Challengers of the Unknown

50 years ago - A B-47 Stratojet transpacific flight encounters an unexplained spatial phenomenon and crashes into a volcanic island. Ace Morgan, Red Ryan, Rocky Davis, June Robbins and Professor Walter Haley survive the crash and the wilderness, bonding over the belief that they had escaped death and felt driven to make something of their borrowed time. Upon returning to civilization, they begin an Adventure Club, The Challengers of the Unknown .
Membership: 28-year-old Ace Morgan, 19-year-old Red Ryan, 24-year-old Rocky Davis, 26-year-old June Robbins, 27-year-old Professor Walter Haley

48 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown take ownership of a mysterious artifact, using science to contain the destructive creatures and energies within. They find it contains a magic ring, a portal into the paths beyond.
Membership: 30-year-old Ace Morgan, 21-year-old Red Ryan, 26-year-old Rocky Davis, 28-year-old June Robbins, 29-year-old Professor Walter Haley

47 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown are tasked with containing the Ultivac, a runaway prototype adaptive war machine. they discover that it has gained sentience, and are able to connect with it, but it is destroyed by its creator before it can be further understood.
Membership: 31-year-old Ace Morgan, 22-year-old Red Ryan, 27-year-old Rocky Davis, 29-year-old June Robbins, 30-year-old Professor Walter Haley

46 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown move into Challengers Mountain in Colorado, building their headquarters and labs in an empty mountain goldmine.
Membership: 32-year-old Ace Morgan, 23-year-old Red Ryan, 28-year-old Rocky Davis, 30-year-old June Robbins, 31-year-old Professor Walter Haley

45 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown discover that the low-gravity Tyrans have begun installing technology to alter Earth's gravity to mine it for resources and add it to their empire. The Challengers are able to use hypnosis to take control of their earthbase, uninstalling their technology from the planet.
Membership: 33-year-old Ace Morgan, 24-year-old Red Ryan, 29-year-old Rocky Davis, 31-year-old June Robbins, 32-year-old Professor Walter Haley

44 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown construct their undersea research labs. They discover deep-sea portals through the bleed to opposite dimensions at war with each other. They broker a peace between the alternate dimensions, and work with Stormwatch to contain and seal the portals.
Membership: 34-year-old Ace Morgan, 25-year-old Red Ryan, 30-year-old Rocky Davis, 32-year-old June Robbins, 33-year-old Professor Walter Haley

43 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown, while traveling into the past with Rip Hunter to recover an extinct plant as part of a cure for a debilitating virus, are lost in ancient Mesopotamia while Rip repairs his time sphere. They must continually work to remove any influence they have on history, learning to write in cuneiform. Rip recovers them and returns them to the correct timeline, where they discover statues of their likeness.
Membership: 35-year-old Ace Morgan, 26-year-old Red Ryan, 31-year-old Rocky Davis, 33-year-old June Robbins, 34-year-old Professor Walter Haley

42 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown, experimenting with microbes from orbit, release a mysterious chemical into the atmosphere. June Robbins and several creatures grow to giant size. June helps the Challengers capture the creatures so they can all be treated.
Membership: 36-year-old Ace Morgan, 27-year-old Red Ryan, 32-year-old Rocky Davis, 34-year-old June Robbins, 35-year-old Professor Walter Haley

41 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown have to stop several escaped criminals who have hijacked a plane carrying artifacts from ancient Kor. The hijackers consume serums found in vials inside the artifacts, and their bodies all alter into different monsters. The Challengers ultimately stop them when they recover the antidote.
Membership: 37-year-old Ace Morgan, 28-year-old Red Ryan, 33-year-old Rocky Davis, 35-year-old June Robbins, 36-year-old Professor Walter Haley

40 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown agree to help free the imprisoned leader of a native resistance movement. Red Ryan & Rocky Davis are intentionally arrested as part of the breakout.
Membership: 38-year-old Ace Morgan, 29-year-old Red Ryan, 34-year-old Rocky Davis, 36-year-old June Robbins, 37-year-old Professor Walter Haley

39 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown are attacked in Challengers Mountain by a rebuilt Ultivac. They are able to contain it, and June Robbins finds a language they can use to communicate with it, helping free it from the control of it's creator. It's consciousness is placed in the computers of the mountain while it's body is put in storage.
Membership: 39-year-old Ace Morgan, 30-year-old Red Ryan, 35-year-old Rocky Davis, 37-year-old June Robbins, 38-year-old Professor Walter Haley

37 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown are stranded on the secret island headquarters of Hunzar Manning. They build tools with what they have on hand to break into his facility and defeat his henchman, stopping his plans of building his own private navy, ruling the Pacific.
Membership: 41-year-old Ace Morgan, 32-year-old Red Ryan, 37-year-old Rocky Davis, 39-year-old June Robbins, 40-year-old Professor Walter Haley

