Let's go to superhero college.
Let’s see, I need to fill out one
more post for this month, I watched The Marvels long enough ago that I
don’t feel confident giving a summary without a refresher, and none of the
characters from The Marvels or Loki is jumping out at me as
someone that absolutely needs a Villain/Hero profile. So, I’m gonna talk about
a book I like instead. There will be spoilers after the next two paragraphs, so
stop reading then if your interest is piqued, but want to go in more or less
blind.
Super Powereds: Year 1 by
Drew Hayes is an action comedy series that is also a twist on the Magic High
School trope that literally everyone is at least vaguely aware of after the
mega success of the Harry Potter franchise. Rather than being about a Magic
High School, the story focuses on a College program that trains Superheroes.
The book focuses on five young people going through the program, the Hero
Certification Program (HCP) and their personal relationships. It’s got laughs,
fights, and drama worthy of any soap opera. The book’s world takes a little
explaining to get the full scope. So, we’ll start out with the big picture and
narrow it down until I’m talking about the five main kids. Kay? Kay.
The world of Super Powereds
takes place on an Earth like ours around the 2010s. Like most fictional
universes, this timeline follows our own right up until WW2 when things get
weird. Just after the war, a man came forward to the US government and revealed
he had superpowers, namely the ability to manipulate Light and Shadows to make
weapons. This man, later dubbed Captain Starlight, helped the US government
form a program to train others like him to protect people from crimes, natural
disasters, other beings like himself, colloquially dubbed Supers, and damages
caused by the other class of Metahuman in this universe, Powereds. In this
universe’s terminology, Supers are individuals born with powers that can
control them, while Powereds seemingly lack conscious control over their
powers. An example the book gives is of a man that can teleport, but only when
he sneezes, at any other time he’s just a dude. Powereds represent the bulk of
Metahumans in Super Powereds, we never get an exact percentage of either
but are told multiple times that there are more Powereds than Supers, and
because of that there’s great interest in finding a cure for them. Heroes in
this universe can be thought of as a cross between US Marshalls and
Celebrities, having jurisdiction to protect civilians from dangers but also
booking public appearances and appearing on TV. Heroes get a small government salary,
but are allowed to license their likeness on merch to supplement their income. The
bulk of the money they earn is expected to be donated to Charity, but the equivalents
to Spider-Man or Superman can still make bank even if 90% of their income is
donated.
Cut to the start of the book, where
two men in black suits, Mr. Transport and Mr. Numbers, are sent out to recruit
five Powereds to undergo an experimental procedure to change them into Supers. The
Mr.’s are employees of an enigmatic company that is connected to the Hero
world, but neither of them has ever worn a costume, just an FYI. Their
candidates are as follows. There’s Nick Campbell, a young man from Las Vegas
with self-described Bipolar luck. His presence can cause the most outlandish of
events to occur, either good or bad but usually a mix of the two. For example,
when he’s interviewed by the Mr.’s, he’s getting checked over in a hospital.
He’d won a big prize on a scratch off lottery ticket, was hit by a bus while
celebrating in the street, flew into a bouncy castle that had been set up, just
before the engine died, and the money he won was just enough to cover the
damages of the event and his hospital stay. Then there’s Mary Smith, a young
woman with an “Advanced Mind,” someone with Telepathic and Telekinetic powers.
