‘New Challengers #3’ (review)

Written by Aaron Gillespie, Scott Snyder
Illustrated by V Ken Marion 
Published by DC Comics

“I get real fidgety when I’m bored.”

Well, no chance of that, thankfully.

Source Wall, Source Wall, Source Wall.

Seems the broken Source Wall is at the heart of every mystery and developing crisis in the DCU these days.

No surprise then that this should be the case on Challengers Mountain, also.

Both were featured prominently in Scott Snyder’s Dark Metal event, and as the summer rolls along it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mr. Snyder’s reasons for that were apparently well-thought out from the beginning, with a clear eye to the long-term.

That fact comes into focus front and center in the latest issue of Snyder’s New Challengers, with revelations that tie everything we have been introduced to so far in this series to that existential damage at the far boundary of known DC reality. In rapid succession the critical links between our New Challengers, the old team, the Prof, and that giant, partial, rather Anti-Monitor-looking corpse currently sitting at the core of Challenger mountain, are all laid out for us.

Then it’s straight back into action for our team, from Challengers Mountain to the Land that Time Forgot. Travel by glowing mystical suitcase trunk is delightfully bizarre, but it gets the job done.

Thankfully, Andy Kubert’s professional comic artistry is a good match for all that, and more.

There’s a certain amount of rapid fire explication involved in all of this, a combination of surprising leaps of logic and blind faith on the part of our core team that’s become a hallmark of Snyder’s style. With storylines that are so intricate and complex, he has find some way to cram all the world-changing revelations he brings to bear into a handful of panels or lines of dialogue.

It says a lot about his talent that he does so while keeping the action moving, and even while managing to flesh out more character backstory, which continues to be one of the more enjoyable things about this series so far for me.

This time out it’s Krunch who gets the spotlight. Mr. Bunyan is a bruiser, and his story matches him well to the role of the hot-headed ginger of the current team, in seeming counterpart to the original team’s Red (Ryder?).

That quartet gets some air-time as well, and it’s gratifying to learn that it actually is the original team.

Where they’ve been, and why they’re showing up now, is an enjoyable sleight-of-hand that successfully ties us into two wholly different Challengers histories. Again, that explanation, such as we get, is a bit disorienting. But on the whole I’m a fan of Snyder having to work in a limited issue format. It means we get answers in something of a timely fashion. Though I’m glad they’ve given him more than four issues to work with this time around.

Two more issues to go, and something tells me that by the time we get to the end, we’ll have pieces to a larger puzzle unfolding throughout the rest of the DCU.

I have to say up till now I’ve been a little bit put off by how over-central DC’s heroes and the planet Earth seem to have become in a remarkable sequence of Snyder’s mega-prime universal developments and crises. It’s definitely beginning to look however, as if even in this, there has been a purpose to that bias all along.

If this issue is any indication, it may even turn out that Challenger’s Mountain is at the very center of everything that involves.

Next Issue: The Mystery of Anti-Prof!