These Heroes Are Lost In More Ways Than One

Project: Superpowers
Dynamite Entertainment

I really enjoyed the initial volume of this title from Dynamite Entertainment. While he wasn't handling all the art chores, who doesn't like a little Alex Ross eye-candy in the form of covers and character sketches? But I find that I am typically more a story person, and Project: Superpowers Volume 1 was an interesting idea presented very well.

The concept of the series is to take any and all golden-age comic characters who have since disappeared from the publishing world and not only bring them back, but make an in-story reason for their many decades' absence. In Volume 1 of this title, readers learn that many of these colorful heroes and heroines were trapped in a magical urn,  the mythical Pandora's Box, in the 1940s. There's the story of the man responsible for their entrapment, not necessarily the evil villain one might suspect. There is the way the world has changed after having an abundance of super-powered humans show up and then just as mysteriously vanish. And when the entrapment is ended in modern times, the heroes must not only deal with being people in a time and world unfamiliar to them, they must also deal with how they themselves have been changed by their time away. Volume 1 made for a great read.

Then after a break, Volume 2 came out and the series seemed to lose some of its focus and direction. The story from Volume 1 was being continued, but also several of the characters were broken off into solo series with varying degrees of success. The overall narrative seemed to suffer under the weight of its own scope along with trying to incorporate events from the various other series. More and more characters were spotlighted and given a chance to shine, but there were so many, few of them really seemed to reach any kind of potential.

It's been about a year since any new books in this line were published or solicited, so I can only guess that I'm not the only reader who felt the series began to suffer in its second year. That doesn't mean there aren't any gems among the various titles and issues of Project: Superpowers Chapter Two. And, as I've already said, I found the first volume to be an excellent tale both told and illustrated well.

Check them out and see what you think or feel free to chime in with your thoughts if you've already read either series. And check back next Tuesday for more.