Dark Horse’s SKYMAN: New soldier of color battles racism — and echoes of the NSA


By David Betancourt

EVEN SUPERHEROES have scandals.
That’s the plot behind Skyman, the politically fueled tale from Dark Horse Comics that sees a government-funded superhero exposed as a bigot and a murderer.
To catch you up: The American public finds out that its tax dollars have been funding a maniac instead of a “hero” when Skyman goes on a drunken, racist rant at a bar, killing a man in the process. The incident goes viral thanks to a cellphone video (of course) and the government has a publicity disaster on its hands as it desperately tries to find a new face for its Skyman program before all funding is lost.
Skyman writer Joshua Hale Fialkov says the story concept was handed down to him from Josh Williamson, writer of Captain Midnight. (Skyman as character, of course, was created during the Golden Age by Gardner Fox and Ogden Whitney.)
“The idea for me was to just extrapolate out from there,” Fialkov tells Comic Riffs. “[Skyman] is super-jingoistic, doesn’t like the current administration’s politics, [is] mean and drunk.
“To some degree, it’s also about the weird casual racism of our current day, where for some reason, it seems like our society has been marching backwards to the 1950s.”
EVEN SUPERHEROES have scandals.

That’s the plot behind Skyman, the politically fueled tale from Dark Horse Comics that sees a government-funded superhero exposed as a bigot and a murderer.

To catch you up: The American public finds out that its tax dollars have been funding a maniac instead of a “hero” when Skyman goes on a drunken, racist rant at a bar, killing a man in the process. The incident goes viral thanks to a cellphone video (of course) and the government has a publicity disaster on its hands as it desperately tries to find a new face for its Skyman program before all funding is lost.

Skyman writer Joshua Hale Fialkov says the story concept was handed down to him from Josh Williamson, writer of Captain Midnight. (Skyman as character, of course, was created during the Golden Age by Gardner Fox and Ogden Whitney.)

“The idea for me was to just extrapolate out from there,” Fialkov tells Comic Riffs. “[Skyman] is super-jingoistic, doesn’t like the current administration’s politics, [is] mean and drunk.

“To some degree, it’s also about the weird casual racism of our current day, where for some reason, it seems like our society has been marching backwards to the 1950s.”

Read the rest of the interview at The Washington Post!