Details Revealed About ‘The Unexpected,’ Ryan Sook and Steve Orlando’s New DC Title

DC has finally released the first details and teaser art for The Unexpected, a new series from their New Age of Heroes banner.

The title, announced at New York Comic Con, brings together a group of enemies who happen to hate one another slightly less than the people they are facing off against. Ryan Sook will draw the series, which will be written by Milk Wars veteran Steve Orlando, whose Justice League of America and Supergirl will end before The Unexpected launches.

“I was going to say that it’s The Dark Tower meets The Expendables, but it’s actually The Dark Tower meets Seven Samurai, even though there’s only four of them,” Orlando sauid at the time.

They are characters that have made huge mistakes, and only by working together do they get a chance to redeem themselves.

[Start Gallery Call-to-Action Key=7295]The Unexpected is made up by Neon The Unknown, a blind magician and rockstar artist; Ascendant, who is a king to a race of “Jack Kirby super-science orcs” who accidentally erased themselves from existence; Firebrand, who was a first responder who has to get into a fight ever 24 hours or her heart will stop and she will die; and Viking Judge, a Viking Judge who lives inside of an unemployed hipster.

“The villain of this book, Alden Quench, is really a citizen of the Multiverse, the same way that [The Dark Tower‘s] Randall Flagg was,” Orlando told DC’s official PR blog. “This is a book that is instantly in play with the events of Metal and the Dark Multiverse, the pre-existing Multiverse, and maybe things that you didn’t even know were happening in the fabric of the DCU—realities that have been destroyed as far back as Crisis on Infinite Earths.”

You can see a number of images, including two covers and some character sketches, in the attached gallery.

“We want this book to act as a unifier for the DCU,” Orlando added. “Just look at the tagline, ‘To Prevent Crisis, Expect the Unexpected.’ These are the people who stop these massive would-be crossover event books before they even happen and we don’t even know it. We don’t know who they are. So, this story is really about finding out what happens, finding out what comes next, uncovering the mysteries that have been seeded in these stories, even beyond Metal and Final Crisis—things you may have not even noticed for the past ten, twenty years, all coming to root.”

Look for The Unexpected #1 by Ryan Sook and Steve Orlando in stores and digital retailers in June, 2018.