And on the seventh day – – Shutterbug who was last seen (for the only time) in the third issue of Graveyard Shift in only a few panels. We get a little further insight into his sparkling personality over the next few pages of this story. Farther down on this blog page is a little bit about the modern Big Bang Comics team known as the Free Agents.
To the left: C.C. Burk’s version of the Free Agents, or at least some of them.
Megaton, Ultiman, Thunder Girl, Dr. Weird and Knight Watchman. The only one missing from their only appearance from the 4th Caliber Press issue is Overdrive, the grown-up Cyclone, kid partner to the world’s fastest man on, the Blitz.
Below is the ad that ran in BB #3. Pencils by Chris Woods and inks by Ben Torres. The Free Agents were the 1990s version of the Round Table of America, who were no longer funded by or associated with the U.S. Government, hence the name change.
The original idea of the mini-series was to do a 64 page Golden Age book introducing the characters, followed by a Silver Age incarnation in issue 2, and then the modern version (this was the 90s, remember) in number 3.
The Golden Ager was split into issues 0, 1 and 2. Number 3 was the Silver Age version and the modern story was slated for numbers 4 and 5, as promised in the ad. There were artist problems and changes in the Free Agents issues, and after requesting newsprint for #s 0, 1, 2 and 3 and getting white paper, the publisher finally switched us to newsprint on #4 which was colored to be on the white stuff and turned out gray and flat. There never was a Caliber #5. We were invited to join Image Comics and took them up on it.
By the way, that’s Overdrive in the bottom right corner. The big guy at the left was a cyborg calling himself the Sub Human. If there had been a follow-up in #5, we would have discovered that he was actually a rebuilt version of the Atomic Sub, who had died in the Silver Age issue. (He was originally known as the Human Sub).
