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Zap Force #1: Royal Blood
Welcome to Sparta City, circa 1995, where seven super-powered teenagers fight for their lives and their freedom against covert cabals of ancient, evil immortals who yearn to outfit them all with high tech alien mind control slave collars – or low tech earthly bodybags, whichever works.
Yes, here in Sparta City, it’s the neurotically networked 90s as they never really were, a time and a place when centuries old evildoers scheme, conspire, machinate and manipulate, while teenage superheroes leap, flip in midair, hurl lightning bolts, cast illusions, punch, kick, fly at supersonic speeds, kick ass, take names, and generally blow stuff up real good.
Seven stalwart students at Sparta University, inadvertently given unique and insane ultrapowers by an exotic on-campus psychology experiment gone horribly awry, and now avidly sought after as super-powered slaves by every other secret super society on the planet –
Yes, here in Sparta City, it’s the neurotically networked 90s as they never really were, a time and a place when centuries old evildoers scheme, conspire, machinate and manipulate, while teenage superheroes leap, flip in midair, hurl lightning bolts, cast illusions, punch, kick, fly at supersonic speeds, kick ass, take names, and generally blow stuff up real good.
Seven stalwart students at Sparta University, inadvertently given unique and insane ultrapowers by an exotic on-campus psychology experiment gone horribly awry, and now avidly sought after as super-powered slaves by every other secret super society on the planet –
145 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 25, 2009
1 person is currently reading
About the author
D.A. Madigan
109 books15 followerspart time adult, full time husband and father, well into my advanced youth, deeply committed to making fetch happen
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 17, 2018
A book that reminds us that the 90's were a dark time for comics.
Some lame college students become super heroes and fight secret societies for no discernible reason.
Some lame college students become super heroes and fight secret societies for no discernible reason.
February 28, 2014
I'm the author of this book, so of course take this opinion with a grain of salt.
When I was in college, I had the good luck to be mentored by two guys who have since then gone on to become fairly well know, award winning creators in the comics field. One day early on in our friendship, both of them told me that superheroes had been created for the visual medium of comic books, and you could not do a superhero story well in printed text without pictures... they were designed to require the big spectacular pictures.
I always felt that this was wrong, that it should be possible to capture that crazy kinetic energy and that weird willful "I don't wanna grow up" hyper-energy in text. The pictures are nice, yes, but for me, it was always the story -- the characters, the plots, the dialogue -- that really made the difference between a good comic and a bad comic.
ZAP FORCE is meant to be my response to them. It's a superhero comic without pictures, hopefully infused with all the goofy charm of the Silver Age comics of the 60s and 70s I loved as a kid, but with a slightly (only slightly!) more realistic, four dimensional backdrop. I think of it as sort of "What if Alan Moore wrote the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers". It's meant to have admirable heroes, incredibly hateable villains, and endless explosions of non-stop action. It's meant, to quote a Frank Miller character from long ago, to "blow up real good".
If you come into this book expecting some kind of serious galactic epic, you are going to be badly disappointed. If you come into looking for a fun pulpy Silver Agesque romp of good vs evil in bright four color costumes, well, welcome. Sit down. And strap yourself in. We start out at Mach 5 and then we hit the afterburners...
When I was in college, I had the good luck to be mentored by two guys who have since then gone on to become fairly well know, award winning creators in the comics field. One day early on in our friendship, both of them told me that superheroes had been created for the visual medium of comic books, and you could not do a superhero story well in printed text without pictures... they were designed to require the big spectacular pictures.
I always felt that this was wrong, that it should be possible to capture that crazy kinetic energy and that weird willful "I don't wanna grow up" hyper-energy in text. The pictures are nice, yes, but for me, it was always the story -- the characters, the plots, the dialogue -- that really made the difference between a good comic and a bad comic.
ZAP FORCE is meant to be my response to them. It's a superhero comic without pictures, hopefully infused with all the goofy charm of the Silver Age comics of the 60s and 70s I loved as a kid, but with a slightly (only slightly!) more realistic, four dimensional backdrop. I think of it as sort of "What if Alan Moore wrote the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers". It's meant to have admirable heroes, incredibly hateable villains, and endless explosions of non-stop action. It's meant, to quote a Frank Miller character from long ago, to "blow up real good".
If you come into this book expecting some kind of serious galactic epic, you are going to be badly disappointed. If you come into looking for a fun pulpy Silver Agesque romp of good vs evil in bright four color costumes, well, welcome. Sit down. And strap yourself in. We start out at Mach 5 and then we hit the afterburners...
January 24, 2014
Really, I'm being generous by giving this one two-stars for effort. As a super-hero novel, it reads like an Image Comic from the nineties; no substance and only attempting to look good. The author seems to want to tell a major epic, but doesn't really lay the groundwork for it. The story is like you've stumbled into the middle of a Champions or Villains & Vigilantes campaign and you're only given Headline News or Pop-Up Video factoids to find out what's going on.
That sort of storytelling's device can and has worked in capable hands, but this book seems to be missing so much of the basic requirements for a self-pubbed novel that it is a virtual stereotype: Poor formatting, a very amateurish cover, a lack of cogent editing of any kind, and a lot of broken writing rules. There's way too much telling instead of showing.
If the book had better formatting and pacing, this might be an okay story, even ignoring the 1990's comics roots. The way it is, it's straight Rob Liefeld. And that's never good.
That sort of storytelling's device can and has worked in capable hands, but this book seems to be missing so much of the basic requirements for a self-pubbed novel that it is a virtual stereotype: Poor formatting, a very amateurish cover, a lack of cogent editing of any kind, and a lot of broken writing rules. There's way too much telling instead of showing.
If the book had better formatting and pacing, this might be an okay story, even ignoring the 1990's comics roots. The way it is, it's straight Rob Liefeld. And that's never good.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews