The RIB: Daughters of Darkness by Samuel Chatman (SPFBO XI)
Daughters of Darkness by Samuel Chatman is a comic book in prose form, which mixes technology-based superheroes with standard urban fantasy tropes like vampires, werewolves and demons. (It's also another entrant in the SPFBO XI contest.)
In this alternate reality, America is divided in two: there’s the evil American Empire led by General Stone, and the country of New Abyssinia, founded by Black heroes to make a separate Wakanda-esque nation with a better technology level and standard of living than the American Empire. The book (published in 2021) is oddly prescient, talking about how the American Empire ..."invaded Canada for Montreal’s hydropower. It marched into Latin America, invading Mexico. It quickly moved to Venezuela..."
Anyway, the main bad guy, General Stone, ruler of the American Empire can’t stand New Abyssinia and he can’t conquer it... yet. And a supervillain appears in his office and makes him an offer he can’t refuse.
The story kicks off (after some exposition) with the mayor’s daughter being kidnapped! A group of female superheroes converge on the rescue and end up fighting each other, along with the actual villains. The girl is rescued, but War Maiden/Eva (a powerful daywalker vampire) falls unconscious during the battle, and the heroes take her back with them to their house. When she awakes, Wraith/Kari (a werewolf hero) suggests they form a team. Eva refuses, but eventually relents. This phase of the book introduces the heroes in their civilian identities, exploring who they are beneath the mask. Eva gets the most character exploration. She’s a university lecturer who is centuries old, and the narrative explores some of her tragic past.
However, before our heroes can form their own team, a government agent shows up and forces them to join his black ops team, dubbed the Daughters of Darkness. Now they’re directly involved in the struggle between New Abyssinia’s independence and the American Empire. The team comes together to defeat the electrical supervillain Doctor Ohm, protecting the new ruler of New Abyssinia during his inauguration.
The main strength of the book is that Chatman is fantastic at writing big-picture, set-piece action sequences. This is a great skill for a prose comic book, and it’s harder than it looks to pull off. I knew where people were in the scene and what they were doing. I knew about their powers and gear (especially the tech-based hero’s gear; Outlaw’s gear is rendered in loving detail). Chatman often dips into omniscient narration to pull this off, but I didn’t mind that, as it’s a staple of comic books.
However, there were a few issues I had. When the book shifts from the opening action sequence to the more domestic stuff in the middle, the narrative refers to the heroes using their civilian names. This threw me off a bit, and made it hard for me to reconnect with the characters (even once I figured out who they were).
The other issue is that there’s so much stuff jammed in here - vampire clans, demons, werewolves and their dens, and technology-based heroes. Additional plotlines involving more villains and the succession crisis in New Abyssinia appear. And we don’t even get to see the Daughters of Darkness directly fight the main villains introduced in the opening chapters: General Stone and the Red Butcher.
Each hero has a backstory and origin, some of which is dipped into in this first book. I would have liked some of this cut back or moved to a future book so we could have had more focus on the core team coming together. Perhaps a tighter focus on a few main characters rather than leaping into an Avengers movie to kick the series off would have worked better for me.
But overall, I enjoyed the book and would be curious to see where Chatman takes us in future installments.