Superhero Fiction Reading List

It’s the ultimate battle of good versus good.

They were best friends at an elite academy for superheroes in training, but now Callie Bradford, code name Iridium, and Joannie Greene, code name Jet, are mortal enemies. Jet is a by-the-book hero, using her Shadow power to protect the citizens of New Chicago. Iridium, with her mastery of light, runs the city’s underworld. For the past five years the two have played an elaborate, and frustrating, game of cat and mouse.

But now playtime’s over. Separately Jet and Iridium uncover clues that point to a looming evil, one that is entwined within the Academy. As Jet works with Bruce Hunter—a normal man with an extraordinary ability to make her weak in the knees—she becomes convinced that Iridium is involved in a scheme that will level the power structure of America itself. And Iridium, teaming with the mysterious vigilante called Taser, uncovers an insidious plot that’s been a decade in the making…a plot in which Jet is key.

They’re both right. And they’re both wrong. Because nothing is as simple as Black and White.

Imagine what it would be like to walk through walls. Kathy Allen doesn’t have to. She already can. She and her friends aren’t normal. They’re stronger, faster and have amazing abilities that no normal human could ever have … but they aren’t superheroes. Yet.

Right now, all Kathy’s powers are good for is getting her to school on time. She knows she could do much more, but the professionals are handling all the normal crimes. Until now.

A masked thief emerges that no one can stop. He leaves no clues. Security systems are no challenge for him, but Kathy thinks she and her friends are. The chance to prove themselves has arrived. And when you’re a superhero, what can possibly go wrong?

Everything.

Critic Xavier Thaxton detests popular culture. But when a wildly improbable plunge into a pool of toxic waste gives him an allergy to High Art and transforms him into (of all things) a costumed superhero, he is forced to reconsider his values–and his life.

The Darker Mask is a collection of original prose stories offering new interpretations of the beings we call superheroes. Unique to this book are characters and stories that color a universe beyond those found in previous homages to pulp. These are tales of extraordinary folks who have been ignored, marginalized, stereotyped. They may lurk in the shadows of a soon-to-be-gentrified ghetto, the dreary rust belt of the city, or in another dimension or planet entirely. But they are heroes, nonetheless.

What do you do if you can deadlift a car, and you spend your nights flying to get away from it all? If you’re fifteen-year-old Avery Pirzwick, you keep that information to yourself. When you’re a former jock turned freak, you can’t afford to let the secret slip.

But then Avery makes some friends who are as extraordinary as he is. He realizes they’re more than just freaks—together, maybe they have a chance to be heroes. First, though, they have to decide whether to trust the mysterious Cherchette, a powerful wouldbe mentor whose remarkable generosity may come at a terrible price.

I’m pretty sure you already know who I am. As for everyone else… I don’t think there are enough people left to make a secret identity worth the effort.

Stealth. Gorgon. Regenerator. Cerberus. Zzzap. The Mighty Dragon. They were heroes. Vigilantes. Crusaders for justice, using their superhuman abilites to make Los Angeles a better place.

Then the plague of living death spread around the globe. Despite the best efforts of the superheroes, the police, and the military, the hungry corpses rose up and overwhelmed the country. The population was decimated, heroes fell, and the city of angels was left a desolate zombie wasteland like so many others.

Now, a year later, the Mighty Dragon and his companions must overcome their differences and recover from their own scars to protect the thousands of survivors sheltered in their film studio-turned-fortress, the Mount. The heroes lead teams out to scavenge supplies, keep the peace within the walls of their home, and try to be the symbols the survivors so desperately need.

For while the ex-humans walk the streets night and day, they are not the only threat left in the world, and the people of the Mount are not the only survivors left in Los Angeles. Across the city, another group has grown and gained power.

And they are not heroes.

Ryan is a shy university student who can turn into a fly.

Cassandra is a waitress at a greasy spoon who can make things disappear.

In a world of political revolutionaries, indie rockers, zinesters, hardcore feminists, rave kids and slackwater poets, they are the Superheroes for Social Justice ?battling cigarette barrons, redneck tabloids, the patriarcky, and other forces of evil!

Impossible, you say? So what?

Having finally defeated all archenemies, the members of the Fantastic Order of Justice are reduced to engaging in toxic office politics that could very well lead to a superpowered civil war. Only one woman can save them from themselves: Dr. Eva Brain-Silverman, aka Dr. Brain, the world’s leading therapist for the extraordinarily abled.

