Page 45 Review by Jonathan
Always nice to see someone do a different take on the superhero genre, and here we have a bitterly twisted short story by Joe (LOCKE & KEY) Hill, adapted for comics by Jason Ciaramella, that is most definitely first and foremost horror, not of the overt variety but the purely psychological kind... until the psychopath really gets going, that is...
Eight-year-old Eric loves nothing more than to play superheroes and villains with his brother, wearing the cape his mother has made for him from his old comfort blanket and emblazoned with a patch from his dead marine father’s uniform, plus a large red felt thunderbolt just for good measure. One day, during a particularly boisterous game, Eric finds himself in a bit of a predicament when a tree limb he’s balanced on breaks, sending him hurtling to the ground and he finishes up impaled on said limb, adding considerable further injury to already serious injury, never mind the insult. It’s just that in the instant before Eric began to plummet, just before he wrenched the cape off himself in floundering panic, it seemed like he was floating in mid-air. He’s pretty sure he didn’t imagine it, his brother even thought it too, though they both obviously thought better than to mention it to anyone. It’s just that Eric believes he will never know now for sure, because whilst he was lying in the hospital, head held together with forty staples, body battered and broken, his mum kindly told him she’d thrown away his beloved cape, his favourite thing in all the world, the cape that might just possibly have really enabled him to fly. Now that, that really was the insult to add to the catalogue of injuries.
Several years on, a now-adult Eric has seen his life go pretty much nowhere, plagued by near-constant headaches, whilst his brother has gone on to be a successful doctor. The one bright point in his life, Angie, the girl whom he wooed away from his brother as a teenager, has finally got fed up with his apathy and thrown him out. Forced to move in back home with his mum, moping around in his bedroom, having finally hit rock bottom, he chances across a certain item he truly thought he’d never see again, his cape. Turns out his mother simply couldn't be bothered to throw it away, she'd just hidden it. And sure enough, it wasn’t his imagination, whilst wearing the cape he really can fly. But will Eric take his chance at redemption and become the hero he always dreamed of being as a boy, or will years of bitterness and anger mean he chooses a different direction and start to settle a few old scores? Well, like I said in my opening sentence, this is a horror story...
