Inferior Five

by Keith Giffen (Author/Illustrator), Jeff Lemire (Author/Illustrator), Scott Koblish (Illustrator)

Keith Giffen reboots the Inferior Five for this special mini-series!

The citizens of Dangerfield, Arizona, are beset by strange goings-on after the "Invasion" that rocked the DC Universe, but only five misfit kids seem to notice them. Can they uncover what's happening before some sinister force collects them all? Find out in this new miniseries!

Also featuring story and art by Jeff the Peacemaker is on a top-secret mission from Checkmate and Amanda Waller to find a mysterious weapon before the Russians can.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Dc Comics, Comic Book

152 pages, Paperback

First published September 12, 2021

About the author

Keith Ian Giffen was an American comic book illustrator and writer. He is possibly best-known for his long runs illustrating, and later writing the Legion of Super-Heroes title in the 1980s and 1990s. He also created the alien mercenary character Lobo (with Roger Slifer), and the irreverent "want-to-be" hero, Ambush Bug. Giffen is known for having an unorthodox writing style, often using characters in ways not seen before. His dialogue is usually characterized by a biting wit that is seen as much less zany than dialogue provided by longtime collaborators DeMatteis and Robert Loren Fleming. That approach has brought him both criticism and admiration, as perhaps best illustrated by the mixed (although commercially successful) response to his work in DC Comics' Justice League International (1987-1992). He also plotted and was breakdown artist for an Aquaman limited series and one-shot special in 1989 with writer Robert Loren Fleming and artist Curt Swan for DC Comics.

Giffen's first published work was "The Sword and The Star", a black-and-white series featured in Marvel Preview, with writer Bill Mantlo. He has worked on titles (owned by several different companies) including Woodgod, All Star Comics, Doctor Fate, Drax the Destroyer, Heckler, Nick Fury's Howling Commandos, Reign of the Zodiac, Suicide Squad, Trencher (to be re-released in a collected edition by Boom! Studios)., T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and Vext. He was also responsible for the English adaptation of the Battle Royale and Ikki Tousen manga, as well as creating "I Luv Halloween" for Tokyopop. He also worked for Dark Horse from 1994-95 on their Comics Greatest World/Dark Horse Heroes line, as the writer of two short lived series, Division 13 and co-author, with Lovern Kindzierski, of Agents of Law. For Valiant Comics, Giffen wrote XO-Manowar, Magnus, Robot Fighter, Punx and the final issue of Solar, Man of the Atom.

He took a break from the comic industry for several years, working on storyboards for television and film, including shows such as The Real Ghostbusters and Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy.

He is also the lead writer for Marvel Comics's Annihilation event, having written the one-shot prologue, the lead-in stories in Thanos and Drax, the Silver Surfer as well as the main six issues mini-series. He also wrote the Star-Lord mini-series for the follow-up story Annihilation: Conquest. He currently writes Doom Patrol for DC, and is also completing an abandoned Grant Morrison plot in The Authority: the Lost Year for Wildstorm.

Reviews

[Chad · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was such a strange idea for a miniseries. It takes place after Invasion!, an event DC did back in 1988 where a bunch of alien races invaded the Earth. The aliens are still here immediately following Invasion conducting experiments on humans in a small Arizona town trying to determine how the metagene is activated. Unfortunately, this is slow paced and doesn't really head anywhere. Jeff Lemire also writes and draws the Peacemaker backups, that again, aren't great. I don't really understand why you'd write a new comic set in 1988 that at this point DC had completely forgotten about. If done properly, it could have maybe headed somewhere. Instead it just fizzled out as a waste of everyone's time.

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Keith Giffen plots and pencils a wholly unnecessary sequel to his 1980s DC Comics Invasion! crossover event using the offspring of obscure 1960s superheroes. Jeff Lemire scripts the Inferior Five chapters and also writes and draws a Peacemaker back-up strip that slowly starts to converge with the feature story.

Purposely weird and told indirectly with loads of obfuscation, this is nothing but an Easter egg laden nostalgic wallow for super old DC fanboys like me who can, for instance, remember that Space Ranger had a little alien named Cryll who'd hang out with him on his adventures or why "five years later" might be a significant caption in a Giffen comic.

Apparently, that audience is getting smaller every year, because this was supposed to be a 12-issue limited series but got canceled after four floppies. Issues 5 and 6 were released digitally, with a new artist stepping in for the final chapter as the script throws up its hand and literally whines about how the story can't be completed now.

So, yeah, this is an artifact of failure more than a complete book.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 4 out of 5]

A charming miniseries that is Giffen and Lemire at their best. Placing this story in the wake of Invasion! is a pretty weird choice decades on, but it's a great basis for an alien-invasion-conspiracy story. Beyond that, we get a charming group of protagonists, vaguely based on the Inferior 5, a lot of mysteries, and some real danger.

The only flaw is that a 12-issue series got cut down to 6 issues. The authors do their best to tie everything up in the last two issues, but it's a bit messy.

