joe prado

This month in DC's January solicitations, a number of iconic '90s characters make their return to the spotlight, Batman faces off against the Green Lanterns, and Doctor Doom invades the DC Universe... kind of.

A while back DC announced plans to revive Jack Kirby's Kamandi: The Last Boy On Earth in January in a form that, to say the least, is a little unique. It's called The Kamandi Challenge, and the idea --- loosely inspired by 1985's DC Challenge and its game of storytelling hot potato --- is that the twelve-issue series will feature a new creative team, randomly paired together from a list of twelve writers and twelve artists for each issue, each picking up the story where the previous team leaves off. It's an interesting way to mark the 100th anniversary of Kirby's birth in 2017. In advance of New York Comic-Con, DC has revealed a first look at some of the artwork from the series, plus new details of how the creative teams will approach the story.

In the mid-eighties, DC Comics tried a bizarre experiment known as the DC Challenge, a story told by twelve different creative teams over twelve comics, with the catch being that each issue would end on a cliffhanger that the next team would have to get themselves out of. Announced at Emerald City Comic Con, DC is reviving the series in the form of Kamandi Challenge, thirteen creative teams over twelve issues telling one complete story with the classic Jack Kirby character, Kamandi: The Last Boy On Earth. The original DC Challenge featured the likes of Elliot S! Maggin, Mike W. Barr, Dave Gibbons, Gene Colan and so many more legendary creators. and featured the additional caveat that they could use any DC Comics characters, except ones they were currently working with elsewhere. The series culminated in a jam-packed final issue which was divided among six of the previous creative teams.

Standing alongside the Justice League since the start of the New 52, Victor Stone has long been a calm but grounding presence for the team. Unlike so many other heroes, he cannot take off a mask and cowl and go off to live a regular life. Victor Stone is always Cyborg. That brings a different perspective to superhero life that, one that, up until now, has never been fully explored. This month writer David F. Walker takes on the character for an ongoing series, fresh off a fantastic run on Shaft over at Dynamite. Joined by Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, and Adriano Lucas as the artistic team, Walker has already demonstrated a little of what he plans to bring to the Cyborg series in a 'Sneak Peak' issue published by DC at the end of May. With Cyborg #1 due on shelves next week, we spoke to Walker about how he came on board, working with DC, and finding the humanity in Victor Stone.

On November 19, DC Comics will release Batman '66: The Lost Episode, a bookshelf-format one-shot by writer Len Wein and penciller José Luis Garcia-López -- superhero comics legends, both -- adapting a previously-unknown story that Harlan Ellison wrote for the classic Adam West and Burt Ward TV show: the introduction of Two-Face. The project is a very special companion to DC's popular and critically acclaimed digital-first Batman '66 series. In addition to its prestigious veteran storytellers, the book also features inking by Joe Prado, colors by Alex Sinclair and cover art by Alex Ross, all industry leaders in their disciplines. At New York Comic Con this past weekend, we had the opportunity to sit down with Wein and discuss the origin of the project, his friendship with Ellison, and the experience of adapting an unfilmed television episode into the comic book format.

Teased for years and finally launched this week, The Multiversity is a universe-jumping series of DC Comics one-shots tracking the cosmic monitor Nix Uotan and an assemblage of star-crossed heroes as they attempt to save 52 universes and beyond from a trippy cosmic existential threat that, like much of Morrison’s best work, represents something far more mundane and relatable. Tying back into the very first Multiverse story in DC’s history, the heroes of these universes become aware of this threat by reading about it in comic books… comic books that, it turns out, take place in neighboring universes. Indeed, writer Grant Morrison continues his streak of highly metatextual DC cosmic epics with this eight-issue mega-series (plus one Tolkienesque guidebook). Described by Morrison as "the ultimate statement of what DC is", The Multiversity naturally offers the reader much beyond the surface level adventure, and that means annotations. Rather than merely filling out checklists of references, my hope with this feature is to slowly unearth and extrapolate a narrative model for Morrison and his collaborators' work on The Multiversity; an interconnecting web of themes and cause and effect that works both on literal and symbolic levels. Three pages into the preview for The Multiversity #1, I knew I was going to have a lot to work with. With no further ado, go get your erasers and your textbooks, close your laptops, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for some course notes. Let's go to school.

DC Comics kicked off Saturday at New York Comic Con with a discussion of all of the publisher's Justice League titles. Topics included the future of Captain Marvel, the new take on Darkseid, Ann Nocenti's status as a "token female" and Wonder Woman's new parentage...

It's been eight months since the first issue of Brightest Day. Now, if an actual day were to last that long, it would cause massive droughts, famine and heat waves on one side of the Earth while the other freezes and probably undergoes equal amounts of famine...