Customer Reviews

Challengers of the Unknown Must Die!

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In the spirit of Dark Knight Returns, the Challengers of the Unknown get their turn at being rewritten. As the story opens we get a reporter criticized for using the cheap cliche phrase "The Challengers Must Die!" This leads him to go visit Challengerville and Challenger mountain. However, no sooner does he arrive then the mountain blows up and almost completely destroys the town.

In the wake of the catastrophe, the surviving Challengers risk life and limb to help the innocent. They are repaid by being arrested and eventually disbanded. The Challengers pursue their own paths as action film hero, mystic, and mercenary. But as their paths seem to be leading them apart, they are brought back together and reform to again challenge the unknown, this time in the form of a powerful villain who bellows that "The Challengers Must Die!"

I ordinally read this in individual issues and was happy to see it collected finally. One does not really need to be familiar with the Challengers to enjoy this story. While the Challengers have no special powers they truly are heros and this mini-series does them great credit. Also included is a Challenger story that has previously remained unpublished. It tries to explain inconsistencies between the mini-series and some other DC titles. A fun read with powerful art, fun plot, and some cameos by Superman and Batman. Check it out.

Challengers of the Unknown Must Die! was the first comic book that Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale ever worked on together. A few pages in and it's apparent that there was plenty of magic when these two collaborated, even from the beginning. This eight-issue (nine if you include the extra story that has never seen print before this book) graphic novel takes a cue from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and starts with the middle aged Challengers scrambling to save a mostly destroyed Challenger City after Challenger Mountain exploded killing hundreds, including Challengers Prof and June. Ace, Rocky and Red are left to stand trial and forced to go their seperate ways, each of them delving deeper into their increasingly crazy lifestyles, until fate brings them together again to challenge an unknown force wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting world. Loeb's strengths as a writer shine through even in his first comic; his characterizations make the world of the Challengers easy to understand even if you've never read a single comic about them previously. Fans of Tim Sale's work on stories such as The Long Halloween will be pleasently surprised by his artistry in Challengers as he has never been more creative with his visual style of storytelling than here. The homages to other comics and a controversial cameo by Superman only add to the great story that Loeb and Sale weave and is definitely a worthy addition to any Loeb/Sale or comic book collection.

I'm a huge fan of the creative team that is Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. I've loved nearly every single collaboration they've published, with maybe two or three excluded (didn't like Hulk: Gray (Incredible Hulk), Spider-Man: Blue, or Wolverine Gambit: Victims so much). I freely admit that knowing nothing about the heroic team that inspired the Fantastic Four, I grabbed "Challengers of the Unknown Must Die!" for the sole purpose of experiencing another Loeb/Sale series. And I can safely say that this isn't like any of their following works.

To begin, for a limited series from 1991, "Challs" impressively captures the sleaziness of the 90s as I remember that decade, which speaks volumes of how little progress was achieved in those following years. We start off with a half-wit tabloid reporter making his way up to Challenger Mountain for SOME bit of news, only for the entire town to blow up in his face. Although the surviving Challengers push out of the rubble to desperately save what's left of the population, the Feds want their heads, and indict Rocky, Ace, and Red in a televised courtroom for murder. Although the jury is swayed in their favor, the three are ordered to disband and retire, which is a sentence they had been embracing before the disaster occurred. In the following [years?], we see the three undergo some increasingly dramatic changes as they go their separate ways away from the civilized world. During this time, all over the country, there have been several instances where unstable men and women... snap... and kill hundreds of people before taking their own lives. What force is pushing these people over the edge? And what are the semi-retired Challengers going to do about it? We are made to wonder.

As one reviewer mentioned, Jeph Loeb takes a few pages from Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by pushing the decaying world on the aging titular characters. Tim Sale also follows suit, sometimes over a dozen frames per page - cramming as many possible perspectives in there as is humanly possible. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is up to you, but personally, I felt the cluttered pages were nauseating at times. I would also say that as much as I truly admire Tim Sale's artwork, I feel that this was his worst. This isn't a testament to his skills with a pencil - his work only improves following this series, but it was a disappointment knowing how much better he could do.

The story isn't boring in any sense. Quite the contrary, I thought it grew more interesting as it progressed, even without the shock value. Sure, there are a bunch of cameos with the likes of Superman, Doctor Fate (Inza), Batman, Commissioner Gordon, Guy Gardner, and Ice... but they never intrude on the Challs, and are present instead to establish who the Challs are not. They aren't superheroes - just a bunch of altruistic individuals who devoted their "borrowed time" to saving the world. Fast forward to a time where there altruism has failed, and you have a bunch of degenerates desperately trying to find their own meaning in their empty states.

Not bad, but not terribly important either.