Company History
Founded in 1999 by Frank Fradella under the name Cyber Age Adventures, iHero Entertainment was among the best and the brightest in the electronic publishing medium. For six years, the Cyber Age Adventures ezine produced the most ground-breaking, thought-provoking fiction in the world, and did it all in the midst of a unique, shared superhero Universe.
In 2001, Cyber Age Adventures won the coveted Writer’s Digest Grand Prize for their Zine Publishing Awards, and invited company founder, Frank Fradella, to serve as a founding member of their Zine Advisory Board, helping to shape the future of electronic publishing.
New Babel Books grew out of that initial foray into publishing and now iHero Entertainment stands as our superhero imprint, featuring a fully-realized universe of unique characters and locales.
The iHero Universe
The iHero Universe, or iHeroverse, is a world very similar to our own. It is identical to our world and our history save for the fact that there are people among us with capes and cowls and fantastic powers who exist to help others, or help themselves.
We use the terms “heroes” and “villains” only in the loosest sense. These are people. Some of them are selfish. Some of them are good samaratins. But very few of them are pure evil or saintly good. They have the same motivations as anybody else.
While there had been costumed vigilantes prior to 1944, it was The Minuteman who introduced our world’s first superhuman. A product of the infamous Manhattan Project, Corporal George Gordon was hand-picked by his superiors to undergo a process that would make him a living weapon against the Axis forces, capable of responding to a threat anywhere on the planet in under a minute.
The war was all but over by the time Gordon entered the scene and he quickly found that the Nazis had developed their own übermensch, a charmingly evil powerhouse called Master Blitzkrieg.
With the introduction of atomic testing, super powers began to manifest naturally in a small percentage of the world’s population. Some of those people donned masks and became heroes. Some of them simply kept it to themselves and went on with their lives. Others, who had no powers at all, were inspired by the rising tide of costumes adventurers and joined the fray. While not technically “super” heroes, these costumed crimefighters play an important part in keeping the peace on a local level.
Since the Minuteman’s first flight, the world has became almost overrun with superhumans. In addition to their “normal” appearance on the street and in the skies, some of them are celebrities, doing endorsement deals, their faces on billboards. Others have found a way to make their compulsion a career, joining their local police forces or being part of the U.N. Peacekeepers, a group of superpowered agents tasked with policing the global community from non-conventional threats.
Costumed villains sprang up, too, finding that the costumes not only protected their identity, but that bystanders were less likely to get involved.
Supergroups cropped up, many of them retreating to hidden headquarters in their off-duty time, choosing to share their true identities with a hand-picked few. Others, like the Crusaders, went to work for the government.
Of all this, perhaps the most important thing to note is that the iHero Universe exists in real time. Our characters age at the same rate you do. They get hurt, they fall in love, they even die. “Legacy” heroes often take the place of the fallen, adopting their costumes and fighting styles so that the world at large continues to believe that the legend lives on.
With the constant escalation of superhumans, the world is a pressure cooker, slowing reaching critical mass.