The Cape Books in Order

The Cape stories start with a simple, almost childlike wish: what if you could really fly? Joe Hill’s answer is that it would probably not make you a better person. In this series, the fantasy of putting on a cape and soaring into the sky curdles into something petty, vindictive, and finally horrifying.

The original short story introduces Eric, a kid who loves superheroes and gets badly hurt in a childhood accident while wearing his cape. Years later, he’s an adult stuck in a dead‑end life—no career, no prospects, and a simmering resentment of everyone he thinks has wronged him, especially his more successful brother. When he discovers that the old cape still works and really does let him fly, his first instinct is not to save anyone. It’s to settle scores.

As Eric experiments with his power, the story leans hard into the ugly side of wish fulfillment. Flying lets him spy, stalk, and strike without warning. The violence in The Cape is graphic and often cruel, but it’s grounded in believable, small grudges: jealousy, humiliation, the feeling that someone else stole the life you were supposed to have.

The comics expand the tale in several directions. The main miniseries adapts and extends Eric’s story, showing his descent from sullen slacker to full‑blown supervillain. Flashbacks and side scenes fill in how his relationships with his family and ex‑girlfriend soured long before the cape ever worked.

The Cape 1969 jumps back a generation to follow Eric’s father, Captain Chase, during the Vietnam War. Shot down behind enemy lines, he and his crew try to survive both human enemies and something stranger in the jungle. This prequel hints at where the cape’s power came from and shows how an earlier brush with the uncanny left its mark on the family.

Later material, like The Cape: Fallen, slots between pieces of the original run, adding more episodes to Eric’s reign of terror. Taken together, the saga reads like a bleak mirror of superhero comics: the costumes are shabby, the powers brutally simple, and the consequences permanent. If you’ve ever wondered what might really happen if someone with a long memory and a lot of grudges suddenly gained the power to drop in from the sky, The Cape has a dark answer.