A DEMIGOD (1886) – Written by American author Edward Payson Jackson, this work preceded Philip Wylie’s Gladiator by more than 4 decades.
We readers are told that in the early 1600s physician Kenelm Vere decided that human beings were not living up to their potential. He established a remote laboratory in Greece, and purchased a female he deemed physically perfect. Dr. Vere mated with her and began a selective breeding program with their offspring, with their children and grandchildren enhanced by his own scientific tweaking over the decades.
In 1880s Greece, Kenelm’s sole surviving descendant Hector, now spelling the family surname as “Vyr”, is a human wonder. Hector has Adonis-like physical beauty, intelligence far ahead of his time, greater than human strength and amazing reflexes that allow him to dodge bullets fired at him. Continue reading
THE MAN IN THE BLACK CLOAK (1886) by P.T. Raymond (Francis W Doughty). Before Batman there was the Shadow. Before the Shadow there was Judex. And before Judex there was the Man in the Black Cloak, or simply the Black Cloak as I’ll call him for short. And ironically, four years before The Man in the Black Cloak was published there was simply The Man in Black, a story I will examine another time. 
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