What if the stories you read in your comic books were based on real events? What if the superheroes you adore were real people, doing real things to protect your city? If you’ve asked yourselves questions like these over the years while browsing the new release racks (or maybe the back issue boxes) at your local comic book store, then you should pick up AshleyRose Sullivan’s Awesome Jones and Lona Chang.

Back Story

Awesome Jones carries the tagline of “a superhero fairy tale,” and such an apt tagline it is. In this book, you get a superhero origin story in fairy tale format. We start with our intrepid prince, one Mr. Awesome Jones (quite the name, eh?) who is toiling away at his mundane day job. He dreams of being like the superheroes he reads about in comic books while he falls in love with the amazing Lona Chang. His tragic back story involves the unexplained loss of his parents, and hints are given that maybe Awesome Jones is more than your everyday file clerk by his inexplicable ability to do certain tasks insanely well or extremely fast.

Learning about Awesome’s heritage and accepting who he is is the key to achieving all he has dreamed of. Yet as in most dreams that come true, there is always a catch. Fast forward to Awesome Jones getting his wish only to find that nothing is ever quite what it seems on the outside.

Lona Chang is the follow-up to Awesome Jones, and it focuses on Awesome’s partner, Lona. This book carries the tagline “a superhero detective story,” and it delivers on the promise. Following closely behind the story from Awesome Jones, we turn our focus to Lona as she begins to learn more about her own power. Her power is much more subtle than Awesome’s but in many ways even more intriguing.

After the death of the city’s most popular, and arguably most powerful, superhero happens in front of her, Lona begins a quest to unwrap the mystery of his death. She will remove the shroud worn by the Guild of Superheroes as well as find her own self-worth. Along with many of the characters we met in Awesome Jones, we get to see Lona come into her own. She uses her skills to protect her loved ones and the city she calls home in a much different way than typical superheroes do.

Thoughts

Sullivan has a very unique writing style, and I really enjoyed it. It can take a bit of time to get used to, but once you do, you find yourself zipping through the text. Each of these books feels very much like reading a comic book but with a few more words and no pictures. I realize that is a really strange description, but it really does help capture this style.

Even the formatting lends to this feeling by having large margins and expanded spacing between very short paragraphs or blocks of dialogue. It evokes a feeling similar to that of reading a well-crafted graphic novel… just without any pictures.

If you check out reviews of the books online, you’ll find that Awesome Jones has higher ratings than Lona Chang, but I wholeheartedly disagree. Awesome Jones was quite good, but Lona Chang is a much more fulfilling story. Lona is a more complex character, and I found myself having more thoughts and feelings about (aka being more invested in) her story.

If I had to pick one bad thing about this pair of books, it would be the reliance on cooking dinner, doing the dishes, and reading the paper to set the mood for every domestic scene between our two main characters. I sort of wish I had kept count, as it really does happen every time they are at home together, and it was clearly noticeable. But if that’s the only bad thing I have to say about the books, then I think that’s a good sign.

(Disclosure: Copies of both books were provided from Seventh Star Press for purposes of review.)