Exclusive DC Comics Preview: Deathstroke: Rebirth #1
Comics icon Christopher Priest returns to ongoing comics at DC for the first time in more than a [...]
Comics icon Christopher Priest returns to ongoing comics at DC for the first time in more than a decade with Deathstroke: Rebirth #1, out next Wednesday.
DC has provided ComicBook.com with an exclusive preview of the issue, which you can check out in the attached gallery.
"Coming back into the business is a little scary because I haven't written an ongoing series in a long time. So there's some nervousness about failure; there's some flopsweat going on. As far as retreading things, the Deathstroke series is unlike anything I've done before. The only similarities between Deathstroke and anything I've done before is Black Panther, where we're kind of using the same sort of structure. With Black Panther we were using these title cards to break up the scenes and I did that deliberately to evoke that sort of Black Panthersort of storytelling. And the fact that he's really smart," Priest told me during an interview at Comic Con International: San Diego. "But unlike Black Panther, he is a bad guy and an unapologetically bad guy who runs around and kills people. So it really doesn't mirror anything that I've done before. Part of my goal though was to reclaim ground -- and I mean this with all due respect to writers who have come before me, but to reclaim some ground for Deathstroke that Deadpool had taken from him. Because Deadpool is the echo of Deathstorke, not the other way around. And we don't want Deathstroke to look like he's some kind of ripoff of Deadpool but Deadpool is huge now. He's huger than huge. I don't even work for Marvel and let's just say Deadpool's been very nice to me lately. So I definitely had a conscious goal to reassert Deathstroke as his own man, as his own character in a unique way. He's not at all funny. There's humor in the book but Deathstroke himself is not. He has no sense of humor, and it is nothing at all like Deadpool. Hopefully, we'll kind of reset him back to being a top tier character in his own right."
What you can see carrying over from previous work by Priest is the "title card" style captions with white text on a black background. Often played for laughs, they were a staple in Priest and M.D. Bright's Quantum & Woody.
Deathstroke: Rebirth #1 hits the stands on Wednesday, August 10. You can get it at your local comic shop or pre-order it on ComiXology here.
