Last week’s entry in this series covered Ultivac, a giant robot who was a bad guy but maybe didn’t want to be. It’s really hard to find honest work when you’re a giant robot.
But bad guys need adversaries, and for Ultivac, that was the Challengers of the Unknown.
Created by Jack Kirby and possibly either Joe Simon or Dave Wood, the Challs as they would eventually come to be known were four men who survived a plane crash unscathed. That was in Showcase #6 back in February of 1957. The lucky foursome were
- Pilot and war hero Ace Morgan
- Daredevil stuntman Red Ryan
- Skin diver and smart guy Prof Haley
- And Olympic wrestling champion Rocky Davis
Since the four survived something they felt they shouldn’t and were living on “borrowed time,” they opted to do dangerous stuff for the good of the world, making them explorer types like another later Kirby creation, Marvel’s Fantastic Four. Only the Challengers had no superpowers, just their regular skills and whatever comic book science and technology could whip up for them.
The Challs set themselves up in the hollowed-out mountain base of Challenger Mountain and then fought the forces of evil as one does. They would even eventually give membership to computer genius and archeologist June Robbins as an honorary or girl member because this was the 50s.
The thing is, if they weren’t created by Kirby, I am not sure how memorable these guys would be. There aren’t any particularly memorable Challenger enemies aside from maybe Multi-Man, and that has more to do with his time on Justice League Antarctica. There were other Challengers that are less memorable. While Red was believed dead, his kid brother Marty, a pop singer, took his place. There was a period before June was officially offered membership when a different woman, a mystic named Corinna Stark, joined up. One mini-series showed the Challs basically get old, with Prof and June seemingly killed on a mission while the other three all went their separate ways.
Heck, there were even other versions of the team. They kept the Challengers name and general mission of living on borrowed time to do whatever it was they did, sometimes meeting the original Challs and sometimes not. And that’s not counting odd appearance like how Rocky became a therapist for one incarnation of the Doom Patrol.
But there was one little quirk the team was given during a long story arc in a recent Brave and the Bold storyline. Bad guys had managed to steal the book of Destiny of the Endless, allowing them to anticipate anything the heroes could do before they did it. But it turned out there were a group of people who had a unique status that left them outside the Book of Destiny: the four original Challengers of the Unknown, who showed up and saved the day. June was there too, but she likewise appeared to die only for the others to realize she’d survived and was, like Prof, Rocky, Ace, and Red, outside of Destiny’s book.
So…I guess not being part of Destiny’s book counts as a superpower? I don’t know. All I know is Kirby once created four guys in matching jumpsuits.
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