Book Review: "Legacy Superhero" Series by Lucas Flint
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If you enjoy superhero fiction as much as I do, then you’re always on the lookout for original superhero fiction and not just the popular characters like Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Fantastic Four. After all, every long-running character was once a brand new property.
One book series that recently caught my eye was The Legacy Superhero by author Lucas Flint, starring his original character Trickshot.
Lucas Flint and Trickshot may not be household names like Stan Lee or Spider-Man as far as authors and characters go, but he’s not exactly inexperienced either. The man’s got a whopping thirteen series to his name, all in the superhero genre. And that’s not including his crossover stories.
But The Legacy Superhero stood out to me for being a four-book series that was set on its own, without crossovers with his other characters that would necessitate me reading their books to understand what’s going on.
Boy, he’s gonna need his own multiverse retcon/reset at this rate.
Having just finished The Legacy Superhero–consisting of A Superhero’s Legacy, A Superhero’s Death, A Superhero’s Revenge, and A Superhero’s Assault–I can say that this was definitely rough around the edges, but an enjoyable read nonetheless.
Of course, me telling you that means nothing. So strap on your Trickshot Watch and let’s dive into the adventures of Jack McDonald, aka Trickshot, and his AI companion TW as we review The Legacy Superhero series by Lucas Flint.
STYLE
The writing style for this series is probably the weakest part of the book.
All four books in The Legacy Superhero are Young Adult books written in the first person perspective from 16 year old Jack McDonald, the superhero Trickshot.
There’s nothing wrong with the first person perspective and I like the fact that Jack is portrayed as an actual teenager and not an adult in high school (like every slasher film ever, or Grease), or an over-sexed little psychopath (like every slasher film ever, or Grease). He’s a kid who sees the world the way a youngster does and is headstrong and stubborn but also subservient to the authority of adults. In other words, the story gets the vibes of the power dynamics of teenage superheroes down pat, at least in my eyes.
But the prose of the story is all over the place.
The narration often involves very clunky sentences that just don’t sound right when spoken out loud, often looping around on themselves and repeating, with asides to the asides, to say nothing of the stilted speech with words that sound “written” rather than “spoken”. It’s really hard to explain, but you’ll know what I mean when you actually see it.
It would be one thing to chalk this up to Jack’s way of talking, except everyone talks this way. So I think this is just the author. I’ll just give this very early example from the very first chapter of the first book:
"You know, it reminds me of the watch your grandfather wore," said Mom."I don't know if you remember, of course, given how he disappeared when you were only six-years-old, but he always wore a watch around his wrist that looked similar to that, even when he was doing superhero work. In fact, today is the tenth anniversary of his disappearance, if I'm not mistaken."
I looked at my watch again. "You know, it does kind of look like Grandfather's watch. But that's impossible, of course, because like you said, he disappeared years ago and no one has seen him since.”
The series has a lot of that.
That said though, the extreme clunkiness of the prose aside, it really is a fun and enjoyable read. It’s very rare that you’re ever confused by what’s written when too many words are being used to describe something. The series is very straightforward and reads like a simple superhero action-adventure. It doesn’t break new grounds or challenge the reader in any meaningful way, but it’s not supposed to. The Legacy Superhero succeeds at doing what it set out to do, which is to be a simple and classic superhero fiction story played straight.
A young man becomes a superhero and puts himself at risk to save the world from evil supervillains. What more could we ask for?
ACTION
What’s interesting is that Lucas really delivers on the action in these books.
It’s strange because I really thought the action scenes were going to be an incomprehensible mess when the time came, but they weren’t. They were actually very well executed, both in prose and choreography.
All the issues I discussed earlier seemed to go away completely once it’s time for the superpowered punches to be thrown. The general tone is still there, but everything is written in a clean and well put together way that keeps you from being mentally ejected from the battle. He doesn’t describe each blow, but nothing’s too abstracted either. When a character is thrown across a warehouse through a stack of wooden crates, you can easily imagine it happening and see in your mind where everything and everyone is in relation to each other.
When I imagine the battles in my head, I can imagine a well put together fight scene in an MCU film and it works perfectly well. Nothing is too confusing to follow.
