Milestone Returns: Denys Cowan Says Fans Have “No Idea What’s In Store”

After quite a lot of anticipation from fans, DC’s Milestone Comics imprint returned with great fanfare earlier this year, recontextualizing the stories of the Dakotaverse for the modern era. Thus far, we’ve seen a wave of three “Milestone Returns” titles – Static: Season One, Icon & Rocket: Season One, and Hardware: Season One, each of which have been met with critical and fan acclaim. There’s definitely been curiosity from some about what the Milestone Returns initiative is building towards (especially after the release of the one-shot of the same name), and according to Milestone’s Denys Cowan, that hype will be justified. During a recent virtual press event to promote Hardware: Season One #1, Cowan spoke about the fan response to the titles thus far, and teased that there is a lot more in store.

“It’s been extremely gratifying to see people’s responses, and I’m very excited about what we have to bring them, because we’ve all been working really hard on this stuff,” Cowan explained. “And it’s good to see it finally, finally, coming to fruition and seeing people’s responses has been good. But people have no idea what’s in store for them. This has just been…the tip of the iceberg. What you’re going to see is stuff that’s going to literally, it’s going to make everybody in this panel room write us and go ‘You didn’t tell us about you was gonna do this! I can’t believe you guys did this!’ Because there’s going to be some…we want to do stuff that makes DC even go: ‘Are you guys sure you want to do this?’”

“You have to challenge them,” Cowan added. “How are they going to let us take them on this journey? So far, they let us take them pretty far.”

This echoes comments made by Milestone’s Reginald Hudlin during a press conference for Icon & Rocket: Season One, were he argued that there is “a big picture” in mind for all of the characters that are being reintroduced.

“Well, it really started with me, Denys and Derek, when we decided to relaunch Milestone Media as a company,” Hudlin explained to reporters at the time. “One of the first things we said was, we’re not going to be a nostalgia company, stuck in the past, talks about the old days. Milestone was successful because it was so cutting edge. So if we’re going to replicate the successful formula of why Milestone works, we had to be cutting edge for this generation, which meant finding new voices, like Leon; like Vita and Nikolas who’s writing and drawing Static Shock; like Brandon, who’s writing Hardware. Having these new voices in there, it’s like, Denys and I had a pretty strong vision of what we wanted these characters to do and how to reintroduce them to the world. But [we’re] so happy to see these writers take those initial ideas and just really run with them and just take them to new, exciting places and extraordinary executions. So it’s just a great squad of people, all working. And there’s a big picture that we have in mind for all the storylines and characters will intersect at certain times, at the same time, you can read it each individual book series and enjoy it, and not feel like, ‘Oh, I don’t know what’s going on.’ You’ll know what’s going on as you read Icon & Rocket, but we think as you read Icon & Rocket, you’ll want to see these other books.”