SUPERHERO SATIRE

Caped, a new title from Boom by writers Josh Lobis and Darin Moiselle and artist Yair Herrera, may be the freshest take on the longjohn lunacies since John Kovalick’s Blink. At first, the book seems to be about “Capital City’s Nocturnal Soldier,” a caped and cowled night-time prowler who bears an intentional resemblance to a certain Dark Knight. Named Edge, he arrives too late to save a supposedly innocent bystander in the first issue’s opening pages, a tardiness some observers believe indicates that the Nocturnal Knight is slipping in his old age. The focus, however, quickly shifts to a young would-be newspaper reporter named Jimmy Lohman, who, because he can’t find other journalistic employment, accepts a job as “assistant” to Grant Godfried, a super reporter who has gone through 27 assistants in the last four months.

Turns out — surprise! — Godfried is secretly Edge, and so young Jimmy becomes “assistant” to a costumed crime fighter. Edge shows him his subterranean “EdgeCave” and then takes him to another catacomb underneath an abandoned football stadium, which Edge calls a “superhero precinct” because it is a shelter or workshop for a few dozen superheroes and their assistants, one of whom takes Jimmy under his wing to show him the ropes.

“Stay away from the action,” the guy warns Jimmy, “ — we don’t get health insurance, one of the many ways we assistants get ‘caped,’ superhero lingo for ‘screwed.’” With that, the issue’s episode is virtually completed: we know, now, that we’re in a tongue-in-cheek title, confirming an earlier suspicion fostered when Jimmy asks Edge if he acquired his powers by falling into a vat of chemicals and Edge says, “Why does everyone always assume it’s chemicals” — but doesn’t explain what did endow him with superpowers. Maybe later. The concept of superheroic action, sometimes fumbled, experienced from an assistant’s perspective is tantalizing enough to get me to buy the next issue. This is not a slapstick take on superheroing as is Sidekick; this is an attempt at seeing superheroing at the elbow of a superhero but somewhat more realistically than Sidekick. It’s not satire; it’s human interest.