The best novels for superhero comic book fans

Jane is a comic book artist whose work is inspired by an alternate universe in which she, her friends, and her dead wife are all supers. Due to executive interference in her comics, however, the fiction and alternate reality don’t completely line up. Jane of course gets dropped into this alternate universe and has to survive the kinds of adventures she’s only written about before. The great thing about this one is that it’s not just a superhero story that happens to be a novel. It’s a love letter to the comic book format, with an incredibly visual prose style.

While this book/series doesn’t actually call its characters “superheroes,” it’s spot-on for fans of the more fantasy-based, mythological side of comics (think Thor or Wonder Woman). Maggie is an unwilling chosen one and magically gifted monster hunter from Dinétah, a former reservation and now one of the last outposts of humanity in a post-apocalyptic North America. All she wants to do is protect the people she loves, but she and her allies (some with their own magical abilities) keep getting dragged into the plotting and power struggles of Coyote and the other gods who now walk among them. It’s perfect if you like your heroes prickly, haunted, and inescapably loveable.

For a grounded take on superheroes in novel form, it’s hard to go wrong with Zeroes. This one isn’t about its bright costumes or cackling villains. It’s about a motley group of superpowered teens who can occasionally be called friends, and who do their best to become the superhero team that some of them feel they should be. The results are about as polished and stable as you’d expect. Not from a book, but from your actual high school clique given superpowers. What I love about this one is that it doesn’t re-hash the conflicts that go with the usual powers like strength and speed. These kids have some really original abilities, which get them into some accordingly interesting scrapes.

Superpowers are a classic allegory for coming of age, and Gifts uses them as such in an especially timeless and effective way. When the children of the Uplands reach adolescence, they develop powerful gifts that can be equal parts useful and dangerous. Most of them start off applying these gifts exactly according to their parents’ instructions. But ultimately, their gifts are their own, and part of accepting them is accepting the responsibility of choosing how to use them. It’s a wonderfully moody, atmospheric exploration of uses and abuses of power.

Almost Infamous was the precursor to Pinnacle City. It’s by my partner, Matt Carter, and I’m so, so happy to have gotten to play in this universe, because this book is a gloriously nerdy yet pretty cutting take on a whole lot of corners of superhero comics. It’s about this disgruntled upper middle-class high school boy who decides to become a supervillain, and ends up drafted into Project Kayfabe, a forced league of supervillains controlled by the so-called superheroes to push the public narrative in whatever direction the “heroes” want. Thankfully, Project Kayfabe is made up of all sorts of villains who ended up there for all sorts of reasons, so they’re able to learn from each other, become better people, and come together to foil the heroes’ plot.