DC Comics, via the Source, has announced that Milestone Comics will get their day in the sun next year with MILESTONE FOREVER, which will be written by company founder Dwayne McDuffie.
This series, which will bring together Static, Hardware, Icon, Shadow Cabinet, and Blood Syndicate together with original Milestone artists John Paul Leon, Mark Bright, Chris Cross and Denys Cowan, will be a bittersweet tale that “chronicles the literal end of a universe, and the birth of something new, with major consequences for the future of the DC Universe.”
“16 years ago this month, industry giant DC Comics and upstart Milestone Media entered into an unprecedented creative partnership, producing 14 interlocking, creator-owned titles including Hardware, Icon, and the multimedia hit that would best be known as Static Shock,” wrote McDuffie. ” The story Milestone chose to tell was an audacious one, larger than life on its surface, character and story-driven at its base, Humanist and multicultural at its heart. For over 250 issues, fans explored a superhero universe like no other.”
DC announced that they would be bringing Milestone into the DCU proper in 2008, where Icon, Hardware, and the Shadow Cabinet guest-starred with the Justice League. Since then, Static has — perhaps not surprisingly — gotten the most time in the mainstream DCU, having joined the Teen Titans.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
‘Bout friggin’ time.
My last question for Didio’s 10Q was about the status of the Milestone characters. Glad to see that they’re finally giving the characters and McDuffie some respect.
November 5th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
They’re using the ‘new’ Static Shock costume instead of the infinitely cooler original one.
If they had made that series like the original comics, we might still be talking about it.
If you haven’t read it you should definitely give the original Milestone titles a shot. They were really cutting edge for their time. The originals are hard to find but there is a torrent floating around in the ethernet with the complete runs of all the original titles.
MR. O
November 6th, 2009 at 9:17 am
Excellent news. I think these characters are a lot more viable than, say, the Red Circle characters (why the heck were they given books instead? – not to mention, Mag). As to Mr. O’s suggestion – may I suggest instead that people who haven’t bought and read the originals go for the trade paperbacks instead? That will give DC and the creators revenue, as well as indicating support for future pubilcation of these characters.
November 7th, 2009 at 6:53 am
A quick trip to Amazon shows that there is at present no trade for the original Static series. And there are other smaller series that have no trades at all that I could find, but were available online.
Also, as someone who’s read a great deal of the original Milestone line, beyond the original Static series, I can’t really recommend it. Torrents of books that were released more than a decade ago that are difficult to find now do make a certain kind of sense. If I could not have read the original issues, then I’d have little to no interest in this property at all.
Do I think the first issues of Static should be available online, of course. The TV show bears little to, to no, resemblance at all to the book. More people might have noticed that if they were able to read the book. Had the TV show been faithful to the book, then we’d already have a trade of the original series by now in a nice format.
As for future publications, I wish I could say that I have some interest in seeing these characters as part of the DCU. The new Static Shock book was not as daring as the original series. There was a freshness to the first books like when Image got launched. People doing whatever they liked, because they could. Now, they’re just third tier superheroes in a giant multi-verse.
Icon worked because he was Superman in a world without Superman. Hardware worked as a completely different version of Marvel’s Iron Man. Books like Call Me Holocaust were just mental, but they were unique.
But like I said, if there was no torrent, I’d never have heard of any of these titles and we wouldn’t be having this conversation, which begs the question as to whether or not anyone would have even commented on this post at all?
MR. O
November 7th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Mr. Obvious wrote:
[A quick trip to Amazon shows that there is at present no trade for the original Static series. And there are other smaller series that have no trades at all that I could find, but were available online.]
Actually, the first Static story arc was collected in a TPB shortly after the cartoon debuted:
http://www.dccomics.com/dcu/graphic_novels/?gn=1438
You are right that the TPB is currently out of print. This is likely due to the a new Static TPB which has material from the original TPB and the “Static Shock” comic:
http://greatblackcomicbooks.blogspot.com/2009/08/static-shock-rebirth-of-cool.html
So, how due you get DC to do a second printing of the original Static TPB? LOTS of people need to email and snail mail DC to demonstrate there is real demand for the book. Then, you will see some change.
Just my two cents.