DC has provided ComicBook.com with an exclusive preview of next week’s The Curse of Brimstone #12, the final issue of the “New Age of Heroes” title from writer Justin Jordan and the art team of Denys Cowan and John Panisci.
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The series centers around Joe, a young man whose good intentions led him to be cursed by a creature from Hell, and his sister Annie, who aims to help him rid himself of the curse. In the twelfth and final issue, the family is facing off against The Salesman, the unholy agent who made the deal — and his reinforcements from the Dark Multiverse.
Like all of the New Age of Heroes books, The Curse of Brimstone was designed to springboard out of Dark Nights: Metal, using concepts from that series to introduce a new generation of new characters who could be added to the DC toolbox. The idea at the time was to treat the new characters — who were owned by DC and mostly recycled existing superhero names from disused DC intellectual property — like creator-owned comics, giving the talent a long leash to tell whatever stories they wanted.
A year or so later, most of the comics are gone, and DC has marketed the No Justice and New Justice stories by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, and their collaborators as the biggest things to spin out of Metal.
[Start Gallery Call-to-Action Key=7745]”The Curse of Brimstone is a very personal sort of book, which is actually why I was doing it when Dan [DiDio] approached me about doing a supernatural kind of book,” Jordan told ComicBook.com earlier this year. “I come from a very rural place in Pennsylvania. The county that I live in is the size of Rhode Island and has 40,000 people in it. It is literally 99% white people; it is that kind of place. It is coal country. The coal mines moved out, factories moved in, factories moved out, nothing moved in. It’s a dying area. And most of the U.S. by geography is that — but that is not what we see in superhero comics.”
The idea of the story is that in a town that used to be a mining town, and then turned into a manufacturing town, and now is more or less a ghost town, Joe Chamberlain makes a deal with an agent of evil that will supposedly “save” his community. The result is predictably catastrophic.
“I was trying to reconcile — I see these people making decisions that I think are bad for them. I see them personally because I still live in an area like that,” he added. “I was like, ‘what drives people to make those kind of decisions?’ I don’t think in fiction, especially comics, that has been real accurately portrayed. I think horror gives us a lens to look at that kind of stuff. I think horror works well when it’s examining real things and real fears and stuff.”
You can see the preview pages in the attached gallery, and the official synopsis for the issue below.
It’s the epic finale! As Brimstone struggles to fight the Dark Multiverse beings who managed to come through from their “home office” to our world, the chance to lift the curse of Brimstone is offered! But with Annie’s life in the grip of the Salesman, Brimstone is forced to choose between his only family left and the sanity left in him.
The Curse of Brimstone #12 will be available in stores and online on Wednesday, March 6.
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