An even more pressing question than that, though is: what does this book have to do with the title CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN? At DC, it's becoming more and more the case that the name, and not the characters associated with the name, is the important thing. First we got Andy Diggle's excellent series THE LOSERS, which, despite its excellence, has little to nothing to do with the pre-CRISIS WWII team of the same name. Then we got the latest incarnation of the Doom Patrol, which has nothing to do with the original and even less to do with the version that had its own series just a few years back and whose existence the new Patrol doesn't even acknowledge. Then there was CATWOMAN, a Halle Berry vehicle that ignored the perfectly decent current series and went off on its own silly little revamp of the character. And now we have Howard Chaykin's CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which has as little in common with the original team using that name as a lemon has with a rabbit.
It'll find fans, naturally, because it's exactly the sort of action-packed, mercenary-driven adventure drama that Chaykin is particularly (one might even say peculiarly) gifted at telling. It'll also sell like the proverbial hotcakes, and in fact it already has my local shop was completely sold out within hours of the book hitting the shelves and only had a review copy for me because they still had the preview copy from the week before. But one wonders if the reason why the first issue has had such sales success has less to do with the actual story within and more to do with the name recognition and the idea that Chaykin might have done a new take on that grand old team from the 60s. They may enjoy this first issue it's engaging, if nothing else but they're bound to be disappointed that the only element that survives of that old team is the name.
Lest I sound like an old foggie or the comic book critic version of a Luddite, I will say that I don't expect every redo of an old comics concept out there to faithfully follow the strictures of the original. Some of the best (such as the aforementioned LOSERS) have nothing to do with the source material, and thus Chaykin's book has that potential, too. But even within the new structure that Chaykin has set up, the book has flaws already, and hopefully they are only the teething pains associated with the first issue. We discover, for instance, that each of the five Challengers (or whatever they end up calling themselves collectively) has had disturbing dreams and that each has experienced a moment in which they have these dreams while awake. Not a bad setup, really. But then we're taken through this moment of revelation with every single team member, with only slight variances, until we can recite the lines by heart. And when they join together at the end wearing the standard black trench coats and sunglasses that such bastions of the strange always seem to wear we get it all again. Before we get to the end of the book, to paraphrase this litany, we're assaulted by the same dreams, of confusion, of chaos, dreams we can't truly say are our own mainly because we'd hope that ours wouldn't be so damned repetitive and insistent on making their point.
Even the none-too-subtle attack on neo-con political commentaries (coming directly after the assassination of the British PM's wife at the top of the issue) is annoying and I'm as dyed-in-the-wool a liberal as they come. While Chaykin has the same trouble with the overt doublespeak of such commentaries that many of those with a liberal orientation do, the commentators he presents us with are so vastly over-the-top that they barely seem tied to any real-life models. They have the same hysterical quality (in both senses of the word) that Frank Miller's depictions of Ronald Reagan had in THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and the even more extreme ones featured in the far sillier DK2. As such, they lose all sense of reasoned counterargument and become little more than a liberal version of Rush Limbaugh-esque antics (though they're not nearly as charming in their comedic sense as Michael Moore).
The one saving grace of CHALLENGERS is the artwork, and on that score I give Chaykin all the credit in the world. He's always had one of the most recognizably rough styles around, but here there's a tightness of control of the imagery that belies the wildness of the plot and characterization. Even those repetitions are infused with a modicum of interest, albeit in a very Michael Gaydos-ALIAS/Michael Avon Oeming-POWERS repeating panel fashion. Michelle Madsen's coloring only heightens the effect, which is presumably why she gets a cover credit. But apart from that, CHALLENGERS has little to distinguish it from any other "world in crisis saved by ordinary mercs with special abilities" fare that we've seen time and again in recent years. The only thing it's truly, radically different from is the series whose name it steals and the reason why anyone, even someone like Chaykin, would want to do that is the real unknown.
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