Her issues? She can’t shut out the voices. She’s constantly hearing every
thought around her, every idle wonder, every angry impulse, or random song
popping into people’s heads. The noise got so bad she decided to live as a
hermit on a plot of land her Grandfather used to own. You can see why getting
to turn off the noise would be a big thing for her. We also have the brothers
Daniels: Hershel and Roy. They’re a particularly odd pair, in that some might
not even consider them a pair. Hershel is what’s known as a Shifter, he’s an
otherwise normal human that transforms into a superpowered form, that form
being Roy. Roy is essentially the Hulk, being incredibly strong, durable, and
largely immune to exhaustion. Other shifters just change their bodies, while
Hershel and Roy change their personalities as well. Their Powered status comes
from the fact that they’ll randomly switch between themselves, Hershel hulking
out into Roy for no reason and vice versa. The combination of their switching
and some personal life issues has led Roy to be something of a hellraiser and
Hershel is really hoping to get control to maybe aim his brother at something
more constructive. Then there’s Vince Reynolds. Vince is an absorber, he can
take in energy and store it for later, discharging it as he needs. His power
will switch on and off randomly, meaning that occasionally fire burns him and
other times he sucks it up and other times he discharges his full payload, it’s
always a roll of the dice. At the start of the novel, he’s being looked after
by several specialists that are trying to help him burn off excess energy he
accidentally absorbed. He was fixing a toaster, didn’t realize it was plugged
in, and then basically caused a statewide blackout. He obviously could use the
procedure so that he can stop being a metaphorical ticking time bomb. And
finally, there’s Alice Adair. She flies if she feels too happy. You might think
that that’s more annoying than life threatening like some of the others, but
her father is Charles Adair aka the Alchemist, a former certified Hero with a
multibillion-dollar corporation behind him. He tells the Mr.’s his daughter is
in, so she’s in.
Oh, and Vince and Mary have
aberrant physical traits as well. Vince has metallic silver hair and Mary has
amber eyes. These features can be a sign someone has powers, but enough people
fake these kinds of looks that Vince and Mary can still blend in.
The five kids go through the
procedure, get turned into Supers and then are offered to partake in the HCP at
Lander University in California. The idea is to stress check the procedure to
ensure that not even the rigors of hero training will cause the kids to revert
to Powererds. Mr. Transport and Mr. Numbers are assigned as their
overseers/guardians, and they’re all set up in a dorm building dubbed Melbrook
Hall. Melbrook is a heavily secure building, with a thick metal door and tons
of monitoring equipment to be sure of the student’s health and well-being. I do
not envy the random analyst that has to monitor the daily issues of college
students.
The students are initially awkward
with each other, but friendships form relatively quickly between the boys.
Vince is just overall a nice dude that wants to get along with everyone, Nick
is a loveable jackass that’s constantly breaking the tension with smart ass
remarks, and Hershel just happy to be around people without spontaneously
changing into his more powerful but shittier brother. The big hold outs are Roy, who is a massive
ego maniac that’s constantly belittling Hershel and everyone else around him,
and Alice who keeps herself aloof because she’s scared of opening up to people.
Mary is weirdly in the middle. Like, she does befriend everyone but it’s like
years of near total isolation has made it so she’s forever keeping herself one
degree separated from everyone else. If that makes sense.
The following day the students
descend into Lander’s HCP. The whole hero course is kept in an underground
complex ala the X-Mansion. It’s a huge structure with lots of combat cells,
specialized training rooms, additional hero-based resources, and anything else
the Super community could think of to stick inside it. The kids are broken up
by gender and placed in one-v-one fights, to get an idea of where everyone is
at from a fighting perspective. We’re only shown one combat match, that of
Vince. He is paired off against Michael Clark, an ice elementalist, and Vince
was dumb enough to go into the fight with only a few lighters worth of heat.
Despite an immensely lopsided situation, Vince holds out for several minutes
before getting one good Fire Punch in that almost drops Michael, but his Ice
Armor proved too tough. Vince is swiftly taken out. He does well enough,
though, to place 8th overall on the boy’s combat roster. Roy ended up
5th on that list, Mary got the top on the girl’s, and Nick and Alice
both were towards the bottom or were the bottom of their lists. So, a mixed bag
sort of day for their first HCP test.
Their primary instructors for the
HCP are Dean Blaine Jeffreys and Coaches George and Persephone. All three are
retired heroes and are the main teachers for the first year. There are other
teachers, but they’re much more specialized and the students need a lot of work
before they can train with the other teachers directly. Dean Blaine handles the
classroom work, teaching the students the Ethics of Heroism, while the Coaches
act as, well, coaches. They run extremely taxing physical work outs that try to
push these kids to their breaking point multiple times per week. Coach George
has a great speech on the first day where he basically tells the students that
they will hate him more than any other person on this planet, but if they make
it to graduation, they’ll come to thank him for the training he and Persephone
put them through. And later in the year they break the students up into Combat
training, under George, or Alternative Training, under Persephone. Combat
training is exactly what you think it is, training to fight with and without
powers. Alternative focuses on perfecting one’s power to handle any situation.
