In the introduction to John Byrne's Danger Unlimited trade paperback, Mr. Byrne gives us the lowdown on the state of comics in 1995 and how the direct market was killing the business. He says the direct market, the comic shops that sell directly to the fans as opposed to that spinner rack in the back corner of your local drug store or the rack stuffed full of wrinkled copies of Batman or The Uncanny X-Men and nothing else at the Waldenbooks in any mall, was meant as a haven for those books selling less than 100,000 copies per month, but in the end turned into a catch-22 for those smaller books. See, with the direct market stores, the publishers need only print as many copies as are ordered. The problem is, those orders are placed up to 3 months before the book is even advertised, so the store owners really have no idea how many copies are going to sell, and the general rule is that the order for issue #2 of any book is 30 percent less than the order for the first book, the order for issue #3 30 percent less than #2, until eventually sales even out and the book is either a success or a failure. What happened with John Byrne's Danger Unlimited is that the orders for #3, which was being placed just before or just as issue #1 was coming out on the stands, were only 40,000, way down from the 90,000 ordered for #1, so 50,000 people who picked up the first issue and wanted to continue with the series either had to be first in line when the book came out each month, or they had to find a friend who was first in line and borrow it from them. And all this was before the book was even available. So with numbers like that and over half the original readers already cut off from the rest of the story, Mr. Byrne did what he felt was best and pulled the plug on the book with issue #4, before the readership was firmly established and too many people got left out of the loop. The real kicked is what Byrne refers to as his Faithful Fifty, the FIFTY THOUSAND fans who follow him from book to book, reading anything he produces. And with an order of only 40,000 on DU#3, there's one-fifth his established readership right there who can't get the book. Enough of the history lesson, let's review the book.
While there are a number of flashbacks, there are only three important dates in the story.
December 17, 1959: Doctor Carson, his children Cal and Connie, and explorer Mike "Hunk" Worley venture into a downed alien craft in the South American jungle. All four are exposed to "gunk", an alien chemical which alters their bodies and leaves them each with different super powers. The four go on to become Danger Unlimited as Doc Danger, Hunk, Thermal, and Miss Mirage.
1985: Danger Unlimited are attacked in their Rocky Mountain base by Umbra. Doc Danger seals the team in emergency holding pods to keep them safe until Umbra can be dealt with. He places a quad-field time lock around the structure, insuring nothing gets in or out.
January 2060: Three weeks after the time lock comes off the DU base, something is detected inside. A team of C-Ops, Control Operatives, enter the building and discover one of the DU members, Cal Carson, AKA Thermal, is still alive inside his holding pod. Cal is taken out and brought to the hospital where he finally wakes two weeks later, with no memory of anything that's come before.
This is the premise. The four issues that make up this collection are a well-plotted telling of two origins, the original Danger Unlimited, and this new team made up of Cal Carson, Theresa Lafayette (one of the C-Ops who discover Carson's body in the DU base. She's been exposed to the "gunk" and now she can become a gigantic rock beast), and Professor David Palmenter, the doctor who'd run the initial tests on Carson and Lafayette. He exposed himself to the gunk and the result that his body divided into three David Palmenters, each individual from the others, but they do finish each other's sentences. At the end of the book, Palmenter convinces Carson and Lafayette to join him in forming a new Danger Unlimited and ridding the world of the alien Xlerii (zeh-LEH-ree). Did I forget to mention them?
The ship the Carsons and Worley found in the jungle was a Xlerii scout ship. Years after the team was put into suspended animation, the alien forces arrived and a war broke out. Eventually a peaceful resolution was reached by the Xlerii ignoring the "haves" of the world and appealing instead to the "have nots", helping them to have. With the majority of the world's populace now in league with the Xlerii, the war ended and the aliens took over. Now there is no war and no one in the world need go without anymore.
But things aren't all peace and sunshine. The Xlerii are really a cutthroat race and there are some humans, very few, the Xlerii have been here almost fifty years in 2060, who remember blue skies and freedom and that's the world David Palmenter wants the new Danger Unlimited to fight for.
The stage is set now for a great series to kick into high gear and it's a shame Byrne never got the chance to take this story where he wanted, because I can tell you what he'd done in these four short issues was a hell of a lot more entertaining than whatever was going on over in X-Men at that time. In fact, by 1995, I'd pretty much given up on all Marvel comics except for The Incredible Hulk, and that was only my loyalty to writer Peter David. And with the last page of the trade paperback collected edition of DU, it's obvious things were going to get even more interesting than they already were. I won't give it away, but Byrne's reasoning for not including this final page in the original release of issue #4 was to keep the series from ending on a cliffhanger. As it is, the original issue 4 ended with Carson, Lafayette, and Palmenter forming the new Danger Unlimited, and that was that. But the new ending in the trade paperback was a shock and a thrill and I wish he'd kept the series going.
As usual, John Byrne provides the art as well as the stories and I've always thought that makes for a better book because it's not two people relying on what the other has provided and trying to work through that. Instead, Byrne is able to bring to the art exactly what he had in mind during the writing, and as anyone who's read a John Byrne book can tell you, he's also one of the best and cleanest artists in comics.
John Byrne's Danger Unlimited will go down in history as one of the best comics that never was, one of the few with any real potential past the original four issue story arc, and that alone can be a mean feat as it seems most new books that come out are based on an initial story idea that's never developed further than that and any subsequent issues that come out are written on a whim with the writer obviously having no idea where to take the characters after the first story is over. It figures one of the few that could have gone further and still held my interest never got the chance. Maybe some day Byrne will come back to it and tell the stories he'd meant to tell in the first place.
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