DC Comics's BloodHound Headed to Dark Horse

After making deals with both DC Comics and his co-creator to obtain the rights to the character, BloodHound creator Dan Jolley will take the character to Dark Horse Comics this year, where not only will they reprint his older material from DC (albeit edited to remove explicit references to the DC superhero universe) but also launch new stories, a decade after the comic was cancelled at DC. The series' lead is a detective whose special skill is hunting down super-powered villains...set in a world where not everyone with powers throws on tights and engages in world-shattering brawls. What if a super-genius like Lex Luthor kept his head down and quietly embezzled hundreds of billions? What if someone with phasing powers robbed a bank at night, wearing a hoodie and ski mask instead of an elaborate costume? That's where Travis Clevinger would come in--and as the star of Bloodhound, he appeared in ten issues of his own monthly series, he pursued the worst and most dangerous criminals his little corner of the DC Universe had to offer before being cancelled amid the crossover mania of 2004-2005. Jolley is unambiguous in a new interview with Newsarama, in which he blames event comics for the inability of the critically-acclaimed series to find its audience. "DC made a baffling choice with BloundHound's timing," said Jolley. "They approved it in late 2002, but then for reasons unknown to me they sat on it for a solid 18 months, and released it after Identity Crisis was up and running -- and if you remember anything about DC from 2004, you know that every last ounce of energy they had was poured into Identity Crisis. Once they decided to do this massive event, focusing entirely on the costumed superheroes, it seemed as though everyone at DC except Ivan Cohen stopped giving a rat's ass about BloundHound. There was no promotion, nothing. People just didn't know it existed, and in 2004, it was a good bit harder to get the word out than it is now; plus DC's marketing department took a very dim view of anyone other than them disseminating information. So the people who did read it thought it was great -- in fact, in his introduction, Kurt Busiek actually calls it DC's best book at the time -- it was just that hardly anyone read it." Dark Horse, though, loved what they saw when Jolley brought them nine issues (the entire series minus an issue with an inextricable Firestorm crossover) to publish in trade, the same way they've done for other creators in the recent past.  In fact, Dark Horse liked it enough that Jolley will be providing at least one all-new Bloodhound story for Dark Horse Presents, the publisher's popular anthology title.