Nick is a smart ass about how one trains a power like his, where from
experience literally anything can happen, and Persephone hits him with her own
power, a pheromone that scrambles his nervous system. No, this lesson does not
convince Nick to avoid smart-assery. It does highly Persephone’s philosophy of
having alternatives to fighting head-to-head.
All the books in the series follow
a simple pattern. We follow along with the Melbrook gang as they prep for a
major test, social event, or holiday, before jumping to the next one. The
recurring events being Halloween, the mid-term exam, Christmas, Spring break,
and the final, with other lesser events sprinkled in throughout the year. Over
the course of the books, they bond with their dormmates and classmates, train
with their powers, fight (a lot), and push themselves to reach the goal of
getting their certification. A huge part of the story revolves around the
physical rigors that the kids have to go through to be a hero. These kids need
to not only reach a physical peak that’s difficult to reach but also train to
use their abilities regardless of how hurt, tired, or emotionally drained they
might be. And this is just the ‘groundwork’ that gets covered in book 1. They
also must deal with a fair amount of internalized self-loathing as they do
their best to fly under the radar as modified Powereds to the rest of their
class. Shock of shocks, when you have two types of superhumans running around,
you inevitably get classism/racism between the groups. Vince in particular has
to tread carefully in this area as he’s bad at lying and he almost immediately
starts dating a girl who is revealed to be extremely prejudiced against
Powereds.
I’ll briefly talk about our main
characters in a bit more detail. Vince Reynolds was an orphaned, former
homeless kid, though he usually refers to himself as a “wanderer.” His powers
manifested early and shockingly most foster parents or potential adoptive parents
weren’t interested in a kid that could cause blackouts or burn the house down
for no reason. He was found by and raised by a mysterious homeless man that Vince
only ever knew as Father, who taught him martial arts, how to travel undetected,
and live on the fringes of society. He was killed in a train crash when Vince
was 13, after giving him a pocket watch that must be wound up. He’s a kind
young man that is absolutely terrified of losing control of his powers again. The
procedure gave him the control that he always longed for and a chance to be a
hero, his lifelong dream. He has a lot of social blind spots given his unusual upbringing
but is an earnest kid that most people develop a liking for. He forms an
immediate liking for his classmate, Sasha, and a good chunk of his story is their
relationship and how he navigates it. Namely, he’s constantly made aware that
Sasha is immensely anti-Powereds and he’s got some intimacy issues from a
relationship he had while he was on the road. Lot of Soap opera stuff with
Vince.
Nick Campbell is also an orphan,
though he was raised primarily by his maternal aunt, Miss Pips, and her major
domo, Gerry. Miss Pips runs a casino out in Vegas, giving Nick a somewhat
unusual upbringing. She and Gerry focused on training Nick to be in control of
every situation, to reduce ‘luck’s’ influence on anything and everything he
did. They instilled a mentality of “luck is for suckers, winners cheat,” into
him. Nick is incredibly intelligent, and a gifted manipulator. Insert him into
any situation and with enough prep time, he can craft a persona and strategy to
manipulate everyone he’s involved in. Nick’s whole attitude is revealed early
on to be a ruse, a constructed persona to talk a lot, say little, and gather as
much information about people as he can. He comes across as a jackass most of
the time, but he’s an informed jackass. He doesn’t rely much on his power,
instead utilizing his intellect, weird skillset, and theatricality to get
through most situations. We only know of one time, for sure, that he uses his
power in the whole book, but boy is it a doozy. He comes across as genial with
his classmates, but on his own or with Mary, whom knows everything he thinks,
he comes across as colder and much more sinister. He’s a fun dichotomy.
