July 2011 - Super Powered Fiction

Cosplay Friday: Genderbent Martian Manhunter (and company)

By Nick Ahlhelm | July 29, 2011 - 4:45 pm | Comics, Coolness

Just because I am taking a birthday break doesn’t mean I won’t bring some comic costume goodness to the fine folks that peruse this site. This week we feature not one, but several costumes as featured in the LA Weekly Style Council blog straight from the San Diego Comic Con.

Martian Manhunter is portrayed by Claire Max and is something of the exception to the costuming rule.

Martian Manhunter leads off an entire group of Justice League members with switched gender roles. The entire stunt was designed to point out the major differences in costume designs between male and female comic characters. Males tend to be fully clothed, females… less so.

After all these weeks of young women featured, here's something for the ladies!

Anyone interested in seeing the rest of the team can check them out at the LA Weekly Blog, including pictures of Superma’am, Batma’am, The Flash, and Green Lantern.

Photos taken by Shannon Cottrell and copyright her and/or their respective owner.

8-Bit Cop: Back to the beginning

By Nick Ahlhelm | July 29, 2011 - 1:17 pm | MHP Network

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Where Shade and Hand discuss the nature of life.

The long weekend begins….

By Nick Ahlhelm | July 28, 2011 - 8:00 am | Comics, MHP Network

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Today is your humble blogger’s birthday, so alas, I will be taking today and tomorrow off from my usual blogging activities. You will have to wait until Tuesday to get more quality superhero fiction related updates.

In the meantime, why not read some web comics?

And don’t forget today’s new Pulp Empire story, “Cat in the Hat” by Christopher J. Ferguson!

Super Powered Prose: After the Golden Age

By Nick Ahlhelm | July 27, 2011 - 4:29 pm | Prose

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Carrie Vaughn has been writing the Kitty Norville series of fantasy-romances for some time now, but it appears that Ms. Vaughn has been a closet super powered fiction fan the whole time. Over the last couple years she produced two stories for the “Wild Cards” collections Busted Flush and Inside Straight, as well as a new story for a revised and expanded edition of the original volume of Wild Cards.

But those stories pale in scope to her new novel After the Golden Age. In a story that would do Kurt Busiek proud, Vaughn chronicles the life of Celia West. Celia is the daughter of Commerce City’s greatest heroes Captain Olympus and Spark, two of the key members of the Olympiad. Unfortunately for her, she has no powers and spends large chunks of her time being used as hostage or bait for her superhuman folks.

When she’s not being kidnapped, she works as a forensic accountant, digging in to old records in an attempt to find criminal activity. She becomes a key witness in the case of the Destructor, the city’s greatest villain, and one that she has a dark tie to in her past.

Over the course of just over 300 pages, Vaughn delves deeply in to the life of a young woman invariably tied to a group of superhumans, even as she struggles with the search for her own identity in the world. It makes for compelling reading and a book that’s just plain hard to put down.

I was blown away by Vaughn’s prose in this novel and I’m already on the lookout for new material from the author. After the Golden Age comes Highly Recommended.