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Pax Britannia: El Sombra #2
Gods of Manhattan
Blood and Thunder!
"You're in New York. Protocol went out the window the second you arrived. This isn't a protocol kind of town. This is a town that breeds monsters and heroes, geniuses and madmen. This town makes gods, and heaven help you, you wanted to be one of us."
While his sidekick lies bleeding out in hospital, city saviour Doc Thunder and Maya, his beautiful companion, attempt to discover the identity of their friend's assailant. The clues lead to secrets altogether older and darker than they could ever have imagined.
The Blood Spider – a name that strikes fear into the hearts of criminals everywhere. But unlike Doc Thunder, this vigilante is willing to kill, and it can only be a matter a time before the two heroes collide.
Mexican masked swordsman El Sombra is visiting the Big Apple, but he's not just any tourist. El Sombra is on a mission of revenge that will take him all the way into the heart of the city's corrupt underworld.
"You're in New York. Protocol went out the window the second you arrived. This isn't a protocol kind of town. This is a town that breeds monsters and heroes, geniuses and madmen. This town makes gods, and heaven help you, you wanted to be one of us."
While his sidekick lies bleeding out in hospital, city saviour Doc Thunder and Maya, his beautiful companion, attempt to discover the identity of their friend's assailant. The clues lead to secrets altogether older and darker than they could ever have imagined.
The Blood Spider – a name that strikes fear into the hearts of criminals everywhere. But unlike Doc Thunder, this vigilante is willing to kill, and it can only be a matter a time before the two heroes collide.
Mexican masked swordsman El Sombra is visiting the Big Apple, but he's not just any tourist. El Sombra is on a mission of revenge that will take him all the way into the heart of the city's corrupt underworld.
247 pages, Paperback
First published September 21, 2010
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92 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
July 27, 2013
Pure pulp adventure that fits right in the comic-book mold. Tells the crazy steampunk-ish tale of a Manhattan that's fresh off a second civil war against "futureheads" and their quasi-McCarthyite forces. Now Manhattan resides in the United Socialist States of America and superheroes like Doc Thunder and his thousand year old lover Maya and his sidekick Monk Olsen the Gorilla Reporter battle the Blood Spider, the evil Lars Larson and a still alive Hitler's forces (Hitler, naturally, still lives in the body of a nine-foot tall killer robot). It's wacky and some of the dialogue is a bit weak at times but the overall sensibility is solid and very escapist pulpy fun.
February 25, 2011
Kudos Al Ewing! The second El Sombra adventure in the world of PAX BRITANNIA is an entertaining hell of a ride. If there is one thing to complain it is the shortness with just 238 pages. I want more El Sombra.
Please Mr Al Ewing please sharpen your pen and write more about El Sombra.
Full review in progress ...
Please Mr Al Ewing please sharpen your pen and write more about El Sombra.
Full review in progress ...
May 29, 2012
This was a fun one chocked full of awesome characters and grand adventures. I would recommend it but who am I. Reads like a classic pulp does jump around a bit but kept my attention to the end. At first I thought a bit cheesy then I remembered how much I like cheese. Like I said who am I to judge . Just read it and enjoy it as much as I did.
January 12, 2015
3.5 stars want to read other pax Britannia books soon for comparison
May 14, 2017
Fun little book with fast pacing, tons of actions and references to pop culture, some which I feel were unneeded, such as the corny and hilarious scene with the Bad Romance lyrics.
Gods of Manhattan reads like a comic book and through the whole endeavor I kept thinking it would be a neat comic, emphasized by the constant parallels to Marvel comics.
The plot starts by pulling you little by little to this steam punk world and then it swallows you whole as the story suddenly hits mach 3 and never stops past the first couple chapters.
While the suspension of disbelief is heavily needed, the prose is vulgar and the characters are barely deep enough as to have any development outside their shtick, it warrants full and total recommendation if you're into action, mystery and comics. You'll love this book.
Gods of Manhattan reads like a comic book and through the whole endeavor I kept thinking it would be a neat comic, emphasized by the constant parallels to Marvel comics.
The plot starts by pulling you little by little to this steam punk world and then it swallows you whole as the story suddenly hits mach 3 and never stops past the first couple chapters.
While the suspension of disbelief is heavily needed, the prose is vulgar and the characters are barely deep enough as to have any development outside their shtick, it warrants full and total recommendation if you're into action, mystery and comics. You'll love this book.
July 15, 2019
Excellent. If you cross Siegal & Schuster's Superman with Doc Savage. Add The Spider, The Bat and other pulp heroes with Steampunk Victoriana Britain and you have a good story, especially with El Sombra the mad Mexican Swordsman in the mix.
A great read for fans of pulp heroes and alternative universes.
A great read for fans of pulp heroes and alternative universes.
