Ryan Browne

Dynamite Entertainment founded its Project Superpowers line as a way to reverently pay respects to the Golden Age superheroes that had fallen into the public domain, but later this year a new series is taking a decidedly irreverent spin on the concept. Ryan Browne and Pete Woods' Hero Killers is set in a town where everyone's a superhero and the old guard aren't retiring to make way for the next generation, so the up-and-coming heroes decide to do something about it. Ahead of the release of Project Superpowers: Hero Killers #1, ComicsAlliance chatted to Browne and Wood about their take on beloved characters and their influences in applying satirical tropes to an established superhero universe.

Dynamite Entertainment has made a name for itself in the past decade as the place to go for reverential yet modern takes on classic Golden Age superheroes like The Black Terror, The Death-Defying Devil, and The Green Lama in its Project Superpowers shared universe. Now, Dynamite is throwing out the rulebook and has recruited Ryan Browne and Pete Woods for a new superhero satire series titled Project Superpowers: Hero Killers, about a group of teenage heroes trying to make a name for themselves in a crowded market.

Comixology Unlimited has already proved a massive resource, and great value for money for readers in the US, but it's a deal that's about to get a whole lot sweeter over the next few months. In celebration of Image Comics' milestone 25th anniversary this year, Comixology Unlimited will add new complete or ongoing Image Comics series to the service every other week, beginning today with Bitch Planet, God Hates Astronauts, and Wytches.

If you've ever read God Hates Astronauts --- and you should, because it's fantastic --- then you already know that Ryan Browne is very, very good at telling stories about genuinely terrible people with fantastic super-powers. And if you've read anything by Charles Soule, well, you probably also know that he's good at high concept stories that add a little bit of weirdness to the normal world. And with that being the case, Curse Words seems like two great tastes that taste great together.

If there's one thing that drives Bebop and Rocksteady more than anything else, it's that they are massive, unstoppable screwups. Those dudes can't even go into a building without bringing the whole thing down to its foundation and kicking off a gang war, so just imagine how much trouble they could get into if they had access to, say, the entire time stream. This June, that's exactly what's happening. Over at the AV Club, IDW has announced Bebop & Rocksteady Destroy Everything, in which the eternal misfits of the TMNT franchise find themselves bouncing around through time itself courtesy of writers Dustin Weaver and Ben Bates, with a cast of artists that includes Nick Pitarra, Sophie Campbell, Giannis Milonogiannis, and Ryan Browne. And if that wasn't enough, they're bringing a few old friends along for the ride, too!

If you're familiar with Ryan Browne's work from God Hates Astronauts, his ongoing series from Image, then you already know that he makes some weird comics. I mean, honestly, weirdness is kind of GHA's defining characteristic, right down to the first volume's focus on a superhero whose giant head explodes and is then replaced with a spectral cow. Now imagine what you'd get if there was absolutely no filter on Browne's creative process and a time restraint that meant he had to go with anything that popped into his head. That's how we ended up with Blast Furnace: Recreational Thief, an "improv comic" project that Browne first put together in 2012, where he had to write, draw and letter a comics page in a single hour every day. Needless to say, the 130-page original makes for an interesting read, but now, Browne's bringing it back for a Kickstarter campaign set to double the length and add full-color pages.

Here at ComicsAlliance, we firmly believe that the only thing better than getting cheap comics is getting a lot of cheap comics at one time while also supporting a good cause, so we keep an eye on the Humble Bundle just in case that exact opportunity presents itself. This week, there's a good one, and it's built around a pretty interesting theme; all of the projects were successfully funded on Kickstarter. Plus, some of the proceeds go towards digital rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and First Book, which provides educational resources for children living in poverty. The bundle includes both comics and prose novels, and right now, you can snag everything that's on offer for fifteen bucks, including the first volume of Ryan Browne's God Hates Astronauts, Ryan North's choose-your-own-Shakespearean-adventure To Be Or Not To Be, and a whole lot more besides.

As the record will show, I'm a pretty big fan of Ryan Browne's God Hates Astronauts, but every time I read a new issue, I'm always left with one question: How exactly is Browne going to top himself next time? I mean, the book's major selling point is that it's 20 pages of unrestrained id that just keeps getting weirder and weirder, but when your starting point is hillbilly rocketships being taken down by a superhero with the spectral head of a ghost cow, that's a little harder to do than it might seem. Fortunately, Browne is up for the challenge, which is why the second issue of the new ongoing series, out this week from Image, kicks off with astronauts (who are presumably hated by the Almighty) playing golf on the moon. Oh, and the astronauts are owls and there is also a swarm of evil space crabs on there too. Check it out below to see just how weird things can get in three short pages!

Comics are weird. I mean, that's part of their charm, right? And it makes sense that they would be. You take a medium that allows people to put whatever they want to on the page, have it defined by the offspring of pulp heroes and sci-fi and let it marinate for a few years, and you're going to get weird stuff like Superman with a lion head and the backstory of any given member of the Summers family. With the debut issue of God Hates Astronauts from Image, though, Ryan Browne has taken weirdness to an entirely new level. Seriously, this is without question one of the top five weirdest comics that I've read in my life, and other than being held together with two staples and having the words in more or less the right order, it's weird in every way, with something freshly bizarre on every single page. And it's also one of the most fun comics of the year.

Get ready for more insanity from the Power Persons Five. Writer/artist Ryan Browne's God Hates Astronauts, which started as a webcomic about crude, perhaps psychopathic superheroes battling outrageous villains and each other, and was eventually published in hardcover thanks to a massively successful Kickstarter, is coming to Image Comics as an ongoing series this August, and he promises all the si