By Justin McCarty

Superb is very familiar. There are teenage mutants. Laws are put in place to control said mutants. And prejudice towards them from the public forces them into hiding. Also, the obligatory government agency, whose responsibility it is to track down errant mutants and inter them. The twists here are that it was meteors that have fallen that possibly caused the mutations, and the main hero has Down Syndrome. A lot of stories have been popping up that include non-traditional supertypes, they have Aspergers, (not the Sherlock kind; the normal kind) or they have autism; in this case, Down Syndrome. Some do better than others in conveying the message that being different doesn’t mean you’re less capable. Superb is definitely about perceptions: people can be more than they appear.

By Patrick Wolf

Have you ever seen one of those cheap, Chinese knockoffs? What’s interesting about these products is how they’re so similar and yet so different from the real thing. We can almost always identify a counterfeit Spiderman toy, and yet we can’t help but marvel at how similar it is to the genuine article. I think part of the reason for this phenomenon is that the Chinese knockoff isn’t a straightforward copy: it’s just so generic it feels like a duplicate. Jim Hachey’s Supernatural Agents #1 has a similar feel. While it’s not a direct rip-off, the artwork, story, and characters are so imitative; you’ll get that same feeling you experience whenever you see a counterfeit: it looks like the real thing, but it’s just too generic to be it.