As he looks forward to a period of writing Superman and Action Comics, superstar writer Brian Michael Bendis told ComicBook.com that he is already trying to figure a role for Kate Spencer, the fan-favorite title lead of Marc Andreyko‘s early 2000s cult hit Manhunter.
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Bendis has a long history with Andreyko: the pair worked together on Torso, an original graphic novel about a true-life serial killer that helpe dto launch both men’s careers. In the intervening years, they have rarely traveled in the same comics circles (largely because Andreyko worked mainly at DC for his Big Two work, while Bendis was a Marvel guy) — but they have kept in touch. Torso is forever being optioned for TV and movies, then proving too difficult to develop, dropped, and re-optioned by someone new, so that helped. In the coming months, following the conclusion of Bendis’s status quo-shattering miniseries The Man of Steel, Andreyko is taking over Supergirl, meaning that the pair will be working in close proximity and sharing an editor.
“Marc is the writer of Supergirl, which comes right out of some plot threads that we laid down in The Man of Steel #5 and #6,” Bendis told ComicBook.com. “He’s working with my dear friend, Kevin Maguire, so it’s two dear friends that I’m so excited are having such a good time working together. They were friends that didn’t know each other, and now they know each other, and I knew they’d love each other, and they do, and it’s fun to watch….Marc literally just stands there and stares at me and goes, ‘Bring Manhunter back, bring Manhunter back,’ so we’re working on Manhunter. Somehow, some way, Manhunter is finding her way into something.”
Spencer was the seventh DC character to go by the name “Manhunter” — if you don’t count Manhunter 2070 or Martian Manhunter — and while her series, which launched in 2004, was a huge critical success, it never set the world on fire commercially. After being cancelled the first time, fans rallied to revive it, but the revival was short-lived. The character eventually joined the Birds of Prey, and then the Justice Society of America, but vanished following DC’s 2011 reboot and vanished for quite some time before finally reappearing in Green Arrow recently.
Spencer was a district attorney who, tired of supervillains getting off on technicalities, stole some super-gear from an evidence locker and used it to hunt down and kill some of the criminals that he day job as a prosecutor could not bring to justice.
Bendis’s final issue of The Man of Steel debuts this week, followed by new episodes of Superman and Action Comics which build on the events of the miniseries later in the month.
Note: An earlier version of this story neglected to mention Spencer’s recent appearances in Green Arrow. We apologize for the error.