And part of this is due to the choreography. The battles aren’t too simplistic, but they aren’t too over-the-top and flashy either to the point that they’d be confusing. Lucas does a very good job of making the fights seem like they would appear in the pages of a comic book. They go on long enough to establish a tense back and forth between hero and villain, but no fight in any of these books overstays their welcome.
Thinking about it more, I’d even say that the action sequences are probably the best things in the books. Nothing mind-blowing or anything like that, of course. Just well crafted fight scenes worthy of any superhero fiction.
STORY
The basic premise for The Legacy Superhero is that 16 year old Jack McDonald is the grandson of the superhero Trickshot, who mysteriously vanished ten years ago. On the anniversary of the disappearance, Jack receives the source of his grandfather’s power, the Trickshot Watch. Together with the embedded AI, TW, Jack defends his hometown of Rumsfeld, Texas as the new Trickshot.
Each of the four books is its own adventure in an overarching narrative. In A Superhero’s Legacy, Trickshot battles a drug cartel called the Injectors that is taking over his town. In A Superhero’s Death, Trickshot must clear his name when he’s framed for the broad-daylight murder of a popular superhero. In A Superhero’s Revenge, Trickshot must battle supervillains from his grandfather’s past. And in A Superhero’s Assault, Trickshot travels to the secret base of Icon, the secret organization behind everything that’s been happening, to end their reign of terror once and for all.
From such simple synopses comes….simple stories. Or maybe I should say straightforward stories. The age rating of 12-18 years as per Amazon is about right. The stories aren’t that hard to follow along, and there’s no twists that completely change the trajectory of the plot. It’s a series of a good superhero battling evil supervillains in a variety of tried-and-true scenarios.
Where the story falters is in connecting a lot of the smaller pieces. Like with the prose, I think a really good editor could have helped out here. Characters with no significance or even dialogue are name-dropped as if they’re going to be important, things which seem like they are plot points are never addressed or brought up again, while other story elements end up being loosely connected but incredibly important.
To be clear, on the broader scale, everything works. The story as presented–both overall and the individual books–makes sense and works well as a story. Things just need tidying and tightening. We don’t need to know all about the classmates on Jack’s schoolbus if they literally don’t have a single line in the series.
The only book that kind of falters to the point where its plot points don’t connect is the second book. A Superhero’s Death needed to have its plot fleshed out more. It’s not even like any of it doesn’t work in concept, but the explanation and resolution for the murder of Baron Glory and the framing of Trickshot is just very disconnected from any of the events that actually happen.
I do need to praise Lucas, and in a way that kinda sounds like I’m insulting him, but hear me out. I’d heard once in an interview he did that he wrote each book in his first superhero series, The Superhero’s Son, in about a month each. That is a very impressive turnaround time, but a lot gets sacrificed to make that happen. I don’t know if The Legacy Superhero books have that same turnaround time, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.
So the fact that Lucas was able to churn out these books as quickly as he did, assuming that was the case, with both individual and series plots that work as well as they do is really incredible. I know if I wrote that quickly, the result would be an incomprehensible mess better resemble a school shooter manifesto than a piece of superhero fiction worth consuming.
CHARACTERS
The main characters of this series are Jack McDonald/Trickshot, and his AI companion, TW.
Trickshot is a pretty flat character. He’s not too deep and is of pretty average intelligence. He’s not too high on the social hierarchy of his school and doesn’t have any experience with girls, but he’s not a nerd being shoved into his locker every day. He really is “just your average high school student”.
But he’s a good character to follow. It’s important to ensure your audience understands your characters if their motivations and actions are to make sense throughout the story, and Lucas is able to craft something out of nothing, even if that “something” is essentially a blank slate character you can self-project onto. Jack wants to protect Rumsfeld from the drugs that infest his town and that took his brother’s life years ago, and he wants to protect the town from the threat his grandfather has warned him about through TW. His powers are well-established early on, with the watch-activated suit granting him enhanced strength, flight, night-vision, and the ability to throw metal discs at a target with 100% accuracy, even bouncing them off other objects seemingly indefinitely.
Compare this to Eric July’s Isom comics, where even after multiple issues, Isom’s motivations are unclear and the nature of his powers are less “mystery” and more “the story keeps indicating different things”. Lucas Flint gets what Eric July doesn’t.
