Back To The Future Again: Warren Ellis Rebooting Dynamite’s Project Superpowers

Here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, we are some Warren Ellis fans.

Back in 2000, when watching Unbreakable led me to leave a several-year Vertigo Comics exile to delve back into superhero comics, Ellis’s The Authority and Stormwatch trades helped reinforce my hope that superhero comics had moved away from the Image Age of chicken-scratched detail lines on footless steroid monsters punching on each other with no driving story to speak of, and into something that an adult might like to read.

Ellis’s Nextwave remains one of my favorite limited series of the past fifteen years, and his collection of Come In Alone columns not only reinforced that there were actual adults writing comics, but they made me a lurker on the Warren Ellis Forums, where my proudest contribution was that Matt Fraction ripped off the logo from a 1999 Web site I ran to be his forum avatar for a while.

Ellis has been mostly absent from mainstream comics since we started this Web site in 2001. He wrote Secret Avengers in 2001 (which is the first book I ever reviewed here), and he’s been contributing to the Kelly Sue DeConnick co-written Avengers Assemble for the last couple of months, and he did the Avengers: Endless Wartime graphic novel a few months ago,  but otherwise he’s been working on novels and TV properties and whatnot.

So it is about time, as far as we fans are concerned, for Ellis to take on a larger-scale comics project… which is a thing that he is doing. Specifically, he will be rebooting Dynamite Comics’s Project Superpowers line of books. You know, that line of comics that Alex Ross and Jim Kreuger launched in 2008! The one that none of us actually read!

If you don’t remember, Project Superpowers was Dynamite’s attempt to build a cohesive superhero universe using a bunch of characters that have dropped into the public domain, like The Black Terror, Fighting Yank, and the original, Golden Age Daredevil. The 2008 series of comics didn’t do a lot for me at the time, and the series has been dormant since around 2010, but it’s getting a new coat of paint from Ellis:

I’ve long been fascinated by the period in comics that produced these characters, and I’m very much looking forward to working out the strange, atmospheric take on the weird thriller that they inspired.

So there’s one intimated difference between Ross’s 2008 version, which took place in modern times, and Ellis’s: it sounds like he might go with a period piece. And that is interesting to me. The idea of writing Golden Age heroes in modern times is a decent one, but it was one done by Alan Moore in Miracleman, and you’re not about to get better and more innovative than that series. Hell, Straczynski’s The Twelve did that kind of story about as well as someone who isn’t Moore could, and it went so far off the rails that it took five years to complete 12 issues, and any plans to bring those characters into the actual 616 Universe were quietly dropped like boogers clandestinely mined in study hall.

But I am a sucker for a good period-based pulp story – Garth Ennis’s initial run on Dynamite’s The Shadow was damn fun, and I even had a soft spot for Brian Azzarello’s First Wave – so I will give it an honest shot… but I will also take a step back and remember that the last couple of times that Ellis went for either rebooting an old universe or reinventing pulp stories, a computer crash delayed the completion of those stories for, well, ever. Which is a hard thing to reconcile for a dude who has saved PGP public keys from people who forgot what PGP meant back in 2002 (hi, Trebuchet!), and preserved black and white photos from my Sidekick Mk. 1 with detachable camera attachment, none of which anyone has ever been willing to pay me a plugged nickel for.

But what the hell; just because a known futurist allowed himself to be felled (get it?) by a lack of backups doesn’t mean that Project Superpowers won’t be damn cool. I’m trying to think of a true period piece from Ellis, and all I’m coming up with off the top of my head are John Colt in Stormwatch and Doc Brass in Planetary, both of which were killer stories. So no matter what, Project Superpowers is gonna get a day in court.

(via Comics Beat)