The Phalanx one-shot (Image, 2022) by Jonathan Luna

[shevek]

Anyone out there a fan of the Luna Brothers' Ultra comic from 2005? (crickets chirping). The series was well promoted by Image on social media at the time, but didn't get much traction. It was like Sex and the City with superheroines.

I posted a thread about it here many years ago. It was about a beautiful Latina superheroine named Pearl, who joined up
with a super-team which had many ladies on it, including such characters as Aphrodite and Cowgirl. The book was written
like a TV show script - there were soap-opera relationships and action scenes, and the superheroines were involved in
product endorsements and had managers and agents (not unlike The Boys). The Lunas could draw female characters quite beautifully when they wanted to.

The Lunas got as far as having a TV show pilot made for Ultra in 2006 which starred Lena Headey. At various times, very grainy versions of the pilot have been posted on Youtube, but they have since been taken down (possibly by Headey's people). The pilot was nothing like the comic, and was rather terrible. Further negotiations to get Ultra made were all stuck in development hell.

Since then, the Luna Brothers have gone their separate ways making their own books. Jonathan Luna created a bunch of titles for Image which were in the science fiction vein (I have his run of 'Girls') and a bit of fantasy as well.

jonathan luna oeuvre.jpg (179.89 KiB) Viewed 471 times

Now, he has returned to out-and-out superhero comics with his own original tribute to Image Comics in light of their current 30th Anniversary celebration.

You can see from the images below that his new one-shot is Luna's tribute to the 90s Image books which inspired him to start drawing comics: Cyberforce, Savage Dragon, Wildcats, Youngblood, Shadowhawk and so on. (He even says so, on his Kickstarter page). However, you can also see how his characters are different than those early Image books. He has clearly filtered his own original Image-tribute characters through the postmodern Current Year sensibilities. It's so evident that you should be able to figure it out.

The comic is called The Phalanx, and he ran a Kickstarter for it last year, which I was totally unaware of, because I don't follow him on Twitter (now, I do). The Kickstarter is now closed, but it had 149 backers and raised a bit over $8,000.


I just found out about The Phalanx now, after stumbling on it on a comics news site. The regular one-shot version of The Phalanx will be available in stores published by Image in June, so look for it if you are so inclined.

the phalanx standard cover.jpg (137.13 KiB) Viewed 471 times

the phalanx variant with spur.jpg (93.37 KiB) Viewed 471 times