It's that time of here - big summer superhero event announcement season. We have your Judgement Day at Marvel, your Flashpoint Beyond at DC… but for fans of the original superhero comics crossover events, they lack a certain nostalgic quality ... you know, from the '80s. Well, now someone is filling that void with The Wrong Earth: Purple.
Spinning out of the meta multiversal creator-owned series The Wrong Earth by Tom Peyer and Jamal Igle, the May one-shot The Wrong Earth: Purple by Stuart Moore and Fred Harper takes the franchise's Batman-esque hero Dragon-Fly and drenches him in '80s nostalgia.
"The Wrong Earth: Purple is Fred's and my love letter to the '80s," Moore tells Newsarama. "That decade wasn't just big hair, shoulder pads, and George Michael music - it was a dark time of angel dust, Wall Street greed, and bloodthirsty vigilantes. It also saw the birth of modern comics and the modern superhero movie, which made it the perfect setting for our very own, rubber-suited Dragon-Fly. So close your eyes, let that sax solo wash over you, and repeat after me: You belong to the city. You belong to the night…"
If you're humming along to those lyrics, that's Glenn Fry's 'You Belong to the City'; recorded back in the '80s specifically for the seminal Miami Vice TV series.
The Wrong Earth: Purple #1 will introduce an '80s-themed alt-universe called Earth-Kappa, which publisher AHOY Comics calls "a dark but glossy world of big hair, shoulder pads, Wall Street traders, rubber super-suits, and funk music."
Speaking of rubber super-suits, check out this The Wrong Earth: Purple variant cover by Jerry Ordway, an homage to his own cover to the Batman 1989 Movie Adaptation.
The Wrong Earth: Purple is part of a larger series of one-shots coming this spring featuring unique spins on The Wrong Earth series. There's the Archie-inspired The Wrong Earth: Trapped on Teen Planet, a beefy The Wrong Earth: Meat, a sidekick switcheroo in The Wrong Earth: Confidence Men, and the heady money-centric The Wrong Earth: Fame & Fortune.
"Words will be written, words will be deleted, and nothing will ever be the same," says The Wrong Earth co-creator (and AHOY Comics editor-in-chief) Tom Peyer in the event's announcement. "This is Crisis on Infinite Earths, minus the line-wide consequences that made it interesting. This is Secret Wars without toys. This is the kind of epic, superheroic storytelling that publishers and CFOs love, where the tail of wealth-enhancing variant covers wags the dog of art."
Nostalgia plus some sardonic satire, that's what this The Wrong Earth is about.
The Wrong Earth: Purple goes on sale May 18.
Both Marvel and DC have had their fair share of memorable superhero events.