Alice Adair is a spoiled rich daughter
of a single parent; her mother having died when she was a baby. Her dad’s
parenting style is emotionally distant and yet demanding, forcing Alice to
behave ‘properly’ in any situation. Her father’s wealth and attitude lead Alice
to be a rather snooty sort when we’re first introduced to her. She’s a perfectionist
with an inflated ego, and often makes snap assessments of people. Despite her
social superiority complex, being a flier in a school of people who can bench press
cars or incinerate buildings with a glance has her constantly berating herself
for being useless in most situations aside from scouting. It’s also clear early
on that she is desperately lonely but is scared to reach out to people due to
fear of rejection. She turns around quickly, though, once she and Mary start to
bond. Their friendship basically starts with Mary saying, while Alice is in
earshot, that she’d like to be Alice’s friend, but a Mind Reader that close to
her would be too much, too fast. And Alcie being like, “No one tells me what’s
too much for me!” and things spiral off from there. And while I said she has an
inflated opinion of herself, she is smart and clever, she just needs to open
her mind up a bit and assess situations better. While she’s one of the two
slowest to bond with the rest of her group, she’s clearly the most grateful to
have real friends in her life, which is very nice to see develop.
Hershel and Roy Daniels are a study
in contrast. They’re the sons of a former Hero named Titan that left his family
sometime when they were young due to a scandal, and that came with a lot of
scars. Hershel, while smart, kind, and hardworking, always feels like he’s the
unwanted tagalong to his other side. He’s got a pretty poor body image too. He’s
overweight and Roy’s go-to insult to him is calling him fat, so his self-esteem
is low. Roy is a confident asshole with an inflated ego and temper. He’s constantly
lobbing insults at Hershel, and pretty much everyone else unless he finds them
attractive enough. Oh, yeah, dude is a constant horndog. And what’s worse, he’s
the sort of guy that’ll have a one-nightstand, revert to Hershel when his time
runs out and leave Hershel to explain what happened to his ‘date.’ Hershel had
a rough time of it, yeah. While their mom, Sally, did her best with the two
boys, it seems that their father leaving the family left some huge emotional
wounds that need to be taken care of. The big one being that Hershel needs to
get confident, and Roy needs to be humbled. Mary has her work cut out for her
with these two. She’s able to do this by tricking Roy into battling Chad, their class's number one rank. Chad obliterates Roy in under two minutes, the one sided nature of their fight being the big blow needed for both brothers to grow. Roy has to accept that there are people more powerful than him and that he needs to work to catch up, and Herschel learns Roy is mortal enough to be wounded and to not be so afraid of him. Way to go, Mary.
Also, the Daniels’ were perhaps the
most heavily modified of the five test subjects. Vince, Nick, Alice, and Mary
were essentially given complete control of their powers, where Hershel was
given an on-off switch. They were given a chemical trigger, revealed to be
whiskey, that’ll cause Hershel to shift into Roy and will let Roy maintain
control if he keeps ingesting it. We’re never told what the exact timetable is,
but it seems a shot of whiskey can keep him transformed for at least an hour or
so.
Mary Smith has perhaps the most
normal background of the group. She was raised by her optometrist parents and
then her powers kicked in. Obviously being psychic has advantages, but not
being able to shut out the voices leads to their own problems. Hearing everyone’s
private thoughts, many of which referred to her specifically as a freak, proved
too much for Mary and she elected to live out in the woods as a hermit. She
wasn’t free from the voices there, as animals do have ‘thoughts’ but she was
more easily able to tune them out. After the procedure, we learned the fringe
benefit of her Powered status, though. It turns out, turning on one’s telepathy
to hear as many thoughts as one can stand and still function is a common
Advanced Mind training technique. This led to Mary being one of the strongest members
of her class. She’s top of the Women’s ranks, and there are only two on the men’s
side that could potentially overpower her. Despite this raw power, Mary elects
to focus her efforts on helping her dormmates out. She leads the charge to help
them try to adjust and improve themselves, doing her best to get everyone to
connect to each other and to force Roy into line. She has a special bond with
Mr. Numbers. The two have a weekly chess game where Mary tries to improve her
skills and to not-so-subtly give her overseer tips on how things are going with
her dormmates. She cares about them all deeply and because of that ends up as
the Dorm-Mom. A roll she pretends to take issue with, but relishes in her own
way.