36 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown race against time to stop the eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera. They ultimately have to choose one of them to sacrifice their life. Red Ryan knocks the others out, taking the task himself, dying in the explosion that vents the pressure in the volcano into the ionosphere.
Membership: 42-year-old Ace Morgan, 38-year-old Rocky Davis, 40-year-old June Robbins, 41-year-old Professor Walter Haley

34 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown are captured by alien drones while exploring an asteroid dense with lithium, and are kept in an interspatial prison. They are able to outsmart the giant alien child that has taken them and escape.
Membership: 44-year-old Ace Morgan, 40-year-old Rocky Davis, 42-year-old June Robbins, 43-year-old Professor Walter Haley

32 years ago - The Challengers of the Unknown are trapped in a rigged-to-explode Challengers Mountain along with a group of hostages when it is sabotaged by Hunzar Manning. Professor Walter Haley sacrifices himself, gunned down by Manning's men, to reconnect Ultivac to its body. Ultivac sacrifices itself to save everyone, proving itself an honorary Challenger. Ace Morgan, June Robbins & Rocky Davis choose to go their separate ways, honoring their roles as the surviving Challengers in their own ways.

Team Members

It is really fascinating sitting down to read the classic adventures of the Challengers of the Unknown. They're such an important part of the history of COMICS, let alone of DC... but when you actually read them, once you get out of the charming early Jack Kirby adventures... they start to feel a little underwhelming. I couldn't say why exactly, other than there seems to be only three or four Challengers stories that were retold for decades with varying degrees of care. Ultimately, I think the Challengers are really more important because of the role they play, the place they fill in the evolution of comic heroes. So it falls to us to make sure our version of the team does exactly that, but also see if we can maybe mix up those story archetypes and make them a little more exciting. Let us know how we did!

The Challengers of the Unknown's Comic History

The Challengers of the Unknown are one of the earliest stories told in Showcase, an anthology series that introduced so many characters that would go on to star in their own series. The Challengers debuted in issue #6 in 1957, parking them squarely in the Atomic Age of comics, that space between the Golden and Silver Ages when comics were processing the damage to their cultural footprint from the Hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, and the creation of the Comics Code.

The Challengers represent a fascinating half-step back toward the reinvention of superheroes. They're still classic two-fisted adventurers out of the sort of serial storytelling popular in the era, but their costumes and their fantastic adventures serve as clear indicators of what is right around the corner.

Most importantly, however, they represent a major step in the career of the King of Comics, Jack Kirby. They are CLEARLY his invention, and they move and pose like all the classic Kirby characters we love. There are some reports that they were co-created by writer Dave Wood, or by Kirby's long-time partner Joe Simon, but it's unmistakable that whatever else they are, they are Kirby classics.

The parallels between this team and an entirely different group of four adventurers, who all experience a plane crash and choose to band together as heroes, is hard to miss. Even some of the characterization of the individual members, from the big gruff muscle guy, the younger hot-headed one that always teases him, the professorial scientist, and even the inclusion of a girl (which was a thing, lets not pretend it wasn't), all seems to be really strong evidence that Kirby might have had a lot more of the Fantastic Four already prepped in his brain then we realize. He left the Challengers after issue #8 of their solo title series, only a few years before Marvel's flagship series launched. The similarities between the two teams color practically everything about the Challengers for the rest of their 87-issue run.

As the rest of the comic book universe blossomed in color and playful scope, the Challengers never really fully caught up. It continued for a long time, but always seemed to be chasing trends rather than setting them. There have been several revitalizing series by really amazing creators like Jeph Loeb, Stephen Grant, Howard Chaykin, Scott Snyder, and Mark Waid, but they have always remained as this sort of preserved-in-amber reminder of a particular era of comics as they developed into worlds where the likes of the Justice League and the Teen Titans could thrive.

Our Challengers Story

The most important thing we want to capture with our spin on the Challengers is to put them in our timeline in as early an era as we can get away with, to make them feel like a foundational element of our world. They don't have to continue to be active now, and in fact, most of the events we collected to build their timeline skew much closer to the early part of their publication history rather than the latter. There are plenty of more modern stories about what happens to them in the future, or new teams with new characters, but that's not really what we want. We want these classic serial-adventurer archetypes.

For the most part, we're just taking classic Challengers stories and reframing them so they fit into our timeline. We're making one core change in their origin by making June a full member and even making her a part of their origin, but I don't even think I need to explain that.

There are some deaths that happened in the original comic that were meant to be permanent, but were walked back because of reader response. We're keeping them in place, which allows us to, we think, gracefully close the door on this era, and gives us this really early institution that predates even the idea of the modern superhero.

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