The ideas are great – as a collection of writing prompts for books or comics, these are golden. Sadly, every single story in the anthology is terrible – like puppy barf terrible. It makes me want to do my happy dance of excitement. It’s all I can do not to just type the whole introduction in here. They make beautiful mistakes and they rethink old routines and they write about what is meaningful to their lives and their experience and I get a little delighted just thinking about it. Here, you pour the kerosene and I’ll hold the match.īecause new voices bring their passion to the table. That’s what I want.īecause I love comics, and if we have to burn down some of the old junk to make room for the next group, I am fine with that. Every color, every sexuality, all over the gender spectrum, all ages, all shapes. And I want them to look like the crowds I see at conventions all over the world. I want new voices, and I want a lot of them. Also, did I mention that the introduction is fantastic? Because it is! Here’s a quote:

I’m so excited about the diversity in the stories that I feel like this anthology is akin to a puppy that just ate my only pair of shoes and vomited the remains onto my pillow – I’m disappointed and enraged by the mess yet the puppy is too cute to properly resent. It is thrilling to see such an array of under-represented groups in spandex getting to have the happy endings they deserve. There are lesbian and gay couples, a character who is severely disabled, and superheroes of various ethnicities.

Powerless is exciting as a concept because not only is it about superheroes, it’s about diverse superheroes. LeGuin (in “April in Paris” and Ray Bradbury (in “The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair”) have somehow managed to pull off compelling, touching, and believable short stories that follow a romance from the lovers’ meeting to a resolution, but in general, short stories about love seem to succeed when they keep their scope small. It’s very difficult to write a romance short story. I’ve been burned by romance short story anthologies before. Powerless is an anthology of romance stories about superheroes. The introduction is exciting and inspiring. Powerless Against You is $2.99 at Amazon (for the Kindle edition) as of this writing, and it is worth shelling out $2.99 just for the introduction, which was written by Gail Simone. Publication Info: Good Mourning Publishing May 2014

Powerless Against You by Gail Simone