There's a funny thing about great ideas: they tend to strike more than one person at the same time. Penicillin, calculus, the telephone, for instance—and apparently, the idea that superheroes might actually be the worst thing that could ever happen to humanity.
In a recent weekly update video, prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson dropped a very fascinating confession while talking about new paperback editions of his Reckoners series. He revealed that he and the creator of the now-legendary comic and Prime Video sensation The Boys independently arrived at the same premise in the early-to-mid 2000s. And the idea was that superheroes are evil and somebody has to deal with them.
Brandon Sanderson recalls having a similar idea to The Boys
"It's kind of the same idea. I had the same idea as the illustrator and guy who made The Boys way back in the early to mid 2000s, about what if superheroes are evil, what would we do? And obviously The Boys went its own interesting direction," Sanderson said.
So what did each of them do with that shared spark?
The Boys started as a comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. The TV adaptation, developed by Eric Kripke for Amazon Prime Video, came in 2019 and distinguished itself as one of the most unhinged, politically charged, and oddly essential pieces of superhero fiction made to date.
The show is set in a world where superheroes called "Supes" are real, but they're owned and managed by a massive corporation called Vought International. The most powerful of them, a Superman-adjacent figure called Homelander, is a fascist narcissist with laser eyes and a god complex. The group that opposes them is the titular Boys, led by the furious and foul-mouthed Billy Butcher. They are actually less a team of heroes and more a group of deeply traumatized people with nothing much left to lose.
The series ran for five seasons wrapping up in May 2026 with its final episode. The last season brought Butcher back with a virus capable of wiping out every Supe on Earth, forcing the whole cast into impossible choices as Homelander's grip on power became total. The Boys resonated so well with fans for what it's actually saying about power, media, and the people who use both to control the rest of us.
The other version of the idea became Steelheart
Sanderson's version took a different road. He wrote a prologue for what would eventually become Steelheart (the first book in his Reckoners trilogy) in the early 2000s and then left it alone for nearly a decade.
When he did finally sit down to continue writing the story, we got a YA action-adventure novel set in a version of Chicago (renamed Newcago) where a man-made cosmic event Calamity has given random people superpowers. Every single one of them, without exception, turned evil. These superpowered humans are called Epics and they've carved the world into fiefdoms. Steelheart, the most powerful of them all, rules his city with terrifying efficiency.
The hero of the story is David Charleston, a young man whose father was killed by Steelheart when he was a child, but who witnessed something nobody else has: Steelheart bleeding. That single moment of vulnerability is David's obsession and it becomes his ticket into the Reckoners, the shadowy team of ordinary humans who dedicate their lives to hunting and killing Epics.
Sanderson recalled the premise simply and well: "It's about a group of people who kill superheroes. That's their whole job. They're a team — they're called the Reckoners — and they find someone who's superpowered who's doing terrible things and they spend an entire book figuring out how to maybe try to deal with this person."
Where The Boys is loud satire aimed squarely at corporate America and media culture, Reckoners is more of a heist-meets-thriller adventure. Both are pretty much about the same concept of what happens when power goes entirely unchecked but they couldn't feel more different in tone.
Now, the reason Sanderson brought all of this up is that the Reckoners trilogy just got brand new paperback editions, available from August 4. This is a great opportunity to start the series fresh or to revisit it if you read it a decade ago. The trilogy consists of Steelheart, Firefight, and Calamity, with an additional novella called “Mitosis” and a later standalone novel Lux rounding out the universe.
For anyone who came to love The Boys, the Reckoners series might be right up your alley.
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