and the growing threat of another World War, he flew into the collective conscious as a man of steel who could leap tall buildings in a single bound and speed faster than our fastest trains. Today, we still need heroes, they're just not always as clear cut - or normal - as a man in blue tights with X-ray vision and a billowy red cape. Okay, that's not so normal either, but you get our point.

Anyway, this space between the typical and the not typical is where the writers of Heroics dabbled to create eight new superheroes that border on the strange and linger just around the corner of absurd. Stephen Graham Jones (Zombie Bakeoff, It Came from Del Rio) shows us the business side of being a vigilante. Rebecca Gale (Trying, Boxfire Press 2012) takes us deep into a mine that's very hungry and Glenn Yonezawa listens in as a sidekick bares his soul in therapy. Connor Cleary flips the coin and shows us what happens when a henchman is so over his bad-guy boss and Keith Kennedy takes us behind the lines of a true battle between good and evil. Wayne Ligon's Straight Arrow yearns to hone some new powers and Quincy Jones asks us to consider the psychic anguish of a heartbroken, 30 million year old mind reader.