When I was sixteen, I dragged my parents all over Paris, France for a day. We weren’t going to see the Louvre, or the Eiffel Tower, or any of the usual sites. We were hunting for a particular comic book shop that was rumored to have a couple of the issues I was missing from Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams famous 1970s run on Batman and Detective Comics. My mother still talks to this day that we ended up seeing a Paris that the tourists don’t, and that it was a very valuable trip. But it was already a valuable trip for me, because I found three issues that I was missing. Because comics matter, dammit. And that’s why, when I set out to edit an anthology of prose stories about costumed crime-fighters, I didn’t want to do anything that would be less than 100% authentic. There have been attempts to do comics in prose before, with varying success (I’m quite fond of one or two of the stories in The Further Adventures of the Joker, and I really need to read Soon I Will Be Invincible), but we all know of lamentable attempts to treat superheroes with camp and irony. Masked was intended to be a superhero anthology for people who actually read contemporary comics to appreciate, and for that, we turned to the people that actually write them. So 10 of our 15 contributors currently write for DC/Vertigo, Marvel, and other comics publishers, and all of them hold a deep affection for the genre. I think that makes a difference, and I hope you will too.
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Lou Anders is the Editor of MASKED, an ambitious collection of superhero tales that provide top-notch plots and characterizations and is on-sale now. He was 2010/2009/2008/2007 Hugo Award nominee in ’07-’10, a 2008 Philip K. Dick Award nominee, a 3-time Chesley Award nominee/winner/nominee, and 2006 World Fantasy Award nominee.
Here is the editorial director of Prometheus Books’ science fiction and fantasy imprint Pyr.
