The Return of Mighty Samson

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The Return of Mighty Samson

12/14/2010 2:14pm

Before you pick up the first issue of our new Mighty Samson series in stores this week, we thought you'd like to hear from Samson editor Chris Warner about the relaunch of this legendary series. Chris, tell it like it is.

samson

As a kid, I found the Samson story fascinating, and a little scary. Wrestling a lion, killing a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, having his eyes put out, pulling down the temple. The Samson myth was one of the first stories that made the idea of being powerful, super-powerful even, seem perhaps not all it was cracked up to be. All that power, and yet human passions and foibles brought low the mightiest man on earth. I have to believe that fable informed the kind of superhero comics I’d go on to enjoy. Somehow, I was drawn to the flawed hero, the doomed crimefighter, the person who’d give up great power in a split-second if it would mean a return to normalcy.

I vaguely remember the Mighty Samson comics of my childhood, written by the great Otto Binder and illustrated by Frank Thorne, one of my all-time favorite comics artists. Alongside the vestiges of the Samson myth I found so compelling was the post-apocalypse milieu that was also a perennial favorite of mine. I remembered the covers—Samson battling some mutated creature with a wrecked, overgrown Manhattan as a backdrop. Good stuff.

So here I am, many years later editing Mighty Samson, a classic Gold Key series of the Sixties rebuilt for a new century. Ramrodding the re-boot is Jim Shooter, who needs no introduction, particularly after helming the new launches of Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom, Magnus, Robot Fighter, and Turok, Son of Stone. Jim has shown the ability to take the best of what these characters have to offer, honoring their roots, while bringing new colors to their canvasses. Riding shotgun on the Samson scripts is J.C. Vaughn, longtime comics writer (and editor of the Overstreet Comics Price Guide!), and pencil and ink duties fall to Patrick Olliffe, a pro’s pro who’s fought in many campaigns for DC and Marvel over the years. I'm really enjoying this book, with its basic elements intact, but with a much more realistic approach than the somewhat more fanciful tack that the original series featured. What would tribal cultures living in the ruins of Manhattan really be like? And how will this series, more than half a millennium in the future, tie in to its related titles set hundreds of years in our past or thousands of years into the future?

Only time will tell, of course, and we hope you'll hang around and find out. And don’t forget to bring an ass jawbone. I was born with one, so I'm good.

—Chris Warner, senior editor