Dear Reader,
We Could Be Heroes is dedicated to “good friends,” and it feels like this is more important than ever before after the year we’ve been throug How do we connect with other people? How do we build the trust necessary to let people into our homes and our lives, to share our triumphs and collapses with them, to enjoy simple pleasures like a cup of coffee or a cheesy horror movie with them?
This book was born from those questions and the underlying idea that friendship matters. In our popular culture, there’s such an emphasis on every story needing a romance—which certainly has its place—but friendship, as I think we’ve all discovered through 2020 and beyond, is invaluable and often taken for granted. I wanted to tell a story about two people who shouldn’t be friends on paper, but form that bond without romance ever entering into the picture.
Of course, this is also a book about superheroes and supervillains! A terrible superhero and a reluctant supervillain, to be more precise, and there’s a certain joy in writing Jamie and Zoe as they banter over the course of their enemies-to-friends tale. As a lifelong comic reader, I was thrilled to twist traditional superhero tropes on their ear while focusing on the people that live under the capes and cowls.
All of that might sound like an unlikely combination, which is totally fitting for We Could Be Heroes. It’s a story of misfits, ill-fitting duos, and a friendship that somehow makes it to the finish line, even if they bicker most of the way.
Oh, and there’s a cat named Normal, who is based on my real cat named Nermal. Nermal meows a “thank you for reading.”
Mike Chen
