Review: Sidekicks

Sidekicks by Arthur Mayor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's difficult to find a good supers book. I was in the mood for one, and looked at and discarded more than 30 before settling on this one. I'm glad I picked it up; it was well done, with a bit of depth to the main character, and not too trope-ridden given the genre. The supers are not obvious knockoffs of Marvel or DC characters, and a bit of thought has gone into their powers.

It was also better edited than the average superhero novel, though sadly that's a very low bar to clear. An editor is credited; I'm sure she caught a lot (by the nature of editing, the audience never sees what the editor caught), but she missed a lot of omitted vocative commas (the "let's eat Grandma" error), some vocabulary issues (homonyms and mangled expressions), a couple of apostrophe glitches, and a few other assorted minor problems. It wouldn't be hard to clean up to a high standard.

The setting is a dark and gritty city filled with urban blight, corruption, and supervillain-organized crime, in which a group of technically illegal vigilantes known as the Guard try to protect the innocent as best they can. Led by the Batman-esque Raptor (who, unlike Batman, does have superpowers, but like Batman is grim and rigidly disciplined), they put their sidekicks/apprentices through a rigorous training regimen and impose strict rules on them, including keeping them isolated from the wider superhero community.

This is a problem when the senior members of the Guard are ambushed and killed, leaving the sidekicks out of their depth, not knowing how to access key resources or any assistance from other supers, and (thanks to the strict rules of their mentors) not really knowing, or in some cases liking, each other very well at all.

There's a strong theme throughout of the main character, who only has a low level of superpowers, having to choose between sensible safety and doing the right thing, and he goes back and forth between the two choices. His first-person narration is filled with self-deprecating banter inadequately covering over terror; he goes through some very traumatic events on his way to a rousing conclusion (that then has doubt cast on it as an effective setup for a sequel).

The other members of his team, apart from Butterfly, who can go into a robotlike mental state in which she can calculate odds and angles with extreme accuracy, don't get much development. Flare is mostly angry, Peregrine mostly a tool (though the rivalry between him and the narrator, Raven, does shift towards a shaky alliance in the course of the book), and Ballista mostly vulnerable; Butterfly gets an arc, in which she struggles with an issue similar to, but sufficiently different from, the safety versus heroism issue Raven faces. Her robotic mindset is a refuge from the fear and horror she's feeling, but it takes away from her humanity, so neither one is truly safe, and she needs both parts of herself in order to be an effective hero.

There's a sequel, which I will definitely read. It's a decent job of writing, with more emotional depth and subtlety than a lot of supers books, and I enjoyed it.

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