Masked (2010) (2 page)

The San Diego Comic-Con is now a respected entertainment industry event, covered in major newspapers and staked out by marketing professionals eager to get on the radar of its core demographic, with attendance levels well over 100,000 each year. And years have even passed since works like Michael Chabon’s
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
, Jonathan Lethem’s
Fortress of Solitude
, and Austin Grossman’s
Soon I Will Be Invincible
brought the superhero (or supervillain) to mainstream “literary” respectability. Meanwhile, the Wild Cards books, created and edited by George R. R. Martin in 1987, are once again back on shelves, delighting new audiences with their shared universe of superhe
roics, and the character of the Escapist, created by the fictional Golden Age writer and illustrator protagonists of Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2000 novel, was himself adapted into an actual comic book series published by Dark Horse Comics. And recently,
Time
magazine selected Alan Moore’s landmark 1986 graphic novel,
Watchmen,
as one of the “100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.”

But we knew that already. After all, the start of the “Modern Age” of comics dates from 1986, with the publication of Moore’s
Watchmen
and Frank Miller’s
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
, seminal works that established the potential of the comics medium for powerful, adult storytelling. Works that we grew up reading.

Perhaps that is why now is the true “golden age” of comics, the best time to appreciate their wonders. All the history, and diversity, that has come before gives us such a rich playground now, a cornucopia of narrative choices, along with an informed and sophisticated audience ready to receive it. The modern comic scribes work with the confidence of knowing that the best of their offerings will be appreciated in and out of the field. Now is a time where everything is possible; there are no limits. After all, seven decades of storytelling has taken us to this point.

The superhero has come into its own, a powerfully pervasive meme threaded through every aspect of our lives, from toys, to games, to graphic novels, to television and film. It enjoys commercial success and mainstream respectability. There has never been a more exciting time to don spandex and a cape, and exploring this phenomenon in prose is a no-brainer that even the worst supervillain couldn’t begrudge us.

The anthology you have before you is just that—an attempt to explore the superhero genre in prose form; not as a pastiche or a parody, or a bunch of writers slumming it and having a lark at the genre’s expense; but an honest exploration, with the integrity and level of storytelling that contemporary readers of comic books and graphic novels, as well as fans of films like
Iron Man
and
The Dark Knight,
appreciate and demand. You know, “real” superheroes.

What follows are fourteen tales, the majority by actual masters of the comic book form, the rest by some of the most exciting writers of contemporary science fiction and fantasy working today. The results are exceptional. So what are we waiting for? If a nod to our camp past can be excused as we fly into our sophisticated future, then set your atomic batteries to power, your turbines to speed, and let’s up, up and away. . .

Lou Anders

From His Secret Headquarters (aka “his office”)

Matthew Sturges
has worked on such DC and Vertigo titles as
Shadowpact, Countdown to Mystery, Salvation Run, House of Mystery, Justice Society of America, Blue Beetle
, and
Final Crisis Aftermath: Run!
With Bill Willingham, he is the coauthor of the Eisner award–nominated
Jack of Fables
, chosen by
Time
magazine as number 5 in their Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2007. In the world of prose-without-pictures, he is the author of the novels
Midwinter
and
The Office of Shadow
, which mix espionage and magic in stories amid a cold war in the realm of faery. One of the hottest writers in the comics field today, Sturges possesses a genius that is evident in the story that follows, a wonderful introduction to his world, and to this anthology.

M
ATTHEW
S
TURGES

I’m on the
ground, trying to breathe through a chest full of broken ribs. The only reason I’m still alive is because I happen to be invisible at the moment. Verlaine is dead. His body is twitching, trying to patch itself up, but the thing that killed him is chewing on his heart, its long tongue flicking. I can hear Verlaine’s fingernails scratching against the rocks.

We all thought Verlaine was immortal. He wasn’t.

Some low-level administrative assistant from the League of Heroes is trying to take a statement from me in my hospital bed. I’m sort of trying to comply, but each time I breathe it’s like someone’s sticking a giant fork in my chest. So I’m not as cooperative as I could be.

