A review by jazhandz
Masked by Lou Anders

adventurous dark medium-paced
  • Diverse cast of characters? No

3.25

As with most anthologies, there are some high points and some low points. More surprising to me is that this falls into the same-iness that a lot of non-Big-Two superhero media tends to. A lot of these stories have clear analogs to Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman, all of which are characters that this generation of writers would’ve grown up with. Many of the stories are repetitive, with tropes that might’ve been groundbreaking in 2010 but feel trite now (what if heroes were mean sometimes? what if violence is actually bad?). Towards the end of the collection I felt fatigued and was having trouble distinguishing characters across stories.

That said: the first story in this anthology (Matthew Sturges’s “Cleansed and Set in Gold”) is one of my favorite things I’ve read this year, and there are other high points (“Message from the Bubblegum Factory” comes to mind).
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