Posted in: AWA, Comics | Tagged: AWA, Comics, jms, mike deodato, The Resistance

No Longer Your Grandfather's Superheroes – JMS and Mike Deodato Launch "The Resistance" at AWA

That was a very fast Rich Twitch. No sooner are we done reporting that Mike Deodato will have his upcoming comics project at Bill Jemas and Axel Alonso's Artists, Writers & Artisans Inc, than the Hollywood Reporter suddenly report that it's The Resistance, written by Joe Michael Straczynski, who wrote Amazing Spider-Man and Thor at Marvel when Alonso was in charge.

The first of AWA's shared superhero universe creator-owned titles, The Resistance will be a six-issue series and launching next year. A series set in the wake of a global pandemic that kills hundreds of millions, but leaves some of its survivors with superhuman powers. Born under a cloud, they must discover who they are, why they possess these powers and what, if any, responsibility they bear for what happened. Are they harbingers of perils to come… or Earth's last hope?

The survivors' powers don't hinge on getting bit by a spider or having billions to spend on high-tech armour, and not only do they have to figure out what to do about all this, the world has to figure out what to do about them/Governments can track down who survived and who didn't for their own purposes, corporations want them, some are frightened by them or upset that they survived while other family members did not… it's a story told against a huge, planetary backdrop that explores what would happen in the real world if 15-20 million people with powers suddenly emerged out of the population.

THR has JMS saying "DC and Marvel are products of the times that produced them. DC, which came to prominence in the '40s and '50s, a very conservative time, was peopled largely by authority figures: Batman is a cop, Superman's a cop, Green Lantern is an interstellar cop, Hawkman is another interstellar cop, Flash is a cop-scientist, and so on. Marvel hit its stride during the anti-authoritarian '60s, and that's reflected by its heroes: the Hulk and Thor answer to no one, Spider-Man is a kid, the X-Men are on the run from the government… you get the idea. Those were the paradigms then. What Axel and I did in beginning this process was to ask, long before we dialed into individual stories [was] 'What's the paradigm now? Where are we as a people, a country, a world, and what stories do we need to hear not just to entertain but to ennoble and uplift?' We wanted to give readers, especially millennials, something that would impart a measure of hope without undue cotton candy while confronting dead-on the real challenges we face as a people… What we find on the micro scale is that, like fame and money, powers make you more of what you were beforehand: if you were a jerk before fame and money, you're a bigger jerk afterward; if you were kind before fame and money, you're kinder afterward. Same with power. The Resistance is thus a character story filled with people from every walk of life, from every part of the world, told against a backdrop as big as the planet itself, which sets the stage for a shared universe approach that has never been attempted before in comics."

And so much preview art as well…

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!