“Yesterday’s” Comic> Project Superpowers #0

Oh, sorry. I mean “S” #0 Maybe 5 #0.

Project Superpowers #0

Dynamite Entertainment (January, 2008)

“Last Gleaming”

PLOT: Alex Ross & Jim Krueger

SCRIPT: Jim Krueger

ARTWORK: Alex Ross, Doug Kaluba, & Stephen Sadowski

COLORIST: Captain Moreno

LETTERER: Simon Bowland

Something has come through the flag of Bruce Carter, the Fighting Yank, to remind him of a huge mistake. During World War II, Adolph Hitler got his hands on an urn, the actual Pandora’s Box, and unleashed evil back into the world. The Yank was told by the government and the spirit of his ancestor that recovering the urn could break Hitler’s power by resealing the evil, but unlike Pandora’s error this time hope got out in the form of the various (public domain) Golden Age heroes. The ghost believed that trapping the other heroes in the urn would not only stop World War II but taken the great evils from the land. In the present, with a different history involving armored cops and new evils, the American Spirit, the thing using the flag as a body, tells both that they were wrong and the heroes could have stopped these evils from happening. The world’s only chance is for Bruce to bring the urn to the Green Lama, one of the heroes who wasn’t trapped, in the hopes he could release the heroes. The ghost still doesn’t believe it but Bruce listens to the Spirit instead, even though he’s sure the Lama will kill him and the Spirit confirms that he will die.

The heck with it. This isn’t the week for keeping to the format. The thing is I like the idea of Golden Age heroes coming back. There were some rights issues with Daredevil thanks to the Marvel hero taking over the name, so they just call him Devil, which is fine. I recognized Black Fury and Chuck plus the Flame (I’m assuming the similarly costumed lady is Flame Girl, who I haven’t seen in action but heard about) and I heard of the Green Lama but no nothing about him. That’s one of the two problems here. How well do the readers when this book came out know who any of these characters are? The comic is more for comic historians than regular readers, which is fine but will lose a modern reader. I think one of them is supposed to be Blue Beetle but it’s not even the version of Dan Garret that recent readers would be aware of, as in the one I’ve been doing the Saturday reviews on.

The other is the idea that the Fighting Yank took it upon himself to ignore his friends and even capture them, and that his ghostly ancestor was the cause. That was his plan, not the government’s. They just wanted to speed up evil’s return to the urn or at least remove a psychological boost Hitler was gaining from believing it was Pandora’s “box”. (Why did they change it?) The ghost tells him that the heroes represent hope and so they have to go in as well, but thanks to the scientists finding a way for him to see the evil spirits and then seeing them through his ghost ancestor tainted him enough that he couldn’t join them. That makes Bruce and his ancestor look bad just to have an excuse to have the same Golden Age heroes in present day. There had to be a better way to do that.

Overall I enjoyed the story but it isn’t without flaws. At least the painted art style was saved for the cover most of the time. (I didn’t look into all the variant covers.) I have the next issue available to me and that’s it. We’re starting out okay but I want to see where it goes before I give a full assessment. If the next issue is enough I should at least have a starting point.