Review: Masks & Mobsters, Vol. 1

Masks & Mobsters, Vol. 1 by Joshua Williamson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Masks & Mobsters is a collection of short, loosely connected stories set in sometime around the 1930s or '40s, in a time when costumed super heroes are just starting to show up. Obviously, for the organized crime families, this is an... unpleasant development. While the families have paid their protection money, making them largely immune from real punishment at the hands of the police or the courts, the bosses still don't like having costumed brutes smashing up their organization's operations. After one hero puts a powerful boss in the slammer, the families vow revenge. Someone is clearly leaking information to the costumed creeps, and they want to know who. But, when an enforcer for the family manages to gun down one of the most famous heroes in the city, war breaks out between the masks and the mobsters.

This volume is a little uneven, but generally a lot of fun. Fans of the pulp era should get a kick out of this reimagining of that time period. Even the weakest stories in this volume (one that is a spoof of the child adventurer stories, and another that is a riff on the Christmas Carol) still entertain, and the strongest stories here make me hope for a second volume. The artwork, black and white throughout, is quite capable, and some of the long shots, showing off the city as people run across rooftops or fly off into the distance, are just fantastic.

I'm not sure how much broad appeal this has, but for fans of that lovely pulp era, this is a loving homage well worth checking out.

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