 |
|
Volume 4, 6 January 2005 |
Note the cover is black for death, and two of the five are erased.  |
The four made-to-order assassins - Harte, Crosse, Starr, and Crowne - are stuck on the moon, slaves of the Hegemony. New biochips make them complacent and happy in their work. Their thought balloons are scattershot gibberish. Meanwhile, Mae Nash Price, CEO of the Hegemony welcomes Jan Boulton to Luna City. Boulton was a hate-TV commentator (modeled after the real-world Ann Coulter). The Hegemony faked her death: a rape and murder pinned on a Green Party rabblerouser. She's honored to be invited to the Hegemony. Price will return to Earth covertly to stage more assassinations - using the proto-Challengers - to further destablize society. The programmed Challs work out under the tutelage of other drones. "It's the life of service that matters." Except images of Zach Dyamond's hypnosis session keep bubbling up. His message: "There might come a time... when whoever implanted these chips.. might get their hands on you again... But NOTHING they do will get past this posthypnotic block... whether they reimplant a new biochip or not." |
Mae Nash Price has a problem. Her new recruit, Jan Boulton, is actually a man! "Where does the servant class get its gall?" Boulton is garroted. Price finds an alternative surrogate. "The perfect vessel to carry my child to birth." Price won't "ravage" her own body with childbirth. Tessa Crowne has already been impregnated with Price's child. Tessa objects to being a mother. Mae Price balks - the drones are supposed to be docile. The four "challengers" blink. Zach Dyamond's hypnotic suggestion clicks. They get their heads back. |
Except Tessa grins nervously. "No need for all this biochip song and dance for me, Ma'am. I'm ready to sign up. You've got a good thing going here." Kendra Harte snarls, "Speak for yourself, bitch." She puts a gun to Tessa Crowne's head, taking her hostage - and Mae Price's implanted child.  |
Crosse and Starr pull their guns. Crosse snarls, "I say we kill 'em all before they know what's what." They shoot. Crosse notes, "I'd still like advance warning before [Kendra's] next outburst." Mae Price takes a short cut and shoots Tessa dead. "Don't be so surprised - I'll just make more." They grab Harte and run. "Time to go, honey bunch." They steer for the spaceport, shooting all the way. All note, "I never liked Zach... Never trusted him, either... but he saved our asses with a trump card from beyond the grave." Running, shooting. Among others, they cap the CEO of KnowNowNet. Kendra notes, "I get to kill him next time. 'Cause if we do manage to get out of this alive - you know they're coming after us."  |
They shoot Kingge, leader of the drones. Then dive into a spaceship that looks like a 1950's Plymouth. "What was with Tessa?" asks Crosse. Harte snaps, "It's easy. The girl was a complete wuss." Mae Price hails them on the radio. "One battle doesn't win a war, my dears. They're been others like you - like those four louts who nearly wrecked us years ago." (That would be Haley, Davis, Ryan, and Morgan.) "From this moment on, you're all living on borrowed time." Price promises to come back.  The narration states, "Fifty years of work... planning... and surreptitious invisible construction... of secret progress of the invisible ruling class on the backs of the average man, woman, and child... vaporized in a single, nuclear instant." Luna City goes up in a nuclear fireball. (Did we miss something? The Challs shot up the place, true. How did they set off a nuke?) |
Back on Earth, the three survivors reflect. "Borrowed time... just like the Challengers of the Unknown." Typically, Crosse notes his parents described the original Challs as "decadent pawns of American adventurism." They figure Mae Price will be back. (Clones have been seen.) "And she's not finished with us. And we've got nowhere to run." "So it's war... Us three against an invisible army funded by multibillionaires." But "if those four guys could stand up to the Hegemony for a little while, we can do the same... Even though we know we're going to lose.... In the meantime, we make those rich bastards pay." |
"So that makes us the new Challengers of the Unknown."  |
Check out some bonus material. |
Comments So the team is reduced to three, as originally reported in Comic Shop News 886. Chaykin evidentally needed two more characters to flesh out the team, or just to get killed for verisimilitude.  |
The DC on Demand page says, "That's the story. Let us know if you want to see more of these Challengers of the Unknown." Seriously. The Hegemony is a vast and evil empire. But who wants to watch these three unpleasant creeps shoot and snarl and snipe for issue after issue? It would be a grave injustice if these snooks actually REPLACED the real Challs. Howard Chaykin fans often cite his style, but everything in this series was done in AMERICAN FLAGG back in the 80s. A page completely filled with gunshot noises, for instance. And Howard can only draw two faces, one male, one female. The style gets old. And where's the visual-ness? "Don't tell. Show." Considering Chaykin is an artist, he did a lousy job "implanting" the biochips. These chips - planted in the Challs' brains - control their very personalities. First they work, and the Challs are puppets. Then they burn out, and the Challs are free. Then they're replanted - puppets again - then overridden by will power(?). They're key to the whole miniseries, but never once do we SEE a chip! How hard is it to draw one to remind us of their on-off status? Bottom line: A waste of paper. |