#ex-heroes

Contrary to expectations, "unconventional" (exe. Tracksuits, sports wear, fancy outfits) clothes are not good candidates for super-hero costumes.

Written by one Peter Clines, Ex-Heroes is actually a series of books, of which Ex-Heroes is the first. It’s about a good old fashioned zombie apocalypse. The twist? It’s also about superheroes.

I got it on the strength of the superhero angle. I normally don’t have any use for zombies whatsoever.

“Saint George” Bailey, the erstwhile Mighty Dragon is the most recurring viewpoint character, though several of the others also get their turn.

They call the zombies exes. Not because of some idiotic attempt to be edgy and original because they’re not REALLY zombies you guys they’re just normal people who are being controlled by a mutant fungus because zombies are boring and dumb and we’re edgy and original.

No, these zombies are proper zombies. People die and then they stop being dead. The dead come back to some semblance of life. They call them exes, short for ex-humans, because it’s just easier for people to accept than zombies.

But something is rotten in the state of Denmark California, because St George and the people of “The Mount”, a re-purposed movie studio in the heart of Hollywood, are not the only survivors.

A former street gang, the South Seventeens, has also managed to eek out a living with a few thousand survivors as well, but they’re not willing to let bygones be bygones because their leader has a beef with one of George’s cohorts, a hero who goes by the name of Gorgon.

The story is split between chapters marked Then and Now, with the former largely taking place before the “zombocalypse” and exploring the lives of our heroes before the fall of humanity.

Rounding out the team of heroes is Zzzap, a star in the shape of a man. Or a man in the shape of a star. Or something. Barry Burke is the resident pop culture junkie, though his references are a bit dated since there’s no more culture to be pop.

Cerberus, the woman who built a super suit of powered armor and who kicks ass and takes names.

And last but certainly not least, the leader of our ragtag group of heroes, Stealth. She’s got no powers, but with mad skills and a keen intellect, she kicks more ass and takes more names than anyone. She’s like Batman, basically.

There were other heroes before the fall, such as Cairax, the demon man, whose death, so rumor suggests, came about when the guy attempted to...shall we say do untoward things with an undead actress.

^This lady So what I like about Danielle Morris/Cerberus is that she's a take on the Iron Man archetype in the context of an otherwise deliberately incredibly low-budget superhero universe, a setting where, with the exception of one millionaire, the superhero population consists almost entirely of working-class people in kludged-together wetsuits and motorcycle leathers who only get away with their low-rent costumes by virtue of the fact that they do, in fact, have incredibly potent superpowers. This is a hard circle to square, aesthetically, if you also want to introduce a hero who uses power armor, because that shit's expensive.

The solution? Cerberus doesn't debut after the other half of the book's elevator pitch, the zombie apocalypse, is already well under way. The fact that there's only one set of the armor despite the extensive documentation that must exist is due to the fact that the armor is a prototype, slated for eventual mass production but hastily deployed as a show of force by a rapidly disintegrating military that's at the point of just throwing whatever they've got at the wall to see what sticks. The typically-inadvisable trope of the suit's chief engineer also being the field pilot is initially justified by the fact that she's the only person left who knows how to operate it; and then by her reluctance to train a second person on how to operate it because she comes to be psychologically dependent on the physical protection it provides her. Protection that's at least somewhat illusory, to boot, because if you take a shot for every time the suit very realistically suffers a power failure or mechanical failure at a crucial juncture, you're going to lose your liver. The collapse of the logistics network impedes the armor's ability to work at full capacity almost from the start; those bracers on her arms in the above illustrations are for .50 Caliber machine guns that ran quickly out of ammo after her first skirmish and had to be mothballed. The series is very clear that Cerberus wouldn't be viable in the long run if she weren't on a team with several other superhumans, including an electrokinetic and a technopath, who can help cover the suit's weak points. Ironic, given the implication that the original point of Cerberus was so the army would have an answer to those same people. Overall, the armor is paradoxically portrayed as both viable and nonviable.

(Ex-Heroes)

This is why the (five?) good ones are all big-two elseworlds that can bank on the audience having a pre-existing emotional connection to the character stable being used, but that carries the double-edged sword of the audience knowing that the story doesn’t actually count.