New DC Black Label Series Reimagines Superman's Earliest Days
DC announced Superman: The Stranger, a six-issue DC Black Label series written and illustrated by Wes Craig, with colors by Jason Wordie and letters by Tom Napolitano. The series returns to the very beginning of the Man of Tomorrow's story, set in an Art Deco 1938 Metropolis and drawing on the look of DC's Golden Age and the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons.
Superman: The Stranger #1 is on sale September 2nd and features a main cover by Craig and variant covers by Dave Johnson, Goran Parlov, and Ethan Young. The series carries DC's Ages 17+ content descriptor for mature readers.
The story strips Superman back to his origins. By day, Clark Kent scrapes by in Metropolis, and at night he takes to the streets to protect the city. Fighting for a better future, Clark grows frustrated that he can't seem to actually change anything. The wealthy keep accumulating, the poor keep struggling, and the question hanging over the series is whether Superman can really do anything for the people at the bottom.
"Superman is my favorite hero. Always has been," said Craig. "I grew up on Christopher Reeve and John Byrne's interpretation, then his animated adventures and All-Star Superman as I grew older. His mythology always changing with the times. But the version I love the most and the one that I think, strangely, reflects our modern world best, is the ORIGINAL. You strip away the extra powers, you strip away Ma and Pa Kent, and Smallville and Krypton, you boil it down to that explosive first issue of Action Comics, and you have this vital, powerful myth of a brash young man with incredible powers fighting against a corrupt city. That's the story I want to tell."
