Suicide Risk #1

"Getting a Bit Short on Heroes"
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Leo is a regular cop in a city being overrun by superpowered fools, most of them criminals but a few of them crazy enough to be heroes.  Those are fewer and fewer and farther between.  Even the ones—like Diva—who were once helpful to law enforcement are beginning to team up with some of the less savory ones—Dr. Maybe, Voiceover, Memento Mori, and Grudge War, for instance.  But, after lucking into an arrest of Dr. Maybe, Leo finds a poorly ciphered phone number for a black-market powers dealer.

"You know, the word is they buy the powers.  On the street.  Can you believe that?  You don't have to get bitten by a radioactive kangaroo or caught in a nuclear hailstorm.  You just hand over your cash."  (Suicide Risk #1: 7)

This is Suicide Risk's innovative contribution to superhero lore.  The increasingly frustrated perspective of a normal police officer under siege by multiplying supervillains is fine enough, but Leo's (probably unwise) decision to receive his own powers shoots the series into a different direction.  Leo, apparently, has uniquely strong potential for superpowers.  It is likely part of the reason he was able to startle Dr. Maybe, who seemed to catch a glimpse of what he might become.  According to the powers-dealer "J," Leo registered "off-the-scale positive" (20), and when it kicks in he nearly kills himself as well as "J" and his companion.

Leo's a difficult protagonist, the embittered leftovers of a jaded idealist.  But the family he goes home to—likely the unintended stakes of his dangerous gambles whether he knows it now or not—is fine and loving.  Despite the trauma of his job, which he cannot help but bring home with him, Leo manages to maintain a relative sense of normalcy for his children.  And his wife Suni is a bombshell.

"Getting a Bit Short on Heroes" introduces Leo's superpowers, but it paces itself like a story that's been going for months.  It makes the issue a rather less charged opening chapter but one that sets the tone for the series.  Since Carey specializes in the slow burn, I'm in.