I’m a big fan of Tim Seeley and Tony Fleecs’ work on Local Man, the story of a washed-up 1990s-era Image superhero dealing with a bad rep and murders in his home town. Now the main character, Crossjack, will have to literally confront his past and team up with some of Image’s finest (finest?) in a new one-shot titled Local Man: Gold.
“Tony and I are really happy with the critical success of Local Man, and we want to make sure we give readers who’ve heard the buzz a chance to sample our story,” said Seeley. “Gold is steeped in the ’90s-comics-by-way-of-crime-noir vibe people are loving, and is easily accessible to newcomers!’
The title and cover pay tribute to the Deathmate crossover, which brought together the Image and Valiant universes in the early 1990s (and is considered one of many straws that broke the comic industry’s back at the time):
The comic will guest star other Image characters from across the company’s history, including Marc Silvestri’s Cyberforce, Jim Rugg’s Street Angel, Tom King and Elsa Charretier’s Love Everlasting and Beau Smith and Tim Harkins’ BOOF And The Bruise Crew.
Here’s the description, which will see the two versions of Crossjack we’ve seen come together, via time travel:
In Local Man: Gold, Jack comes face to face with his explosive past when his superhero alter ego is blasted into modern-day Farmington by a massive cosmic event.
Now, Local Man has to get his younger, more extreme self back to his own time before he ruins what little life Jack has left. But it won’t be easy—Crossjack isn’t the only one who’s landed in the wrong era, and they’re both being hunted by a vengeful hero from the past.
“From as far back as I can remember, I always just wanted to make a comic that had BOOF in it,” Fleecs said. “We’re tackling a lot of ’90s comics motifs in Local Man and one of my favorite things about the early Image books were the crossovers. From little things like Youngblood showing up in WildC.A.T.S. or Badrock and Company where in every issue Badrock hung out with somebody from a different Image founders’ books to giant mega-events like Deathmate. We wanted to try and take one of those crossovers and make it super personal. That’s what Local Man: Gold is.”
Here’s a look at the second cover for the one-shot, which does indeed feature BOOF … and also Fire Breather, a character created by Andy Kuhn and Phil Hester:
Look for it to hit stores on Aug. 30.