[Travis Duke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whelp I didnt realize it was a DC tie into "the invasion". I am out of the loop of current DC stuff so this made little sense to me.

Anyways it really isn't very good. I just don't get the presence of Lemire in the story but that is ok. The art sure looks like Lemire...

The Inferior 5 story is just not for me...
The Peacemaker story was OK.

Skip it

[Todd Glaeser · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m a big fan of Keith Giffen’s (Remember Punx?) and the original Inferior Five. But I don’t understand the reboot/ connection and it doesn’t seem enough to have an ongoing series. So what’s the point?

[Pat]

This was an exercise in futility. It starts of with an interesting premise though invasion was a major storyline from a couple of decades ago. Unfortunately it seems it was a major flop with four issues in print and the last two released digitally. In the last issue a character complains and says it was supposed to be twelve issues. In essence too much weirdness, a lack of understandable plot, an obscure event as it was a long time ago and minor characters who have mostly been forgotten. All in all a strange publishing choice by creators all of whom have done much better.

[Philip · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was going along fine, and then it just ended. In the final issue, a character says the plan was to go 12 issues, but it got cancelled at 6. If it’s true, that would explain why this was so unsatisfying.

[Kurt Lorenz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting idea cut short and confusingly concluded. Strange that a collection was even released for this.

[Alex Sarll]

Keith Giffen returns to his late eighties heyday for a sequel to the self-explanatory Invasion! crossover, and like most of his best work it's co-written, except this time the co-writer is from a later generation: Jeff Lemire. Both of them being artists too, they also contribute to the visuals, as do a couple of Scotts, plus there's a back-up strip about Peacemaker, because between the film and the show, Peacemaker will give it some crossover appeal, right? But the main story is closer to Lemire's Black Hammer, its cast trapped in a small town where Something Is Not Right. Except that Dangerfield, Arizona, is far less seductive a trap than Black Hammer's gentle backwater; the town's spooky presence, making marks and reciting rhymes, feels a lot more serial killer, and rather than old superheroes, the captive leads are only kids. Or are they? And also, there's an in-universe Invasion! comic which ran much longer than ours, and is the biggest hit on the shelves, much to some people's annoyance: "How long are they going to drag this thing out for? [...] I just don't get it. Why do people want to read about all the horrible real-world stuff? It's hard enough living through it. The last thing I want is for it to make it into my comics!" Not to mention supporting roles for some of the absolute dregs of DC's character library. There's a lot going on here, in other words. I'm not sure all of it is entirely successful, and even of the bits which worked, I don't altogether know if they're what I want in my comics. But all the same, this is one of those rare recent books from DC which I can see having been published in the happier alternate world where the company hasn't basically sucked for over a decade, and in this benighted timeline it's one of their highlights. This despite the fact that it's simultaneously and quite noticeably attempting to ride the coat-tails of Stranger Things, James Gunn's screen DC work, and those various memes where something unconvincingly insists it likes engaging in normal human pursuits with its normal human friends – which you wouldn't expect to be a cocktail that would come off at all. Even when it inevitably gets cancelled halfway through its planned run, rather than an undignified, rushed checking-off of plot points, it goes out UK soap style, with a spectacularly meta grump about how DC only want to publish Batman comics nowadays.

[Bob Comparda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started out as a really interesting story about five kids that are drawn together in this weird town. It involved alien invasions, super human experimentation, government conspiracies, a creepy kid in a mask, and a cool side story about Peacemaker! Unfortunately the series got cancelled half way through and Lemire was forced to rush the story line. The final issue gets pretty meta about it and actually references how Peacemaker is getting his own TV show and they are getting cancelled which was pretty funny. Overall I think this showed a lot of potential and I think it would have been great at 12 issues, but unfortunately what we get is a half finished product. I'd still recommend to anyone who likes comics as you can't go wrong with anything from Jeff Lemire.

[Rod DiManna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty weird series we have here. Weird and fun. Can only imagine how much better this would have been if it was able to reach the 12 issues it was meant to. Also would have been nice if Giffen penciled the last chapter. Not that I have any dislike for Scott Kolins work, but the draw for me was Giffen art.

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story begins with a slow build that goes nowhere. It just kind of ends without answering any questions. I have no clue what the story was really about.

