The ad shown above ran in CSN and DC comics. It gives us clues about the new alt-Challengers. Note the little icons under the title: a heart, cross, diamond, crown, and star.

According to a Chaykin interview (cited below), we're not in the DCU, but in some "world devoid of heroes." So these Challengers are Elseworlds Challs, or something.

Yet in issue 2, a government fink says, "You're too young to remember the last time this [a major disaster?] happened... but Morgan, Haley, Ryan and Davis caused us a world of trouble... and set our plan back by decades." Which means they're alt-versions of the original Challengers - except they're never seen.

Move on to the Issue 1...

.... Or read more of the creator's comments below.

At today's DCU panel at WizardWorld, one of DC's more intrepid properties got a new lease on life - Challengers of the Unknown will be revived by Howard Chaykin in a six issue miniseries next year. We chatted with the creator for a few about the three who defied death.

As with his Mighty Love, Challengers of the Unknown is all Chaykin ­ he is both writing and drawing the limited series ­ Dave Stewart will color. "The reality is, from this point on, pretty much everything I'll be doing, with a couple of obvious exceptions, I'll be writing and drawing," Chaykin told Newsarama. "I've just decided to get back to comics full time. I'm really excited about this."

Along with the property itself, the new Challengers projects revisits a time-honored tradition at DC, namely, give Chaykin an old property that needs some refreshing, and letting him have a go at it in his distinctive style.

"I have a long history with DC, over the past 20 years, of DC coming to me with characters that have been functionally moribund, and asking me to play with them ­ the Shadow, DC's science fiction characters, and the Blackhawks being the three that come right to mind," Chaykin said. "I've always felt that the Challengers is one of those back listed properties that deserve more attention than it got, basically for the title alone. So I thought it was a real intriguing offer, and as usual, I gave them back something that, conceptually, was not what they expected, and I'm glad about that."

What Chaykin gave back, as the illustration suggests, is not a revamp of the original team who, having survived a plane crash, figured they were on borrowed time as it was, and began well, challenging the unknown. Chaykin deconstructed the team and the concept before he started building again.

"First and foremost, I reduced the group from four, which, in the original grew to five, when they added a woman, down to three people, mostly because three is an easier number to service in terms of characters. Four becomes, in a time of 22-page stories, even with extended arcs, a lot of characters, and I felt that three was a good way to go.

The other major change was that the original concept was Indiana Jones meets the Fantastic Four kind of thing. Four people who cheated death that were out there looking for adventure. Contextually, they were challenging their manhood. I felt that in this culture, it needed an agenda-based idea. You couldn't just have guys out there, looking for trouble. So I created adversaries and a problem in the realm of the 'unknown' to play with."

One final change after a fashion is that this series won't be set in the DC Universe. "There's an element of super heroics in it, but if I'm going to do that, I like it to be grounded in some idea of recognizable real science, albeit with one strong fantasy element in it," Chaykin said. "I'm trying to keep it real, and that means not having the three of them running into guys with capes. They're not those kind of characters."

The three members of the Challengers are Rydell Starr, Holden Crosse, and Kendra Harte. All are familiar with trouble. "None of them really get along well with authority, and they're all sort of gadflies, muckrakers and troublemakers who find themselves part of a situation of a secret war, so to speak, that they had no idea they were playing a part in. And they also discover that they're on the wrong side. They end up turning their 'weapons,' their adversarial natures against the people they thought they were serving."

Chaykin broke down the characters further:

"Rydell Starr is a former felon who's a pop star, and jailhouse lawyer. He's an astonishing dual personality ­ someone who is comfortable on the streets and can work just as well in a boardroom.

"Holden is a child of Soviet sleeper agents who were never activated who opted to stay in this country, and has become an Internet gadfly. He's somewhat of a centrist-left version of Matt Drudge.

"Kendra Harte is a child of the counterculture who makes her living as an industrial saboteur."

Survivors of a terrorist attack (although their memories are affected), the three will fall in line with earlier incarnations of the property, that is, they are living on borrowed time ­ by all rights, they should be dead.

"Along with everything else they're going ot have going on, they're going ot have wicked cases of survivor's guilt and rage. And fear," Chaykin said, explaining how something such as what the three go through could turn people into heroes.

"I'm a great believer in the idea that people who are heroes are not brave, but are cowards who put aside their fear for a moment for the larger good. That's what these guys are. In another circumstance they would be, if not objects of contempt, then certainly not heroes. It is their baptism, and I mean literally their baptism of fire that makes them heroes. The three of them have things in common beyond their outlaw nature, which emerge slowly in the first two or three issues."

As with every project he tackles, Challengers is serving as a repository of sorts for larger topics that interest Chaykin, as well as the interplay the concepts create when placed alongside one another.

"In the first six issue arc, we'll be dealing with international terrorism, domestic terrorism, the real story of modern piracy on the high seas, and all sorts of science fiction elements that have core bases in both truth and eugenics, with a counter history of the United States and the world that dates back to the 1920s and leads up to today," Chaykin said. "The subtext is 'pay no attention to the man/woman/or anybody else behind the curtain.'

"The core idea of this comes from an essay by Gore Vidal which, paraphrased describes a shadowy corps of men who hire the man to play our president every four years. That's the core genesis of the idea. Paranoia is my watchword. Whereas some people pull back to reveal the oogie boogie spooky when they do a story like this, for me, the thought is: you can't handle the truth that's out there. Challengers of the Unknown shows that basically everything you've ever feared is true. It has nothing to do with aliens, angles or Cthulu. It's all us. We are the bad guys of our world.

"But we're the good guys too. We're alone on this muddy speck, so we've got to do the best we can with what we've got to work with."

Comments

One reviewer thought the premise - sleeper agents unknowingly implanted with hyper-abilities - was a "sort of a souped-up version of THE BOURNE IDENTITY."

One early release noted the title would come from Wildstorm, not the regular DC line.

Read another early interview at Fanboy Planet where HC explains that reviving the Challengers was one of Dan DiDio's priorities.