And finally we have the Mr.’s,
Numbers and Transport. Mr. Numbers has a brain like a supercomputer and can
make complex calculations and strategies at a moment’s notice. Mr. Transport is
a teleporter with an absurdly huge range. The two are assigned this job by
their enigmatic company as it’s thought that Mr. Numbers could see issues
before they happen, and Mr. Transport could evacuate their charges at a moment’s
notice. Transport is the more emotionally intelligent and invested in the students
of the two. He often notices when the kids are having a rough patch well before
being told and cares for them all. He forms a tight bond with Vince especially,
doing his best to advise the one student without some kind of parental figure
when he can. Numbers is significantly colder than his partner, doing his best to
treat this as just an assignment. He’s very formal with the students and tries
to stay out of their way unless he detects danger. Despite this, he forms a
tight bond with Mary. The chess game/status reports tie them together in a
weird way. They both care about their kids, though, and are willing to put a
lot on the line for them.
This series was pitched to me by my
little brother for well over a year before I decided to sit down and read them,
and he’s been a smug git about it ever since, since I ended up loving it. Drew
Hayes has a talent for writing superpower fight scenes that I have rarely seen
in others. Some fights are just bare-knuckle brawls, but he works in full
environment manipulation into later battles. The world he created feels well
developed and incorporates a few elements into a world of Superheroes that I
don’t think many other series have touched upon. Namely that this universe has
the Super Athletics Association. Yeah, they talk about guys with superpowers
playing football and baseball on a few occasions. He has a well-thought-out
scale for how heroes assess threats and prioritize things in crisis situations,
and for how these kids get trained. Oh, and he gets extremely creative with
powers and how they’re used over the course of the books. A major plot point
throughout the story is that it’s unique application of one’s power that
matters almost more than the power itself. And it’s fun to see the kids go from
their starting skill to what their ability ultimately matures into. Alice especially,
as her powers take a fun turn by book two. The cast is also huge if that’s
something you like. Outside the Melbrook students, there’s something like
fifteen major supporting characters that you get a lot of over the course of
the books, some standing out more than others in this first go though. These
include but are not limited to Alex, a kid who thinks he’s a Jedi, Sasha,
Vince’s speedster girlfriend that has some loud opinions about Powereds, Chad, the
stoic top ranked student of their year, Thomas, a guy with basically Green
Lantern powers, and Camille, a shy healer that seems to be weirdly intimidated
by Vince. And as a final good point, the books are hilarious. The jokes and
witty dialogue of some of the characters have me laughing even on multiple readthroughs.
Nick getting nerve stunned by Coach Persephone and thus forever being wary of
her doing it again is a good recurring joke.
As for the bad… well… Drew Hayes
wrote the books online, posting chapters as he wrote them before they were all
eventually organized into the complete novel. Because of this, the chapters can
be extremely short, certain minor plots can be dropped entirely or wrapped up
extremely quickly, and some section feels just a little disjointed. There are
also some continuity errors, but those are really only noticeable for someone
like me that’s read this series four times. This first book is also rather
slow. I say that the fights are a major draw to the series, but they’re used a
bit too sparingly in my opinion in this one. One of the early major plot points
is that the students fight for combat ranks. As stated above, everyone takes
part in a tournament at the start of the year that gives them their initial
rank, and then they’re allowed to fight it out in sanctioned matches to
potentially earn higher ranks. And we see exactly two of those fights. Two. And
one of them is between side characters. The other is Roy taking on the class’s
top rank to try to win a bet against Mary and he’s obliterated by Chad in less
than two minutes. This takes place around Halloween and after multiple chapters
of Roy just being the biggest dick, it’s good to see him humbled. Book two
onwards has a better balance between the action and talking bits in my opinion.
