During today’s Gotham City panel at San Diego Comic Con, DC Comics announced the return of a classic superhero team with a new twist. Writers Collin Kelly & Jackson Lanzing will team with artist Robert Carey for a new Outsiders series set to launch this fall. The series will star Batwoman Kate Kane, Batwing Luke Fox, and a new version of the Planetary character The Drummer.
Information about the series outside of the writing team was sparse in DC’s official announcement online, but on Twitter Lanzing revealed a few more details. Outsiders will, according to Lanzing, launch as a twelve-issue series, with the writers “digging into the darkest forgotten corners of the DC Universe for twelve issues of truly weird pop-culture adventure archeology.” Twitter fans were quick to notice similarities between Roger Cruz‘s main cover to Outsiders #1, from character placement to Luke Fox’s white suit, to an image by artist Phil Jimenez of Wildstorm’s Planetary team. The use of ‘archeology’ in Lanzing’s tweet and the presence of a new version of The Drummer also indicates this version of the Outsiders may be a new twist on Warren Ellis & John Cassaday‘s iconic team.
The Outsiders first appeared in 1983 in The Brave and The Bold #200. Led by Batman, the team of international heroes would take on challenges the Justice League wouldn’t or couldn’t. Various iterations of the group, with or without Batman, have appeared over the forty years since their debut. The most recent Batman & The Outsiders series was helmed by writer Bryan Edward Hill and ran for 17 issues and an annual, ending in October 2020.
Check out variant covers by Dan Mora (open-to-order), Christian Ward (1:25 incentive), and Cruz (1:50 incentive), as well as some work-in-progress preview pages, below. Outsiders #1 will arrive this Winter.
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