Welcome to the Legion!

heroes-rebornAnd the first eBook will be free for one day only after the series premiere!

Oh Heroes.  I can’t think of any other shows with as many drastic highs and lows… especially ones so universally agreed upon by, like, everyone.  We all know Season One was great (a recent rewatch reminded me of just how good– thank you, Bryan Fuller!)… Season Three started out insufferable, but tried its best to bounce back, before aggressively deflating over the course of Season Four.  I stuck with it to the bitter end, and I’m in the minority of the one area of Heroes whose quality is up for debate– Season Two.  I don’t think it was good, per se, but it went to some surprisingly dark places for network TV at the time, and David Anders is always totally great.

Despite my downright baffling loyalty to sticking with the old series as it slid headfirst into a particularly mediocre oblivion, when it was over I never really had an interest in returning to this universe.  Like many of you reading this, my first reaction when NBC announced the Heroes Reborn event series was “Huh?”

Since then, we’ve seen a promising trailer which debuted at San Diego Comic Con, and some other intriguing clips like this one Jenna talked about earlier in the week.  I’d be lying if I said I was fully on board, but I’m going to give the new show a chance, for sure.

If nothing else, I have to admire the multimedia approach Tim Kring and his team are using to support the new series.  There’s the requisite mobile app, of course, but also much more interesting is a series of in-cannon novels, which will bridge the gap between the finale of the original series and the beginning of Heroes Reborn.  The stories will be written by some notable names in sci-fi, including Timothy Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson, and former 2000AD editor David Bishop (author of the first novel in the series), and they’ll be released in both ebook and audio book formats.

I’m not going to lie, it would be much, much cooler if these stories were being released as comic books instead, to better tie into the core themes of the show, but that complaint became much easier to deal with today, as it was announced the first book in the series, Heroes Reborn – Book 1: Brave New World, will be made available as an exclusive, free eBook download on Amazon for one day only, on September 25th.  That’s pretty cool!  It’s also the day after the premiere of Heroes Reborn, so if the show actually does end up being good (like, Season One good), then it’s nice to know we’ll have more story to delve into only a few hours after the show’s credits roll.

At best, we get an awesome book that expands the narrative continuity of the Heroes universe… for free no less!  At worst, we’ll have to read about Nathan dying for the tenth time, Claire getting mad at her dad for the hundredth time, and Sylar wavering between hero and villain for the thousandth time.  Maybe it’s just five years of newly-discovered nostalgia talking, but I’m willing to take that risk.

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Bill Sencio

Bill has been writing about toys for more than five years, and collecting them since before he WAS five. When he's not arguing for better representation in all facets of pop culture, he serves as an Editor at KastorsKorner.com, and spends way too much time in the action figure aisles at Target and Toys R Us.