DC’s James Gunn Reveals Favorite Comic of 2023

James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Universe has begun to take shape, promising a number of movies and Max-exclusive television shows in the coming years. One of the biggest surprises of the new DC Universe slate has been the wide swath of comics that it draws inspiration from, including a number of newer hits. As a result, fans have been eager to get ongoing or recent comic recommendations from Gunn — and it looks like one title was especially his favorite.

In a recent post on the social media platform Threads, Gunn revealed that The Human Target from Tom King and Greg Smallwood is his favorite comic of 2023. The 12-issue maxiseries, which began in 2022, published the back half of its arc this year.

What Is The Human Target About?

In The Human Target, Christopher Chance has made a living out of being a human target—a man hired to disguise himself as his client to invite would-be assassins to attempt his murder. He’s had a remarkable career until his latest case protecting Lex Luthor when things go sideways. An assassination attempt Chance didn’t see coming leaves him vulnerable and left trying to solve his own murder, as he has 12 days to discover just who in the DC Universe hated Luthor enough to want him dead by slow-acting poison. And the prime suspects happen to be…the Justice League International?

“This is not a book that I went hunting for,” King explained in a roundtable interview in 2021. “I very rarely go hunting for books. My best books that I’ve I’ve ever written were given to me, things like Vision and Mister Miracle, those came from someone being like, ‘We have a project, Tom. You do this,’ and me being in a corner and writing my way out. And Human Target was the same. I literally made a joke on Twitter. People say nothing good comes from Twitter, I got some work from it once at least. The editor called me that day and said, ‘Hey, would you actually like to write about Human Target?” And I thought he was joking, so I said yes, because I didn’t really get the joke, and it kept tumbling forward from there.”

‘I went back and I read the original stuff, the Len Wein and Dick Giordano stuff, and it was just absolutely amazing,” King continued. “That’s when it sparked my interest, and I sort of went ‘Oh, I can do something cool with this.’ I came up with this pitch — and again, I was putting it on the side-burner because I didn’t really think it was that important. It wasn’t until I saw Smallwood’s art, his first cover he sent in, where I was like, ‘Oh, this could be something special. This could be something unique in comics, something that transcends the moment — an opportunity to do all those things that I always say I want to do on my best projects, which is be in a genre and tell a great genre story, but also comment on our moments of the day.’ So, that’s how I came to Human Target, and it ended up being a story about a guy facing death and what you do when you think you’re going to die soon, which is kind of the mood of the entire world for the last two years.”

What Is On the DC Universe Slate?

As Gunn and Safran revealed earlier this year, the initial DC Studios slate for “Gods and Monsters” will include movies for Superman: Legacy, The Brave and the Bold, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Swamp Thing, and The Authority. It will include the HBO Max television shows Waller, Booster Gold, Lanterns, Paradise Lost, and an animated Creature Commandos series.

“A lot of people think it’s going to be Marvel 2.0, and definitely I learned a lot of stuff at Marvel. I think that we have a lot of differences,” Gunn explained at the time. “We are telling a big, huge, central story that is like Marvel, except for, I think that we’re a lot more planned out than Marvel from the beginning because we’ve gotten a group of writers together to work that story out completely. But we’re also creating a universe that is like Star Wars, where there’s different times, different places, different things, or Game of Thrones, where characters are a little bit more morally complex.” 

What do you think of James Gunn’s favorite comic from 2023? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!