And… there’s a diversity issue. I don’t think Drew is doing it intentionally,
and it’s something that I know he improves on in his other books, but this is a
very white book. When I say that it isn’t intentional, I feel like Drew left
the character description vague enough that he wanted people to have as much
mental creative freedom to picture characters as possible. Mary, for example,
is described as having messy brown hair and Amber eyes. Her skin tone isn’t
mentioned once, and as her eyes are not a natural shade, you could very easily
picture her as any race or ethnicity under the sun. The problem is your average
reader often defaults to white if not told otherwise. There are exactly two
supporting characters described as having dark skin tones, which adds to the
problem. If a noteworthy feature of them is that they’re darker than everyone
else, everyone else must be white, ya get me? And, for a school set in
California to not have any explicitly Hispanic students really stretches believability.
There’s also not really any good LGBTQ+ rep in the first novel. The only
explicitly gay characters in the book are side characters, and not even HCP
applicants. So, we get less of them than other side characters. And this is
more of a stylistic pet peeve for me, but Hayes has certain words and phrases
that he absolutely loves to use but can get a little grating. Not since the OK
Corral has there been so many instances of people “Shot back” at each other. Drew
Hayes also has difficulty finding the right way to write women in places. Some
of it’s definitely intentional, as Alice’s whole arc is supposed to be about
her growing beyond a material girl that makes snap judgements about people and spends
thousands of her dad’s moneys on clothes… but there are moments where I just
have to roll my eyes and say, “this was definitely written by a straight
white dude.” There’s a whole bit in the
second book where Hayes stresses that not all girls like fashion or fixating on
relationships… while having two of the women he’s written to be the least
likely to be interested in these topics turning out to be extremely interested.
It’s just kind of eye rolling.
Oh, and this isn’t bad per say, but
I figured I should include a PSA on content. This is a college setting, so as
all the students are 18+, there’s a fair amount of drinking, parties, sex, and
swearing. Hayes gets extremely creative with the swears in places, which
is true to how I remember college kids talking. Though, while sex is involved
in the plot, there are no sex scenes. We get some excessive details in places,
but the act itself never appears on page, Hayes electing to fade to black
whenever two of his characters get frisky. I just want everyone prepared to go
into the story, just in case a heavy amount of F-bombs put you off. There’s
like, metric tons of F-bombs. Again, true to how I recall college kids talking.
So yeah, that’s my general pitch
for Super Powereds: Year One by Drew Hayes. The book has it’s flaws,
some of them glaring, but overall it’s a very fun read and I highly recommend
it. The series as a whole is one of my favorites, even if the first book can be
a bit of slog to get through in places. The highs more than make up for the
lows. It’s a world that I can see existing to some degree or another, as much
if not more so than the big staples of DC and Marvel. The characters are fun
and engaging, and I like following their arcs, even if Roy and Alice in the
first half of the book can be grating as hell with their respective attitudes. I
also recommend the Audiobook version, as the narrator Kyle McCarley does an
excellent job voicing dozens of characters and acting out the story as much as
possible. There’s also a Graphic Audio version of the story but I haven’t
listened to that one personally. You probably noticed that I didn’t do a scene
to scene or a full plot beat summary of the first book here. That’s due in part
to me thinking that you’ll enjoy reading the events in full rather than reading
my summary. But also, because the books are massive, with a ton of plot wrapped
in it and just talking about everything before the midterm would take several
pages. And that’s not including the midterm itself. It’s a lot of content, so I
just assumed you enjoy a broader stroke approach this time. But it’s also
because the first book’s overarching plot really is “this is the first year of
school.” We get hints of a larger event happening in the background, but 99% of
the story is tests, social events, and the kids feeling like garbage when
someone is mean to Powereds and they say nothing. It’s the smallest scale book,
with the grander plot only being hinted at in the final chapter. This book is
overall a simple start of a story well told, and I hope you enjoy this
recommendation of mine. Have a good night.
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Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
