Killer Collaboration: Jay Bonansinga and Stan Lee!

As those who follow my Instagram account know, I’m a fan of Jay Bonansinga. His images sizzle and pop on the page; his story lines demand I go on reading. The immediate connection he builds between a reader and his characters drives us forward, page after page. Don’t read him at bedtime!

            In Stan Lee’s The Devil’s Quintet: The Armageddon Code, readers get more of Bonansinga’s driven prose around superhero characters of the like not seen before.  This collaboration, like a Marvel movie that we cast in our heads as we leap from page to page, brings these two brilliant artists, Stan Lee and Jay Bonansinga, together for the first of what I hope are many more books.

            See, the thing that grabs us, I think, about a superhero, isn’t just the power he or she has but the manner in which it arrives and the cost it exacts on the individual. Here, this team of elite Spec Ops warriors, nick-names Hack, Ticker, Pin-up, and Boo, under the tight leadership of Spur, are thrust into powers they do not seek, to which they must adjust in a hurry or be wiped out by the very source of evil that empowers the human foes they oppose.  It isn’t enough that they face thechallenges and grave costs of combat and counterinsurgency; the powers, two edge swords, that have come to them could cost them their souls.  No matter a superhero’s power, what saves or destroys him or her is the ability to make the next right choice.  As elite operatives, their lives are already on the razor’s edge of split decision moments that could cost them everything. Their new powers could claim their souls.

            Of all the things I like about this book, though, I think my favorite thing, played out more in the many characters interactions, is the sense that it isn’t solely their action that saves them but something about their individual commitment to fight evil. There, we see aspects of ourselves making the best of situations that demand our action and test our values.  A superhero, after all, is only as compelling as his/her mission, the forces that oppose him/ her.  Lee and Bonansinga take us deep into the costs of the superhero’s commitment to the mission that drives them and let’s us think, in our own small ways, about our need to be true to our missions. I invite you to read this book as well as Book Two in the Series, The Shadow Society, and talk to me about it.

by M.J. Downing