[Spot · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love lemire, but the last part was rushed. enjoyed it.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was a fan of the original Inferior 5, written by E. Nelson Bridwell, and I am a fan of the writing of Jeff Lemire. Not so much the writing of Keith Giffen, which often involves interesting but convoluted concepts that can easily go off the rails.
I had not read this as a monthly, and thus assumed that this trade paperback edition was a complete story. It was not. Instead, it was the first four printed issues of a planned twelve-issue limited series, with two finale issues thrown together for online publication, to at least explain what some of the weird things really meant.
So first, the concept. This was a 1980s comic, written in 2019, as a sequel to a 1960s comic. The 1980s comic was written in relation to Invasion, a huge crossover event that was a bad idea, but let's ignore that problem. The thing is, the original Inferior 5 was humorous. Think of it as being to the Justice League what Get Smart was to the James Bond stories. The stories were goofy and weird, but a lot of fun. Some of the humor would have to be revised to do in modern times, but the basic concept would stand up...the idea that children of superheroes might inherit only part of the powers of their parents, and that the children of skill-based heroes might not have the same skills to work with. Thus, the child of an archer hero who learned how to handle a bow, but not how to face danger and overcome fear, or the daughter of a Wonder Woman-like character who never learned how to use her brain. So, a lot of humor about these characters and their lack of self-confidence.
Fast forward to the Giffenized version. Ummm...I think the intention was that these were the children of the original Inferior 5, but we never got to know for sure, because only one of the parents visibly appears in the story. The other connections were forced and unclear, although I had to assume that the teen "dumb bunny" character was related to the original Dumb Bunny, but the writing never gave her any tendency toward doing or saying things that lacked intelligence, and even the comments by other characters that she was an "airhead" were not supported by the story.
Then there is the weird set of appearances by long-ignored characters like Tasmanian Devil [not the cartoon one, the comic book one!] who is, as a joke I assume, given the spinning power of the one from the Looney Tunes cartoons. There's also a version of Brother Power, the Geek, but that part of the story never made much sense.
If the story had run the full twelve issues, it is possible that the completed version would have made a lot more sense. This way, though, was pretty bad, and it was painful that DC would sell half of an uncompleted story to unsuspecting buyers. The guy at the comic shop hadn't even looked at the book, so he hadn't realized it was half of a story, and that the other half may never come out.
That said, now that I've read this half, I can see why sales were bad. If you're going to do a story that varies this wildly from both established but now outdated continuity and a parody of a different established but now outdated continuity, then maybe you should proceed at a pace that will get the readers involved with one or both? Sadly, that is lacking here, as for much of the existing story, the readers have no idea why it's called Inferior 5, and it's not until what seems to be an imprisoned version of Awkwardman appears and is connected to a character that we learn that it's more than just a reuse of the name. Since the story doesn't seem to include the other four of the original team, it's hard to say. Since the book doesn't include what should have been the second half of the story, it's hard to say why DC even put this book out, other than to squeeze a few dollars out of fans who didn't know the book had come out and died a horrible death on the market. Now, if they were going to do something like an animated HBO Max series, it might be forgivable, but the only connection there is a fairly weak Peacemaker story that interweaves with the main one.
Without a completion to the story, I cannot recommend this book, but if you want to read it as an example of how an idea can crash and burn, I can't stop you.

[Scratch · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow, I am really disappointed. I liked the idea of the original Inferior Five, so I held out hope that a modern update would give us some deeper characterization. ... Nope.

This appears to be some sort of vaguely drug-induced "meta" work, that takes itself too seriously, while simultaneously disrespecting its audience. It had remarkably little superheroism. If anything, it felt like somebody just wanted to parasitize the popularity of Netflix's "Stranger Things."

Bad artwork. Worse story.

[Will Cooper · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've come to realize I'm not a huge fan of Giffen anymore. :( LOVED his JLI but didn't like this because of the art and all the characters who I didn't like (all of them), and the story felt weirdly out of place and didn't seem to say anything at all. I don't know. Oh! I also didn't like Lemire's Peacemaker stuff in the back! Ok cool.

[Etienne · Rating 2 out of 5]

A rare thing happened here. I didn’t like a Jeff Lemire comic… It has happened a few times, but not often since he is my favorite comic books artist. Nonetheless, this one was too thin as a story and even the art felt weird to me. It happens…

[Al McCarty · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t like anything about this. Giffen has never been confused with Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, and Jeff Lemire will never make anyone forget Gil Kane, but the art in this is shockingly bad. The story and writing held no charm and I gave up halfway through. Nice to see Angry Charlie, I guess.

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

I usually love Jeff Lemire's work, but this is frankly just a waste of good wood pulp.

[Joshua Sloan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not very good, but also not really its fault since it was cancelled six issues early.

[John Geddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pandemic casualty that didn’t end up going anywhere, I’m still a sucker for anything Keith Giffen touches. It felt a little like his old Legion run and I just really like his art and storytelling.

[Burton Olivier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange book.

[Jack T · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked it. I also love weird dc properties so I was all in, however it seems everyone else was not. A shame cause I love the idea of invasion so Id like to have seen a modern sequel
4.5/5

[Aidan]

The only worthwhile part is the Peacemaker backups, which Jeff Lemire and José Villarrubia give a vintage grit and tone that I haven’t seen in DC much at all. I like Giffen but either his age or the coloring or both have rendered this a visual mess to look at. Lemire’s scripting succeeds more on the pages he pencils himself, but both parts of the book suffer from his continued inability to properly segue dialogue, leaving conversations feeling awkward and characters unfocussed.

I think this would have been better if Giffen handled scripting and Lemire handled pencils across the whole thing. Idk why, but it’s like both of these guys prefer the aspect of comics less suited to their natural talents.