1926. New York. The Roaring Twenties. Jazz. Flappers. Prohibition. Coal-powered cars. America is in the midst of a cold war with a British Empire that has only just buried Queen Victoria, her life artificially preserved to the age of 107. Coal-powered cars roar along roads thick with pedestrians, biplanes take off from standing with primitive rocket boosters, and monsters lurk behind closed doors and around every corner.

This is a time in need of heroes. It is a time for The Ghost.

A series of targeted murders are occurring all over the city, the victims found with ancient Roman coins placed on their eyelids after death. The trail appears to lead to a group of Italian American gangsters and their boss, who the mobsters have dubbed “The Roman.” However, as The Ghost soon discovers, there is more to The Roman than at first appears, and more bizarre happenings that he soon links to the man, including moss-golems posing as mobsters and a plot to bring an ancient pagan god into the physical world in a cavern beneath the city.

As The Ghost draws nearer to The Roman and the center of his dangerous web, he must battle with foes both physical and supernatural and call on help from the most unexpected of quarters if he is to stop The Roman and halt the imminent destruction of the city.

The last thing in the world Thom Creed wants is to add to his father’s pain, so he keeps secrets. Like that he has special powers. And that he’s been asked to join the League – the very organization of superheroes that spurned his dad. But the most painful secret of all is one Thom can barely face himself: he’s gay.

But becoming a member of the League opens up a new world to Thom. There, he connects with a misfit group of aspiring heroes, including Scarlett, who can control fire but not her anger; Typhoid Larry, who can make anyone sick with his touch; and Ruth, a wise old broad who can see the future. Like Thom, these heroes have things to hide; but they will have to learn to trust one another when they uncover a deadly conspiracy within the League.

To survive, Thom will face challenges he never imagined. To find happiness, he’ll have to come to terms with his father’s past and discover the kind of hero he really wants to be.

On a soggy November night in 1940, New York City’s protector and top gangbuster, a trench coated, masked vigilante known as the Silver Scorpion, is about to be murdered by a turncoat cop. Suddenly a pretty blonde appears in an expanding ball of light and shoots him point blank with what looks like a shiny metal bazooka. The Scorpion disappears.

One hundred and forty years later, a clandestine organization known as the Lazarus Project prepares to risk incarceration, ruin, and death in order to reverse the effects of almost a century and a half of decadence and corruption. America’s once great city is now its biggest cesspool.

It’s a daunting task. The good people of the city have all given up or moved out. The evil rule ruthlessly. The city needs a hero. The city needs hope. It needs the Silver Scorpion. It’s about to get him, ready or not.

A thrilling, unique anthology of original super hero fiction, with contributions from luminaries in both the comic book and science fiction fields.

• Introduction: The Golden Age by Lou Anders
• “Cleansed and Set in Gold” by Matthew Sturges
• “Where their Worm Dieth Not” by James Maxey
• “Secret Identity” by Paul Cornell
• “The Non-Event” by Mike Carey
• “Avatar” by Mike Baron
• “Message from the Bubblegum Factory” by Daryl Gregory
• “Thug” by Gail Simone
• “Vacuum Lad” by Stephen Baxter
• “A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows” by Chris Roberson
• “Head Cases” by Peter David & Kathleen David
• “Downfall” by Joseph Mallozzi
• “By My Works You Shall Know Me” by Mark Chadbourn
• “Call Her Savage” by Marjorie M. Liu
• “Tonight we fly” by Ian McDonald
• “A to Z in the Ultimate Big Company Superhero Universe (Villains Too)” by Bill Willingham

The shining metropolis of Seventh City is the birthplace of super powers. The First Wave heroes are jerks, but they have the best gifts: flight, super strength, telepathy, genius, fire. The Third Wavers are stuck with the leftovers: the ability to instantly make someone sober, the power to smell the past, the grace to carry a tray and never drop its contents, the power to produce high-powered excrement blasts, absolute control. over elevators.

Bar owner Keepsie Branson is a Third Waver with a power that prevents anything in her possession from being stolen. Keepsie and her friends just aren’t powerful enough to make a difference. at least that’s what they’ve always been told. But when the villain Doodad slips Keepsie a mysterious metal sphere, the Third Wavers become caught in the middle of a battle between the egotistical heroes and the manipulative villains.

As Seventh City begins to melt down, it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad, and even harder to tell who may become the true heroes.

Sixteen-year-old Damien Locke has a plan: major in messing with people at the local supervillain university and become a professional evil genius, just like his supervillain mom. But when he discovers the shameful secret she’s been hiding all these years, that the one-night stand that spawned him was actually with a superhero, everything gets messed up. His father’s too moral for his own good, so when he finds out Damien exists, he actually wants him to come live with him and his goody-goody superhero family. Damien gets shipped off to stay with them in their suburban hellhole, and he has only six weeks to prove he’s not a hero in any way, or else he’s stuck living with them for the rest of his life, or until he turns eighteen, whichever comes first.

