The Darker Mask Heroes From The Shadows Edited by Gary Phillips and Christopher Chambers-- Review

The Darker Mask Heroes From The Shadows Edited by Gary Phillips and Christopher Chambers-- Review

This book is an anthology of eighteen short stories about heroes. They are not just superheros. The short story, Strega's Last Dance is about a witch who gets her revenge on the local crimelord. Avatar is about a man who sweeps away evil and is the next incarnation of the buddha or other religious figures.

There are of course many superheroes, but these heroes are often not what you expect. Walter Mosley's Picket is a young thief who acquires his powers in a most unusual way. The Henchman becomes a villain to feed his family and pay child support.

A number of these heroes come from the poor quarters and the ghetto, Dred is a heroin addict, The Remover is fighting urban blight, and Flow is found by accident by a crew of thieves. There is a strong urban component to this anthology.

My favorite story in this collection is The Whores of Onyx City by Michael A. Gonzales. Sage Steel is a young girl who watches her mother die and is taken in by Dr. Sax who trains her to become a superhero. She must fight Kidd Babylon and his Wild Bunch who are selling drugs and pimping women.

My second favorite story is In Vino Veritas. Veritas is a hero who can smell lies. He must drink to avoid being overwhelmed by the people around him. I won't give away anymore.

The mix of authors is excellent; the husband and wife team of Steven Barnes and Tannarive Due, Walter Mosley, Gar Anthony Haywood, Ann Nocenti, L.A. Banks, Naomi Hirahara, and many others. There is a very diverse ethnic background among the different writers.

At the end of the book, they give one paragraph biographies of the editors, writers, and artists in the book. There are four artists who do black and white illustrations throughout this book. I especially like the illustration of the hero, The Alienist on P.334. are Brian Hurtt, Jeff Fisher, Shawn Martinbrough, and Sean Wang.

This is a very entertaining anthology with a different take on what it means to be a hero. I did not find any stories in this anthology which were not readable. This is a real accomplishment for the editors.

A Trip To A Bookstore

Image from Hokusai Manga. A Very Early Japanese Manga

A Trip to a Bookstore

Good afternoon, I spent a little bit of time at the local bookstore which is a generic Barnes & Nobles. I did not buy anything. Occassionally, I do see things which I want to buy for myself, but not this time.

I had a free $5 gift card from Starbucks which was supposed to be good at any Starbucks. I thought the cafe in the Barnes & Noble was a Starbucks because everything in it was Starbucks. Apparently, it just serves Starbucks and the employees wear Starbucks style clothing, but it is is a Barnes & Noble cafe. I was annoyed. I had hoped to get two free medium coffees with milk. (This might have been why I was annoyed enough not to buy anything.)

Anyways, I instead walked around the store and looked at the various sections in the story. The first part which I looked at was Business. I found something interesting in the business section, apparently, Businessweek has a bestseller list. This is a link to the bestsellers for Businessweek for the last two years. http://www.businessweek.com/slideshows/ss_books.htm Hopefully, this will be useful when I have to order $3000 worth of business books. Wall Street Journal has a bestseller list for business books, but it is almost an exact match of the New York Times bestseller list for business.

There were of course your typical books on business. It of course included books by Warren Buffett, Jack Welch, and Peter Drucker the current American icons of capitalism. I compiled a short list of books which I thought might be useful to order. Two of the books which I put on the list were The Dip by Seth Godin an internet evangelist, and Stirring It up by Gary Hirshberg. I reviewed Stirring It Up earlier on this blog.

As I was wandering around the business books aisle, a gentleman asked me who I was, and I told him that I worked at a library, he gave me a business card that said he was an ecommerce development specialist.

Anyways, I then spent a bit of time looking at the science fiction titles. There were three titles that stood out, Time Spike by Eric Flint, Space Vulture, and The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. There were also a few paperbacks by Mercedes Lackey and Tanya Huff I am considering.

I also saw a few superhero mass mareket paperback fiction titles. These are not graphic novels, but movie tie-ins novelizations of recent movies. There were four that stood out. The reason people read these things is that they saw the movie and it stuck in their mind. They were Ironman, Hellboy The Golden Army, Indiana Jones and The Genesis Deluge, and Batman Gotham Knight. This was kind of fun to look at. The Ironman paperback was written by Peter David who actually is a very entertaining author who has written for Star Trek Pocketbooks, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and the Star Trek television show. This is a link to his blog:
http://peterdavid.malibulist.com/index.html

Finally, I wandered around the manga (japanese comics). I don't know a whole lot about manga, but I did notice that a number of the publishers had omnibus editions of manga, things like Fruits Basket, The Ultimate Edition which combined several of the smaller editions together. There was also The Viz Big Ruruoni Kenshin, XXXholic Omnibus Edition, and Trigun . I am going to look and see if more of the desired titles are available in either ultimate or omnibus titles. Hopefully, this will allow me to get a wider variety of titles for a little less money. I also saw a graphic novel of Vampire Hunter D, one of my favorite animes. This is a lot of fun to watch.