TW is Cortana from Halo, but with a way different personality and less ability. And less, um, NSFW art online. I do like the character, despite what that might have sounded like just now. But there’s no better way to describe him. He actually has a really good dynamic with Jack, being the knowledgeable and often-exasperated old caretaker having to deal with this thickheaded teen who thinks he’s smarter than he really is. The two characters work great together.
There’s no other characters worth mentioning here. Not because there’s no other characters of consequence, but none of them have any real importance and continued presence in the series as a whole. The villains are villains, the supporting characters are supporting characters, and that’s it. There’s Jack’s friend, Kyle, who is really good with tech but not good enough to really do anything. There’s Jack’s parents, who are your average rural/small town Texas couple. And that’s about it.
The Legacy Superhero isn’t blowing anyone away in terms of character depth or what they represent. This isn’t Spider-Man or Superman or anyone who’s stood the test of time for decades, nor is it Homelander or Omni-Man or anyone with a rabbit hole of psychological depth. It’s Trickshot, and he’s here to protect the people of Rumsfeld–and the world–from evil.
MISCELLANEOUS
Despite not being a conservative myself, I really like the wholesome conservative vibe I get from this series. Jack is the son of a construction worker and a stay-at-home mom and apparently likes shooting and guns (never explored, see my issue above), and the family absolutely dislikes someone from New York who doesn’t like small town America. Yup, definitely conservative. As much as I prefer my New York superheroes, it’s cool to see stories set in small town America as a change of pace and feature people who would realistically be living there.
It’s funny because my own main character is a lefty, and I definitely get the impression that Lucas’s protagonist would be a conservative, and they’re both the same age and named Jack. A conversation between the two would be an absolute blast.
There was only one “oof” moment. It’s where Jack meets a good guy character (no more details for spoiler purposes) that offhandedly mentions that he helped stop some Uyghur terrorists in China who were working with the main villainous organization. For those who don’t know, the Ugyhurs are an ethnic group in China facing a genocide, so….probably not the best group to have used there. It’s not a big deal though. I remember laughing when I read that part.
There were elements of the world-building that didn’t really come into play that often. One of the things that gets established very early on is that superpowers come from a drug administered by the government only if you pass a test to become a licensed superhero, but none of this ever comes into play. Sadly, this detail prevents The Legacy Superhero from taking place in the same universe as SWITCH and the Challengers Bravo.
What? I like the idea of imagining that other superhero universes and stories can coexist with mine.
CONCLUSIONS
I won’t mince words. The Legacy Superhero is a flawed series. There’s really weird prose and wordflow throughout all four books. Unimportant details get focused on while important plot points can sometimes not quite connect properly. A good editor was really needed to give these books the once over.
And yet, I can’t help but highly recommend it.
Why wouldn’t I? The flaws and disconnects in the finest of finer details aside, both the premises and the stories that follow from them fit together quite well, and the pacing is just right with nothing being rushed through or overstaying its welcome.
The action scenes are fantastic. Nothing revolutionary, but they work to provide a tense conflict between hero and villain that keeps you wondering how Trickshot will survive.
The story and characters ultimately work, flaws and simplicity aside.
And I think that simplicity is why this series works so well and why I recommend it. It doesn’t seek to reinvent the wheel, but simply to roll that wheel along the smoothest possible road. It’s superheroes played straight. At a time when superhero fiction, especially prose fiction, is looking to explore the genre from every possible alternate angle, something like this is just so needed from time to time.
What’s best is that, if you’re not sure, you can always pick up the first book for free. Lucas always makes the first book of each series available for free, so it’s a great way to test the waters to see if you’re interested in reading further. I bought the rest immediately after reading A Superhero’s Legacy.
But if you are interested in checking out the whole series, the best way to do that is by reading The Legacy Superhero omnibus collection. You get all four books for a fraction of what they would cost separately, even considering the first book being a freebie.
At the end of the day, all I can say is that The Legacy Superhero by Lucas Flint kept me engaged. I felt myself rooting for Jack and wanting him to take down the villains. I found myself ruminating on plot points and wondering how they will play out in the future.
I found myself engaged and enjoying every moment of the books. As should be the case with all superhero fiction.
For exciting superhero fiction written by me, be sure to check out the BLUE EAGLE Universe!