Super hero, or super colonoscopy advertisement?

What make a hero “super”?   This is a serious question.  Is it a costume that makes a super hero?  Well, I’m sure Steve Austin would disagree.  Is it powers that make someone a super hero?  Tell you what – I’m not going to be the one to take that up with Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Nick Fury, or Frank Castle.   Guns?  Again, I would refer you to the Goddamn Batman or Oliver Queen.  Or Clint Barton.  Do your parents have to be killed, or special, or special and killed?   There are plenty of heroes out there that still have more family members than grave stones.

What I’m getting at is that a super hero isn’t someone who wears something or uses a specific weapon, or has a “particular set of skills”.   You could have phenomenal cosmic powers and wear all the spandex the ’80s had to offer, and still not even come close to hero status, let alone get to be one of those personages who is cheered by thousands as they streak across the sky toward the villain holding the city for ransom.  The mark of a real super hero is making the right choices at the right times, hard choices that can come back to haunt them later.  Choices that often result in the aspiring cape getting the crap kicked out of them for it.

Now we all know that comic books are your primary source of catch-phrase poets.  DC and Marvel alone are putting out movies, graphic novels, and even full out literary works featuring their well known stables.  Then you have the up-and-coming labels like Zenescope, Valiant, et al., which are keeping the Big Two honest and making sure that wherever you turn,there are new and interesting heroic types trying to save the day.   With all that and Marvel’s full on movie juggernaut it’s a really good time for heroes and the geeks that love them.  But did you know that there has been a renaissance, one with the non-spandex, non-comic-book types,in the literary world as well?

With self-publishing now an established and practiced reality, many new authors have popped up all over the place and been given a chance to be heard without having to run the gauntlet of the traditional author shaming machine (AKA Big Publishers).  Granted, this is good and bad, as for every ass-kicking former merc with daddy issues who’s sword finds vampires delicious, you get an over powered wielder of a pet god-bear and a weak willed whining demon-witch who no one in their right mind would take orders from.  It can make finding the good stuff an expensive, time-consuming, and mostly disappointing chore.

Well, not anymore.  We here at SuperHeroSpeak are dedicated to finding you the best, brightest, and more importantly, the most bad-ass literary superheroes there are. That way you can kick back and enjoy one good story after another without the need to sully yourself with, say, a rather blatant advertisement for a religious group in the form of a fantasy trilogy (we’ll get to that one in the future).   We will literally kill our brain cells for your benefit, after which we will probably ask you for donations to fund our therapy.

Before pet god-bear, and after pet god-bear.
Pro-tip: Don’t give your main protagonist a pet god-bear.

On a bi-whenever-the-hell-I find-time schedule, I am being forced going to read a book and review it here.  Most of the novels will be urban-fantasy based, since that genre most closely resembles the comic book universes we hero geeks are comfortable with and enjoy the most.  If we get enough requests that I don’t delete quick enough [ed. Please stop hacking the comment admin account], I will get to enjoy and review, for you, other genres or settings so long as the main character or characters can, at the very least, be loosely defined as super-ish heroes and not bumbling idiots that deus ex machina their way to victory/…profit.

And with that, we’re off.   The first book I am grinding through is Steve McHugh’s “Crimes Against Magic”.  See you in [length in units of time].