Starting in November, Image Comics will publish Halcyon, a five-issue miniseries by Marc Guggenheim (Flash, JSA) and his wife, screenwriter Tara Butters (Dollhouse, Reaper), about what happens to super-heroes when they win the never-ending battle against crime. In an interview with Newsarama, Guggenheim describes several of the major characters, including…
There’s another character named Transom, who’s a speedster. And what’s cool about him is the fact that, once you remove war and crime and any sort of man-made aggression, the only thing left for superheroes to deal with are natural disasters, like plane crashes and earthquakes. The problem is that Transom is the only superhero on the planet who is fast enough to get to these disasters as they’re happening. So he’s the one superhero who’s being run completely ragged, because he’s the only one who’s able to still be a hero.
The “what now?” question has been raised before, even in the DC Universe. Countdown to Final Crisis featured Earth-51, a world in which the heroes managed to eliminate super-crime and retired to pursue civilian careers. Of course, since this was Countdown, the world was created as cannon fodder, so it wasn’t explored much.
Between this book, Justice Society of America, No Ordinary Family, and (if Warner Bros. approves the treatment) the Flash screenplay, Guggenheim is going to be busy with speedsters this fall.