To get out of this mess, Damien has to survive his dad’s “flying lessons” that involve throwing him off the tallest building in the city–despite his nearly debilitating fear of heights–thwarting the eccentric teen scientist who insists she’s his sidekick, and keeping his supervillain girlfriend from finding out the truth. But when Damien uncovers a dastardly plot to turn all the superheroes into mindless zombie slaves, a plan hatched by his own mom, he discovers he cares about his new family more than he thought. Now he has to choose: go back to his life of villainy and let his family become zombies, or stand up to his mom and become a real hero.

Doctor Impossible—evil genius, diabolical scientist, wannabe world dominator—languishes in a federal detention facility. He’s lost his freedom, his girlfriend, and his hidden island fortress.

Over the years he’s tried to take over the world in every way imaginable: doomsday devices of all varieties (nuclear, thermonuclear, nanotechnological) and mass mind control. He’s traveled backwards in time to change history, forward in time to escape it. He’s commanded robot armies, insect armies, and dinosaur armies. Fungus army. Army of fish. Of rodents. Alien invasions. All failures. But not this time. This time it’s going to be different…

Fatale is a rookie superhero on her first day with the Champions, the world’s most famous superteam. She’s a patchwork woman of skin and chrome, a gleaming technological marvel built to be the next generation of warfare. Filling the void left by a slain former member, we watch as Fatale joins a team struggling with a damaged past, having to come together in the face of unthinkable evil.

As night manager of Santa Cruz’s quirkiest coffeehouse, Marzi McCarty makes a mean espresso, but her first love is making comics. Her claim to fame: The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, a cowpunk neo-western yarn. Striding through an urban frontier peopled by Marzi’s wild imagination, Rangergirl doles out her own brand of justice. But lately Marzi’s imagination seems to be altering her own reality. She’s seeing the world through Rangergirl’s eyes–literally–complete with her deadly nemesis, the Outlaw.

It all started when Marzi opened a hidden door in the coffeehouse storage room. There, imprisoned among the supplies, she saw the face of something unknown – and dangerous. And she unwittingly became its guard. But some primal darkness must’ve escaped, because Marzi hasn’t been the same since. And neither have her customers, who are acting downright apocalyptic.

David Brinkley used to be a hero, the greatest the world had ever seen–until he retired, got married, moved to the suburbs, and packed on a few extra pounds. Now all the heroes are dead or missing, and his beloved New York is on the edge of chaos. It’s up to Brinkley to come to the rescue, but he’s in the midst of a serious mid-life crisis–his superpowers are failing him.

At long last this classic satire that inspired comic books like Watchmen and Miracleman is back in print. It’s a hilarious thriller that digs deep into the American psyche.

A shared-universe superhero prose anthology edited by George R.R. Martin.

It all began in 1946, when the bizarre, gene-altering Wild Cards virus was unleashed in the skies over New York City. A virus that created superpowered Aces and bizarre, disfigured Jokers.

Now, thirty years later, the victims face a new nightmare. From the far reaches of space comes The Swarm, a deadly menace that could very well destroy the planet. Putting aside their hatred and mistrust, Aces and Jokers must form an uneasy alliance and prepare for a battle they must not lose. . .

Twenty-two of today’s most talented writers (and comics fans) unite in Who Can Save Us Now?, an anthology featuring brand-new superheroes equipped for the threats and challenges of the twenty-first century — with a few supervillains thrown in for good measure. Edited and with contributions by Owen King (We’re All in This Together) and John McNally (America’s Report Card), Who Can Save Us Now? enriches the superhero canon immeasurably.

With mutations stranger than the X-Men and with even more baggage than the Hulk, this next generation of superheroes is a far cry from your run-of-the-mill caped crusader. From the image-conscious and not-very-mysterious masked Meathead who swoops in and sweeps the tough girl reporter off her feet; to the Meerkat, who overcomes his species’ cute and cuddly image to become the resident hero in a small Midwestern city; to the Silverfish, “the creepy superhero,” who fights crime while maintaining the slipperiest of identities; to Manna Man, who manipulates the minds of televangelists to serve his own righteous mission, these protectors (and in some cases antagonizers) of the innocent and the virtuous will delight literary enthusiasts and comic fans alike.

With stunning illustrations by artist Chris Burnham, Who Can Save Us Now? offers a vibrant, funny, and truly unusual array of characters and their stories.