Jack Kirby’s Challengers of the Unknown was just plain bonkers

 DC The New Frontier inspired me to look at the collected Challengers of the Unknown by Jack Kirby. Which would be the first dozen stories of the Challengers.

The basic idea of the Challengers of the Unknown is that four men, all experts in their fields, survive a horrific plane crash virtually unscathed. Deciding that they are all living on borrowed time, they decide to band together to, um, do incredibly risky stuff.

I’m not actually joking when I say that Jack Kirby wrote about suicide pact disguised as an adventure team. That said, it was firmly established that they were altruistic with the first story establishing that, if they made a profit, a chunk of it went to charity.

If the Challengers of the Unknown are remembered for anything these days, it’s as dry-run for the Fantastic Four (which, honestly, doesn’t seem unreasonable) However, after Kirby left DC and the Challengers to change the world as we know it with Stan over at Marvel, DC kept publishing the Challengers for another ten years. Which is hardly what I’d call a flop, although none of the many efforts at reviving it have pulled it off.

I’ll also say that if the Challengers were a beta for the Fantastic Four, the later is a strong improvement on the concept on every level. Each of the Fantastic Four, from the get go, is not only visually distinct but distinct in characterization. You won’t mix up the Thing and the Invisible Woman. Meanwhile, I sometimes struggle to figure out which Challenger is which in some panels. (And the dialogue seems to have the same problem!) While I know they got more distinct as time went on, they initially read pretty much the same guy with different hair.

Having said that, the Kirby issues are still quite a wild ride. Aliens, giant monsters, ancient artifacts, this is Kirby with no brakes.   It’s also a fascinating part of a watershed event in comic publishing. They aren’t quite superheroes. They don’t have super powers or secret identities. They barely have costumes. But they take the idea of the giant monster comics from the fifties, where some random scientist saves the day and make it an ongoing concern. They take the secret agent adventure stories that were getting written at the time and added a new level of the fantastic.

The Challengers of the Unknown aren’t quite Silver Age superheroes but they share so many of the building blocks of what was to come.

I find the Challengers to be an odd mix. On the one hand, I find the characters to be rather bland. And the concept of four white guys who are implicitly very rich (or else how could they be doing all this?) doing crazy, death defying stuff because they feel like it is kind of entitled.

On the other hand, it’s a  pack of madmen who are out to save the world. While not a one of them is normal, they are still ‘regular’ people going way out of their depth by their own choice to make a difference.