November 28, 2023
I read this years ago, and even knowing it couldn't be as good as I remember it I read it again. It was better than I remember. So many homages. I mean if Zorro/The Shadow and Doc Savage/Hugo Danner/Superman going up against Willie Loman's kid/Lex Luthor and the Spider/Spiderman doesn't interest you, keep walking.
December 24, 2017
The first book of the series was OK without being great, sort of an alternative superhero but the second! I just gave up after a while, just seemed a pointless rambling?
July 7, 2021
Very fun read with pastiches of doc Savage, the shadow and others set in an interesting universe.
May 19, 2012
Al Ewing knows his stuff! This pulp-filled adventure-fest is delightfully evocative of The Avenger, Doc Savage, the original Superman Comics, and the Shadow. The prose is sometimes a bit overblown, but I suspect that is deliberate as Ewing makes mad and passionate love to comic book and pulp conventions in a rocketing novel full of twists and turns and reveals and battles. A thoroughly fun read.
Each chapter is titled like its a full-blown adventure story and many of them are. The characters all echo famous comic book and pulp characters, and yet are also neatly-drawn, providing occasional moments of true pathos. And the alternate history is the best, skittering just on the edge of believability and complete pulpy, comic book madness, but never breaking ranks, never demanding that you truly believe it, only accepting it.
I leave you with my favorite piece of it. If reading this turns you off, walk away. If it makes you salivate for more, yummy, pulpy, goodness, then pick up this book:
...He was sixty-three years old, old enough to remember the last time he'd heard that word, the word nobody ever said anymore. Old enough to remember where it had led. Old enough to not be able to hear the name McCarthy without flinching. Old enough to remember the Second Civil War, the six days of hell when you didn't know who was your neighbour and who was Hidden Empire. Six days when people you'd lived next door to for years took a knife to you, calling you a monster, a liberal, like it was a curse word, a fake American. An un-American.
And the un-Americans didn't get to live.
Sure it was mind control, or that's what most had told themselves so as not to tear the country apart for good when it was all over. Still, after that week, there wasn't a USA anymore. There couldn't be. So the big boys had made it official -- sent the message that there'd never be another McCarthy, another Hidden Empire. This was the USSA, and that's how it was staying.
There was a sign behind the bar: Doc Thunder drinks free. Pretty much every bar in New York had a sign like that, and everybody knew what it meant.
Each chapter is titled like its a full-blown adventure story and many of them are. The characters all echo famous comic book and pulp characters, and yet are also neatly-drawn, providing occasional moments of true pathos. And the alternate history is the best, skittering just on the edge of believability and complete pulpy, comic book madness, but never breaking ranks, never demanding that you truly believe it, only accepting it.
I leave you with my favorite piece of it. If reading this turns you off, walk away. If it makes you salivate for more, yummy, pulpy, goodness, then pick up this book:
...He was sixty-three years old, old enough to remember the last time he'd heard that word, the word nobody ever said anymore. Old enough to remember where it had led. Old enough to not be able to hear the name McCarthy without flinching. Old enough to remember the Second Civil War, the six days of hell when you didn't know who was your neighbour and who was Hidden Empire. Six days when people you'd lived next door to for years took a knife to you, calling you a monster, a liberal, like it was a curse word, a fake American. An un-American.
And the un-Americans didn't get to live.
Sure it was mind control, or that's what most had told themselves so as not to tear the country apart for good when it was all over. Still, after that week, there wasn't a USA anymore. There couldn't be. So the big boys had made it official -- sent the message that there'd never be another McCarthy, another Hidden Empire. This was the USSA, and that's how it was staying.
There was a sign behind the bar: Doc Thunder drinks free. Pretty much every bar in New York had a sign like that, and everybody knew what it meant.
March 21, 2012
Al Ewing, perhaps the most ridiculously under-appreciated genre novelist of our time, delivers yet another fine book. Ewing is always full of surprises, and I certainly did not expect the second El Sombra novel to be a romp filled with pulp fiction/comic book in-jokes and parodies. Ewing resurrects Doc Savage, Ayesha, Denny Colt (aka "The Spirit") and other old literary acquaintances, here very thinly disguised by slightly modified names and attributes––somewhat in the manner of Kim Newman, both analyzing and celebrating pop culture of the past: for example, Ewing satirizes superheroes of the Batman variety, while pointing up their implicit Fascism. The narrative is set in an alternate historical stream where the US went socialist following an attempted right-wing coup in the 1950s (amusingly, in this world, 'Sixties counterculture is essentially a form of neo-Nazism). There is also, as with the rest of Pax Britannica books, a fair bit of steampunk. There are brilliantly imaginative touches on every page, and plenty of wicked black humour. As a narrative, it is not as strong as the other Ewing books I've read, but it seems churlish to complain when there are so many tidbits to enjoy. I do wish a more suitable cover illustration had been used: the book cries out for a snappy 1930s pulp cover pastiche.
