The People's Heroes
14 years ago - The Russian government sanctions their new metahuman organization The People's Heroes. The Rocket Red Brigade are placed in support.
Membership: Ivan Illyich Gort, 30-year-old Anatoli Knyazev, 20-year-old Christina Alexandrova, 34-year-old Nastasia Korolevna & The Rocket Red Brigade
Membership: Ivan Illyich Gort, 30-year-old Anatoli Knyazev, 20-year-old Christina Alexandrova, 34-year-old Nastasia Korolevna & The Rocket Red Brigade
12 years ago - The People's Heroes are unable to stop 35-year-old Ben Turner from performing an assassination of a Russian Pakhan for the League of Assassins as Bronze Tiger.
Membership: Ivan Illyich Gort, 32-year-old Anatoli Knyazev, 22-year-old Christina Alexandrova, 36-year-old Nastasia Korolevna & The Rocket Red Brigade
Membership: Ivan Illyich Gort, 32-year-old Anatoli Knyazev, 22-year-old Christina Alexandrova, 36-year-old Nastasia Korolevna & The Rocket Red Brigade
11 years ago - Leonid Kovar explores a crashed alien spaceship near the Yenesi River with his archaeologist father, and is caught in it's explosion. Empowered with alien energy, he offers his services to Russia as Red Star, and is named a member of the government-sanctioned organization The People's Heroes.
Membership: Ivan Illyich Gort, 23-year-old Christina Alexandrova, 33-year-old Anatoli Knyazev, 37-year-old Nastasia Korolevna, 16-year-old Leonid Kovar & The Rocket Red Brigade
Membership: Ivan Illyich Gort, 23-year-old Christina Alexandrova, 33-year-old Anatoli Knyazev, 37-year-old Nastasia Korolevna, 16-year-old Leonid Kovar & The Rocket Red Brigade
9 years ago - Mikhail Arkadin's attempt to reproduce 36-year-old Martin Stein's Matrix Reactor results in catastrophe when the reactor melts down. Arkadin's body is almost completely destroyed, but when Stein & 20-year-old Ronnie Raymond arrive in Russia to review the aftermath, Arkadin is able to integrate himself into the Firestorm Matrix. After forcing Stein to fight for control, he is able to craft his own matrix and his own fire-based body. He takes the name Pozhar, and is selected to join the government- sanctioned organization The People's Heroes
Membership: Ivan Illyich Gort, 25-year-old Christina Alexandrova, 35-year-old Anatoli Knyazev, 39-year-old Nastasia Korolevna, 17-year-old Leonid Kovar, 37-year-old Mikhail Arkadin & The Rocket Red Brigade
Membership: Ivan Illyich Gort, 25-year-old Christina Alexandrova, 35-year-old Anatoli Knyazev, 39-year-old Nastasia Korolevna, 17-year-old Leonid Kovar, 37-year-old Mikhail Arkadin & The Rocket Red Brigade
8 years ago - Ivan Illyich Gort attempts to defect. He is tracked by The People's Heroes. He destroys many of the Rocket Red Brigade's armor suits & removes 38-year-old Mikhail Arkadin's heart while transitioning to his nuclear form. 26-year-old Christina Alexandrova's body rejects its speed force connection and she falls into a coma. While the rest of the team tries to stop him non-lethally, 36-year-old Anatoli Knyazev kills him with an experimental handheld railgun. 19-year-old Leonid Kovar focuses on keeping bystanders safe, and takes control of the team in the aftermath of the death of Ivan to keep everyone alive. 40-year-old Nastasia Korolevna abandons the team and returns to Yav.
3 years ago - Leonid Kovar leads several former members of The People's Heroes to stop mad scientist Alexi Nicolai from creating a nuclear apocalypse.
Membership: 24-year-old Leonid Kovar, 32-year-old Christina Alexandrova, 43-year-old Mikhail Arkadin & 41-year-old Dmitri Pushkin
Membership: 24-year-old Leonid Kovar, 32-year-old Christina Alexandrova, 43-year-old Mikhail Arkadin & 41-year-old Dmitri Pushkin
1 year ago - The People's Heroes joins the battle against Mageddon.
Membership: 26-year-old Leonid Kovar, 33-year-old Christina Alexandrova 45-year-old Mikhail Arkadin & 43-year-old Dmitri Pushkin
Membership: 26-year-old Leonid Kovar, 33-year-old Christina Alexandrova 45-year-old Mikhail Arkadin & 43-year-old Dmitri Pushkin
Noteworthy Teams
Original Membership
Current Membership
As we expand our international teams of superheroes, we're trying to capture something that feels intrinsic to the country in question. The heroes in question are all from within acceptable DC lore, but we don't really consider them ready to post until there feels like a real singular story is being told by the team itself.
Given that DC is an American company, and that the mid-eighties post-crisis boom in their creative output happened right at a really interesting time in American and Russian (then Soviet) relations, there was a weird little surge in characters from that part of the world. A decent number of them were bad guys, but they were at least often introduced as being somewhere on a spectrum between downright baddies (KGBeast) or fully superheroes (Red Star). So in building these stories together, we think we found an interesting story that feels like it's uniquely structured around these characters. I'd be interested to know what you guys think of this one.
Given that DC is an American company, and that the mid-eighties post-crisis boom in their creative output happened right at a really interesting time in American and Russian (then Soviet) relations, there was a weird little surge in characters from that part of the world. A decent number of them were bad guys, but they were at least often introduced as being somewhere on a spectrum between downright baddies (KGBeast) or fully superheroes (Red Star). So in building these stories together, we think we found an interesting story that feels like it's uniquely structured around these characters. I'd be interested to know what you guys think of this one.
The People Heroes Comic HistoryThe original People's Heroes appeared for the very first time in issue #10 of the second Outsiders series in 1986. They were a group of Soviet KGB agents who were sent into the country of Mozambia to fight the Outsiders while they were there trying to save Black Lightning's ex-wife. Everybody caught up? Good.
This actually wasn't the first time we were introduced to a group of Russian heroes all wearing similar costumes with a spectrum of different abilities. In 87, Mike Baron introduced the Red Trinity and Blue Trinity teams of Russian speedsters in the Flash, and in 1988 John Ostrander included Soyuz in his run on Firestorm, a team of five superhuman teenagers from Russia that all wore black costumes with a big red star on the front. Not to be confused with Red Star, the OTHER Russian teen superhero from over in the Teen Titans. Ostrander would go on to invent several more Russian characters in the pages of Firestorm that you'll see us reference here. This was largely where everything sat with most of these characters, until 2018(-2020)'s Doomsday Clock, a series we generally don't recommend you read. Part of the premise of this series was that lots of countries were fielding their own superhero teams, and the Russian team used the name of that very first group: The People's Heroes. |
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Our People's Heroes StoryThe People's Heroes is a solid name. That by itself really gives you your initial push to see if we can build something here. Doomsday Clock did recommend at least a few characters, but we actually had a pretty fun time slowly combing through DC's history and finding the specific characters that really worked for US.
We really latched onto characters like Steel Wolf, Red Star, and KGBeast, letting them guide the story we put together. By virtue of the material we were getting these characters from a lot of them were originally either villains or at least pseudo-antagonists, but putting them all together and integrating them into the larger Project, I think, creates a new corner of the international DC world that fits in really well. |