British creators David Hine and Dougie Braithwaite team up on DC Comics Brave and the Bold title for the next four issues, delivering a story which begins with a strange child channelling the Green Lantern oath and scrawls it on a wall, a summons from forces located in another galaxy.
A fantastic civilization that has its own Green Lantern requires immediate aid and their only chance for survival rests in the hands of Hal Jordan and the Phantom Stranger.
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Brave and the Bold #19 cover © DC Comics, Art by Dougie Braithwaite.
"This is one I'm really proud of," David said recently." If you were into Brave and Bold in the Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams period, that's the spirit we were trying to recapture. Like those old B and B stories, you can pick it up cold and enjoy it for what it is, a good old-fashioned story with a solid science-fiction background, plenty of drama and some very cool depictions of alien races and environments from Dougie."
The story was Dougie's last job before he signed his exclusive deal for Marvel Comics, working on projects such as Secret Invasion: Thor.
"I've known Dougie for many years," says David. "I actually inked one of his strips for Marvel UK back when Dougie was first starting out and we've been wanting to collaborate again for a long time, so we pitched this book at the beginning of 2007. It has actually been finished for a while but we had to wait for a slot on the Brave and Bold monthly.
Over on US comics site Newsarama, David explains both he and Dougie are both big fans of the body of work that Neal Adams produced for DC in the late 1960s and early '70s. "We wanted to recapture something of the excitement of those books: The Brave and the Bold, the Deadman series in Strange Adventures, the Green Lantern and Green Arrow series written by Denny O'Neil.
"If we've been successful, the story will recreate the appeal that DC comics had for Dougie and I when we were kids. While the Waid/Perez run on The Brave and the Bold is a tip of the hat to the Silver Age, we're looking to acknowledge our love of the watershed era at the end of the 1960s, when realism began to enter mainstream comics, spearheaded by Neal Adams. I guess what you'd call the Bronze Age, although I don't like that term. It sounds like a poor third place after Gold and Silver. For me it's the real Golden Age.
"We wanted to do a story we could really sink our teeth into and create a whole alien world as a setting. Dougie's art on this one is some of the best work he has done."
The story will run for four months, to be followed by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski as new regular Brave and Bold writer. (Straczynski of course has been in the news for his script for Clint Eastwood's new film The Changeling and that he has been engaged to pen a remake of the science fiction classic Forbidden Planet).
Written By John Freeman of www.downthetubes.net.
