The Challengers of the Unknown, as a franchise, dates back to February, 1957, debuting in Showcase Comics # 6 (the so-called “Silver Age” of comics is often said to have started just two issues prior, with the first appearance of the revamped version of DC’s superhero The Flash in Showcase Comics # 4). This original version of the team, in subsequent Showcase appearances, and then, later, in its own series, lasted until 1970 (at which point little Joey Manley came along as a comic book reader and completely ignored them, because they weren’t nearly colorful enough to hold his attention against, say, Wendy the Good Little Witch or Richie Rich and Jackie Jokers Digest). A revival in the late seventies quickly faded (not-quite-so-little Joey hated the stupid purple-and-gray costumes, if I recall correctly). The team has been revived and re-imagined a few more times since then, first by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale (The Challengers of the Unknown Vol. 2, 1991), then by Steven Grant (The Challengers of the Unknown, Vol. 3, 1997), and most recently by Darwyn Cooke in his outstanding DC: The New Frontier, 2004 — currently available in the form of two trade paperbacks. As often happens in the comic book world — where D-list characters are concerned, anyway — Howard Chaykin’s new version of the Challengers chucks all of that out the window (well, not completely — Chaykin “retcons” the old comic book stories as an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the new version’s primary villain, on characters who have the same names as the original Challengers; she had been obliged to embroil them in bizarre fantasy adventures to keep them out of her hair; it’s a nice little touch, for those who care about the history of these characters, but doesn’t get in the way, or explain itself overmuch, for those who don’t).

In this version, the Challengers have lived their lives until now as cold-blooded killing machines, political assassins whose identities and free will have long been compromised and controlled by the same secret organization of immortal billionaires who pulled the strings for Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Timothy McVeigh. They’re allowed by their overlords (well, their overlady) to live normal lives in the downtime between missions, unaware, themselves, of who and what they really are. And so on. In the first chapter, something goes wrong with the technology (surprise!) and the new Challengers are accidentally let off their leashes, dangerously in control of their own faculties, for the first time since they were turned into killing machines. And they’re mad as hell. Yeah, so, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. I’m not completely unforgiving of less-than-original setups in my action/adventure entertainments, but when it happens, I hope and expect that the author will bring something new and twisted to it, in the margins and the sidelines, at the very least. Chaykin doesn’t. It’s like he used a computer program to generate a generic action/adventure franchise with randomly-spaced blanks for the author to fill in. What’s worse, he doesn’t trust his reader to follow his very basic, very overdone storyline. He approaches it as though it were the most complex and difficult-to-understand thing in the world. Ninety percent of the dialogue is exposition — I am not exaggerating — most of which is repeated, numerous times, from the mouths of different characters, just in case we didn’t catch the setup the first four or five times we heard it. (Another 9% of the dialogue is liberal agitprop — I’m as loud a liberal activist as the next guy, and it even annoyed me).

But that’s ultimately neither here nor there. Even if the setup were original, and even if the exposition wasn’t so prominent, or so clunky, or so repetitive, the plot would have killed this book anyway. It has bigger holes than any action/adventure plot I’ve ever seen (and, yes, I’ve seen all the Star Trek movies). I won’t go into them all, because a). it’s not worth the time, and b). you might want to read the book anyway, and pointing out plotholes necessarily means spoiling the plot points they represent. Here’s the big one: the villain’s secret, evil plan (which she spells out for them in minute, damaging detail, after capturing them, but before they inevitably escape) is, well, anticlimactic and weirdly counterproductive. I suppose it couldn’t help being that way, since, at the start of the book, she already rules the world (the more traditional goal of the supervillain), and has done so for decades. There’s not really much left for her to scheme about. But if you look at what she says she wants to do — take herself and her organization into outer space, leaving earth and its inferior mix of “mud races” behind — it seems to me that the Challengers should leave her alone and let her go. “And don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out!” Why force her to stick around (which means that she will keep ruling the world with an iron fist)? I dunno — except that thwarting evil plans is what the heroes are supposed to do, in stories like this, I guess, even if the evil plan hasn’t been thought out very well, and is counterproductive to the villain’s own, um, villainy.

This book is crap.

But it is beautiful crap, when looked at only on a page-by-page, panel-by-panel basis.

That makes it (for me, anyway) worse.

Howard Chaykin is a master storyteller and an illustrator of the highest order, whose lines may be wobbly, and whose draftsmanship may seem unwieldy when individual figures are contemplated in isolation, but who knows how to lay out a page, establish an evocative setting, introduce an “actor” with a couple of quick, uniquely human and distinct facial expressions or gestures, and (in the meantime, with his left hand tied behind his back) cut seven different, tangentially-related scenes together in alternating beats, using powerful graphic design and even more powerful chutzpah to hold it all together. Watching him do his thing takes your breath away. When it comes to technique, Chaykin makes the work of run-of-the-mill action/adventure comic book creators look like those slow-footed oil paintings by elephants. But all the storytelling mastery in the world cannot salvage a deeply unworthwhile story, which is what Challengers of the Unknown : Stolen Moments, Borrowed Time ultimately turns out to be.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not slamming it because it’s a genre story (spy thriller, in this case). When they’re well-done, when the creators take the time, and/or have the emotional investment in the work, the respect for themselves, the characters, and the reader, to connect all the familiar dots in new and interesting ways, I like genre stories quite a bit (see my feature review of Deep Sleeper). I even have a particular soft spot for the spy thriller: The Bourne Identity (from which Chaykin’s version of the Challengers steals a central conceit) is one of my favorite movies of all time; Queen & Country, one of my favorite current comic book series. The problem is that Chaykin seems to be bored — he’s given us nothing new, despite its shiny, interestingly-crinkled wrapper, and he hasn’t even paid enough attention to his trite storyline to make sure that it at least, on its own terms, makes sense. If he wasn’t so good on a surface, technical level, if I hadn’t been hooked by his mad page design and scene-moving skills up to the point when the Challengers are captured by the primary villain, and she starts to spout exposition while posing (which is when I started to realize how old-fashioned and stupid it all was, and had been, all along), I’d probably be more forgiving.

But he was, and I was, and I’m not. It actually makes me angry, that this man, who has more raw talent, and more serious entertainment industry storytelling experience, than just about any of his peers (or, for that matter, than anybody who has ever worked in comics, period), has chosen to throw his energies away on garbage like this.

Do I have to say it? Not recommended.

Title: Challengers of the Unknown : Stolen Moments, Borrowed Time
Creator: Howard Chaykin
Publisher: DC Comics
Cover Price: $16.99

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