Written By Andrew Fontana
Old is new once again in Scott Snyder’s and Aaron Gillespie’s New Challengers #1. Unlike other staples of DC’s New Age of Heroes, New Challengers is a fresh reworking of Challengers of The Unknown, a silver age comic with a rich history.
Scott Snyder and Aaron Gillespie’s debut is textually aware of that history, even as New Challengers blazes forth into territory that is fresh and exciting.
This new iteration has just enough of the original’s sense of adventure and 1950’s Sci-Fi without veering into the nostalgic. Snyder and Gillespie manage this by striking a tonal balance between the realism of modern comics and the wistfulness of the silver age. The new characters that make up this book would not feel out of place in a mainline DC comic; their familiarity helps ground the more zany elements that Snyder and Gillespie introduce throughout the book.
The quirkiness of Snyder and Gillespie’s script wouldn’t work if not for the strong visuals that Adam Kubert turns in. Things move fast in this introductory issue, giving Kubert plenty of opportunities to cut his teeth. He captures the crazy and the mundane with equal aplomb, but that fact that his strongest work is in the last pages bodes very well for this new title.
Rating: 8/10
