New Outsiders Team Revealed

A new team of Outsiders has assembled in this week’s issue of Detective Comics from writer Bryan Edward Hill and artist Miguel Mendonça.

In the final part of Hill’s Detective Comics story arc, which will feed into the upcoming Batman and the Outsiders series, a new team is assembled to deal with the threats hidden away in Brainiac’s files.

The cosmic know-it-all had gathered intel on various galactic threats before his death in Justice League: No Justice, and Amanda Waller saw an opportunity to loot the knowledge vaults and did. Her interference led directly to Brainiac’s death, as well as some other bad news that came about as a result, including damage done to the Source Wall.

Batman took the files back from her, and has assembled a team to address some of the dangers within.

The team, a modern update of the Outsiders Batman led in the ’80s and early ’90s, features Black Lightning as its leader along with Orphan, The Signal, and Katana. Batman is not new to the concept, either in the real world or in the in-universe continuity presented by the comics; in Dark Nights: Metal, Batman was revealed to have been fielding a team of Outsiders fairly recently that included characters like Halo and Metamorpho.

The team will feed into Batman and the Outsiders series launching in the fall, written by Bryan Edward Hill, with art by Dexter Soy.

Speculation that such a title could spin out of Hill’s arc on Detective — which was titled “On the Outside” and advertised as a Batman/Black Lightning team-up — has been going since the arc was announced. Orphan had been featured in Detective Comics during James Tynion IV’s run at the start of Rebirth but the idea of a Batman family book had been pushed aside so that James Robinson and Peter J. Tomasi can focus on more Batman-centric stories in upcoming arcs.

The Outsiders have been name-dropped on Arrow and Black Lightning over the years, and the upcoming season of Young Justice borrows that name as well.

Recently, Black Lightning series star Cress Williams name-dropped them in an interview with ComicBook.com.

“The thing that’s gonna be really, really interesting at some point is that there will be, we will on some level be like a super hero team down the line,” Williams said. “So it will be like our own little very small version of The Outsiders.”

Batman and the Outsiders will be available in stores and online in December.