Goon Squad (Jonathan L Howard) Books in Order

Goon Squad is Howard's superhero series, but it does not behave quite like a standard cape book. He describes it as a prose comic, which is a good fit. The stories are short, fast, visual in spirit, and built around a version of modern Manchester where the police have a Special Talents Response Team for cases that ordinary law enforcement cannot begin to handle.

That team is the Goon Squad.

The basic idea is wonderfully blunt. If the city is threatened by monsters, mutants, killers, and warped masterminds, then the answer is to recruit some monsters, mutants, and warped masterminds of your own, give them warrant cards, and hope for the best. The result is part superhero adventure, part police procedural, part urban horror, and part very British deadpan comedy.

A lot of the first-year material is anchored by Nadiya Kysla, better known as Puppet Girl. She enters the story trying to leave behind a notorious past and build something quieter, but joining the Squad turns out to be anything but quiet. Through her, the series gets a useful angle on the team, probationary status, trust, public reputation, and the awkward business of trying to become a hero after once being known for something very different.

She is not alone for long. The Squad includes figures like the werewolf Red Wolf, the long-serving Revenant Ian Mears, Talos, and other gifted or deeply strange colleagues. That mix gives the series a fun internal rhythm. Some members are blunt instruments, some are walking headaches, and some are carrying history that reaches much farther back than a new recruit first realizes. Howard uses that history well, especially when older cases refuse to stay buried.

The stories can work like case files, but there are bigger arcs running under them. Organized crime, cemetery horrors, impossible killings, and the recurring shadow of the Vivisector all push the series past simple one-and-done adventures. Titles like The New Girl, Nightclubbing, By the Water, By the Grave, Exterminating Angel, Holy Fool, Pomona Island, Life During Wartime, and Shadow of the Vivisector show how flexible the setup is. One episode may lean toward superhero action, the next toward gothic horror, and the next toward a grim little bit of city history.

Manchester matters here too. Even in this altered version, it feels like a real place with old ghosts, civic grime, and neighborhoods worth defending. That local grounding keeps the bizarre elements from floating away.

If you go in expecting a polished, all-explained superhero universe, this may feel looser than that. If you want energetic short fiction with monsters, teamwork, odd humor, and a city forever one bad night away from catastrophe, Goon Squad is a lot of fun.