Critiques en avant-premièreMike Madrid

“Innovative form and spellbinding content. . . . Stories, as Tod Davies’s History of Arcadia novels ultimately suggest, serve as a civilization’s backbone, and it is therefore in stories too that we can discover the potential for fundamental change and a better society.” —Marvels and Tales You won’t need to have read any other of The History of Arcadia books to become engrossed in the drama of Aspern Grayling, whose obsession with creating a new life form—in the person of ruthless adventurer Pavo Vale—could destroy all his world. A compelling descendant of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this is a tale of a man bent on conquest, and of an adversary that may yet defeat him: the ghost of the Arcadian Devindra Vale, the only woman he has ever loved.

The classic alternative history of American comic book superheroines, in a new and revised edition."An essential read for pop-culture enthusiasts, feminists, comic-book readers, and social justice warriors."Kirkus Reviews,/i>“Madrid’s meticulous and passionate research provides a window into a seemingly lost herstory of patriotism, bravery, and progressive ways of thinking about female agency and adventure.” —JENNIFER K. STULLER, author of Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology

The Lizard Princess crosses mountains, oceans, deserts, and the Moon Itself to learn that it takes an animal, an angel, and a girl to make a great queen. “Innovative form and spellbinding content . . . Stories, as Tod Davies’s History of Arcadia novels ultimately suggest, serve as a civilization’s backbone, and it is therefore in stories too that we can discover the potential for fundamental change and a better society.”—Marvels & Tales

A rogue’s gallery of the most seductive and dastardly villainesses in Golden Age comics “Mike Madrid is doing God’s work. . . . mak[ing] accessible a lost, heady land of female adventure.” —ComicsAlliance “These ‘lost’ [characters] are now found—to the delight of comic book lovers everywhere.” —STAN LEE “Lovers of comics and strong women everywhere thank you, Mike Madrid!” —TRINA ROBBINS, author of Pretty in Ink: Women Cartoonists 1896–2013 Between the covers of Vixens, Vamps & Vipers, fans will rediscover the original bad girls of comics—as fierce and full of surprises as they were when the comic book industry was born. From murderous Madame Doom to He-She, dubbed by io9 as “the most unsung comic book villain ever,” Mike Madrid resurrects twenty-two glorious evildoers in fully reproduced comics and explores the ways they both transcend and become ensnared in a web of cultural stereotypes. Among the deadly femme fatales, ruthless jungle queens, devious secret agents, and double-dealing criminal masterminds, are some of the very first women of color in comics. These women may have been overlooked in the annals of history, but—like their superheroine counterparts in Divas, Dames & Daredevils—their influence, on popularculture and the archenemies that thrill us today, is unmistakable.

Wonder Woman, Mary Marvel, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle ruled the pages of comic books in the 1940s, but many heroines of the WWII era have been forgotten. Divas, Dames & Daredevils uncovers these “lost” heroines’ influence on our most popular superheroes and reintroduces their ingenious abilities to mete out justice to Nazis, aliens, and evildoers of all kinds.

For readers age 12 and up, this is a fairy tale within a fairy tale that can be read with pleasure for its story, and also for the deeper meanings about the struggle for a better world (or worlds), and how that better world can best be formed. It is for people who love discovering windows into other worlds through films like those of Guillermo del Toro and the books of Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula K. LeGuin, and John Connolly's Samuel Johnson Tales series. It is also for anyone who cheers the comeback of the fairy tale through its contemporary reimagining in television series like ABC's Once Upon a Time and anthologies like the World Fantasy Award-winning My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.