Super-Heroes: the Fact Behind the Legends by Gyles Brandreth, illustrated by David Symonds: Knight Books 198

I remember getting this book out of the library in the late 80s. I remember three things: 1) The title “Superheroes” coming out of the cover with no pictures.

2) there was an illustration of James Bond casually filing his nails with a Bond behind him as he is surrounded by henchmen with guns; and

3) There was an entry for Paddington Bear.

Now I know we all have our definition of what is and what is not a superhero and where I might disagree with you, I can typically follow your chain of logic.

BUT PADDINGTON BEAR???????

Surely my memory is faulty, I’d mixed up Superheroes with David Pringle’s Imaginary People or some other reference work that I had read at the same time.  I mean it was like 40 years ago.  I must have been mistaken. But I was so certain of those three things it would pop into my head every now and then.  Recently, the thought popped up again and I decided to track down the book and put the whole thing to bed.

Easy peasy you say a book called Superheroes with no author. Let’s pop “Superheroes” into the title search on Abebooks or some other online book search tool.  Over 12,000 hits.  Let’s scroll through the results

“Superheroes don’t clean their rooms”

“Your Guide to Superheroes”
“Marvel Superheroes”

“Big brothers are Superheroes”

And many many many more that just aren’t the book.

However, I did know that the book was likely published in the late 70s or early 80s and I had a feeling it was British. 

So I start limiting the search by time which would knock out many of the results and I find Gyles Brandreth’s book.

The cover had the title coming out of the page that I remembered but had a subtitle and a guy in a plain white superhero suit (I wonder if Mark Millar saw this book and that was the inspiration for Nemesis)

But that cover might just be another printing or I just misremembered but I found a copy at a reasonable price and ordered it.

The book arrived and I flick through and there is the James Bond illustration almost as I remembered but the Bond girl was not there.

I am not doing well on my memory for this book, maybe I was wrong about Paddington Bear.  I flick a little further in the very thin book and DAMMIT the bear is there.

I read the introduction and Brandreth gives no rules or rationale for what he sees as a superhero. He merely states that these are characters are his favourite characters.

Looking over the 35 entries there are several that I certainly would not have considered superheroes, Robinson Crusoe, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Dan Dare, Peter Pan and Tin Tin just to start.

If the book had been titled Adventure Heroes or Action Stars or something similar these would have made more sense.

The entries themselves are fine a nice two or three page profiles but there are some errors, Alan Scott’s successor as Green Lantern is referred to as Hal Gordon instead of Jordan (but that could be a confusion with Flash Gordon or a simple typo).  Look I get it I’ve written my own similar non fiction works and errors happen.

Perhaps more egregious is Dr John H. Watson is referred to as Dr Henry Watson.   I mean the H might stand for Henry but there is no Henry Watson in the Cannon of Conan Doyle Stories.  Speaking of Cannon, he says that Irene Adler is the love of Holmes’ life – that’s not in the Doyle stories that’s from several of the continuation authors.  Ideally you should only reference the Conan Doyle stories or make it clear that you are referencing a continuation work (such as Baring Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street for example).

For adventure heroes, this is not a bad quick reference work for a young reader of 10 or so.