“How big was this thing?” he asks.

“Biggest one I’ve ever seen,” I whisper, carefully mouthing the words.

“But still a Ghoul? Same physiognomy?”

“His ‘physiognomy’ is his face. You mean ‘morphology.’”

The lackey scowls at me. “Sorry,” he says.

“If you don’t know what a word means,” I say, “don’t use it. Then you won’t have to apologize.”

He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, looking around the ICU ward, maybe hoping that there’s some more desirable Leaguer that he can pester. But there isn’t.

“Anyway, to answer your question, no. He wasn’t like the others. He was bigger. He. . . his fist was like. . .” I hold up my fist and five needles of pain lace across my chest. I notice that the nail on my left index finger is bent backward, nearly disconnected. They’ve put a bandage on it. This bothers me more than the ribs for some reason.

“His fist was the size of your head,” I finally say. “He put it through Verlaine’s chest like Verlaine was as mortal as you.”

The lackey puts his minirecorder on the table by my bed. His hand is shaking. “How many of them were there? This new variety.”

“I just saw the one. He was leading the others, though. Can you imagine that? A leader. A Ghoul King.”

The next day, the headlines read
GHOUL KING KILLS RUSSELL VERLAINE
. I can imagine the League’s PR people going back and forth on this. “Is it worse if we admit that there’s some kind of new mutant giant Ghoul running around, or if we imply that Russell Fucking Verlaine was murdered by some
regular
Ghoul?” I don’t envy them.

After I leave the hospital—against medical advice; which, whatever— I take a taxi back to my apartment. A few unpleasant bites choked down and a potent healing factor kicks in, spreading warmth throughout my battered bones and knitting everything together in
seconds. Oh, God. Yes.

I decide that it’s best not to appear too healthy at Verlaine’s funeral, so I take care to walk slowly and gasp for breath every few paces. I’ve even gone so far as to put on fresh bandages around my chest. In case someone uses their X-ray vision to look under my shirt, I guess. Although if they could do that, they could see that my bones aren’t actually broken anymore. It doesn’t matter, though, because all of the people who’re capable of doing so wouldn’t care. And anyway, one of them is lying dead in a box in front of me.

I’m sitting on a cold metal folding chair, pretending to be hurt, watching them lower Verlaine into the ground. It turns out that they need a special crane and a steel-reinforced casket for all of this, because Verlaine’s body is so dense that he weighs just over three tons. The news media are fascinated. Jesus, Russell Verlaine makes good TV, even dead.

When you think “hero,” you think Russell Verlaine. You don’t think of me. I’m not particularly good-looking, I don’t have a fascinating origin story, and I don’t even have a constant set of powers that you can put on a trading card. “David Caulfield, The Wildcard. Powers: variable” is what the League Reserves card they did for me reads. You can buy it for a penny on eBay. Shit, I don’t even wear a costume. I go around fighting criminals and monsters in jeans and an AC/DC concert tee. I am nobody’s favorite hero.

I don’t mind, really. The last thing I need is intense media scrutiny. The less they know about me, the better.

I stay until the coffin is in the ground and the bulldozers have filled in the earth. I’m the only one left except for Jeanie Verlaine, who’s sitting on the ground in front of her husband’s grave. The last thing I’m going to do is go try to comfort her or something, so I whisper my last respects to Russell from my seat and then I get up and try
to walk away without Jeanie hearing me.

At the entrance to the cemetery is a woman I vaguely recognize as a reporter for one of the wire services. She’s standing by the gate, smoking, trying to look casual.

“Hey,” I say. “If you’re waiting for Jeanie to come out so you can ambush her, forget it. That’s the last thing she needs right now.”

“Hi, David,” she says, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I’m Toni Evins, from Reuters.”

She intercepts me before I can cross the street. “I’m not here to ambush Jeanie Verlaine,” she says. “Give me some credit.”