January 26, 2013
Didn't read book 1 of this but it sounds like (from the first 10 pages or so) that won't matter much. I picked this up because it looked different from most of the stuff I've read and it was. It's basically a book about superheroes in a kind of steampunk-ish alternate past. The main character, Doc Thunder, is obviously a homage to Superman just smarter and with less powers.
The story has a lot (too many I think) of flashbacks but I think this is done as a device to make the whole thing more "pulpy"/episodic. The writing was fun and the plots were fairly original, if fairly complicated.
So in the end this isn't something I would want to read a lot but it was fun and would be fun to try again at a later day.
Probably closer to 3.5 stars.
The story has a lot (too many I think) of flashbacks but I think this is done as a device to make the whole thing more "pulpy"/episodic. The writing was fun and the plots were fairly original, if fairly complicated.
So in the end this isn't something I would want to read a lot but it was fun and would be fun to try again at a later day.
Probably closer to 3.5 stars.
September 26, 2015
You ask Ewing to give you a steampunk, he gives you a fever dream of old pulps and Golden & Silver Age superheroes and progressive humanism and he'll even find room for steampunk. And then he'll ask "what do subcultures like hiphop and punk look like in this timeline? Do they exist? What's Andy Warhol up to?". It's barely controlled madness and humour, and writing that will take a Golden Age Superman and tell you exactly how impressiv it'd be to look at even that 'less powerful' version.
(Also, guys kill Nazis. Go El Sombra!)
This book also has one of Ewing's most defining superhero scenes: when Doc Thunder walks into Grand Central Station and the people see him, the whole place bursts into applause.
(Also, guys kill Nazis. Go El Sombra!)
This book also has one of Ewing's most defining superhero scenes: when Doc Thunder walks into Grand Central Station and the people see him, the whole place bursts into applause.
August 15, 2012
Wow. This may be the perfect pulp superhero novel. It's able to stand alone for those who don't want to read the other Pax Britannia novels and you can enjoy it without even having read the El Sombre novel (also by Ewing). I was hooked within pages and found it served up an odd fair that delivered a world full of familiar tropes but used them to tell a solid, entertaining story. It was often like a puzzle box, deliberately pulling at threads familiar from a variety of comics but never tedious or outlandish. In the end, if you don't find yourself caring about the characters I'll be surprised!
February 15, 2014
If you love the hero pulps of old this is a love letter to that begone era. There are some imaginative deep cuts as you follow pastiches of Doc Savage and the Shadow through the Pax Brittania steam punk alternate history. If anything the steam punk elements are the stories main weakness. They feel like after thoughts to the setting of the story.
All in all, I liked the story a great deal. This is the sequel to the El Sombra novel by Al Ewing. Luckily, that was not a barrier of entry for getting into this novel.
All in all, I liked the story a great deal. This is the sequel to the El Sombra novel by Al Ewing. Luckily, that was not a barrier of entry for getting into this novel.
February 21, 2011
The biggest problem with this book was that it uses source material that has been rehashed too many times. Both Planetary and Tom Strong use analogs of the same characters and in many ways do better jobs of making their iterations interesting. Ewing does a decent job with his characters though and the setting is set in an interesting piece if alternate history that I enjoyed. While I believe the setting comes from the series though and not the author, he does lend it an interesting style.
July 31, 2011
Deliberately trashy pulp sci-fi that this is intended to be, in some respects it fails to live up to its own promise.
It's churlish to demand depth from the characters but I was hoping for more interest.
The same goes for the plot. It's all okay, but nothing shocking or over the top.
It's a time passer. But nothing more.
It's churlish to demand depth from the characters but I was hoping for more interest.
The same goes for the plot. It's all okay, but nothing shocking or over the top.
It's a time passer. But nothing more.
March 9, 2012
It was a fun read... super heros in a diesel/steampunk setting. If it were the usual super hero setting I don't think I'd have cared for it as much, but the characters actually jest at the typical traits of super hero/villains, such as the villain gloating after catching the hero, or the fact that most heros are merely vigilantes.
November 25, 2011
I admit, I did not really enjoy El Sombra, but really like the Quicksilver installments of Pax Britannia. I read this one just to complete the series so far and did not expect much from it but I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed the vigilante vs. vigilante vs. superhero plot.
February 4, 2011
awesome
May 3, 2011
A BOMBSHELL OF A BOOK!!! Fun, Fast, Gritty. Give it a read if you want to enjoy something.
August 2, 2011
steam punk at its finest. the pax Britannia series just keeps getting better. that said I didn't enjoy it as much as el sombre
October 24, 2013
I *really* enjoyed this book from Al Ewing. He borrows a bit from pulp heroes like doc savage and the shadow and then twists them into a fantastic alternate history of america and the world.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews