Challengers of the Unknown!

Went down a deep rabbit hole recently with one of my bargain bin finds. Was so enthralled by that one issue that I needed more so I then searched, and found, two volumes of re-prints for almost nothing! I totally remembered the Challengers of the Unknown, but I really didn't know until much, much later that they were the product of the ever still impressive Jack Kirby. Some have called them the Fantastic Four prototype! So, of course I started doodling. Once I knew what I wanted, I started to tighten up my drawings for the final design. Ok. Here is the elephant in the room. Normally I am pretty opposed to gender or race swapping of characters because they are usually done for the wrong reasons in my opinion. There have been a few successful times tho. The Challengers of the Unknown were created by Kirby way back in the late 1950's so having four white guys seemed of the time. I feel quite strongly tho, that if Kirby created them even just a few years later, he would have been much more open to changing that. So, to that end, I have made Rocky a black man and Prof. Haley is now a woman, Prof. Hailey.

Eagle eyed observers will notice that in my re-creation of the classic logo, that I changed the font. I didn't set out to but when I started to scroll thru my fonts for a match, I came across a few that made it look a bit more interesting. To me at least.