DC Comics has announced a special New Talent Showcase one-shot to celebrate the up-and-coming creators of the Milestone Initiative. After launching the Milestone Initiative last year to train and support under-represented creators in comics, DC will quite literally showcase the rising talent in a new publication.
DC released details for New Talent Showcase: The Milestone Initiative #1 with the rest of its May solicitations, revealing that this new one-shot will hit shelves in May 2023. A full 112 pages, the showcase will feature work from the writers and artists who attended the Milestone Initiative program at DC headquarters in May 2022. The full details from the solicitation, including a cover by legendary creator Denys Cowan (and others), follows:
NEW TALENT SHOWCASE: THE MILESTONE INITIATIVE #1
- Written by VARIOUS
- Art by VARIOUS
- Cover by DENYS COWAN and others
- $3.99 US | 112 pages | One-Shot | Prestige
- ON SALE 5/30/23
- In May of 2022, 12 writers and 12 artists came to DC headquarters to hone their skills with some of the best comics creators in the business, and one year later, we’re showing the results of the cohort’s hard work! This special showcases all 12 stories created out of the Ally-sponsored Milestone Initiative…If you don’t grab a copy, you’ll be missing some of the first published work of the stars of the future!
DC Continues to Support Its Milestone Line (and Creators)
While the showcase issue will spotlight new and rising talent (as handpicked by DC for the groundbreaking Milestone Initiative program), the publisher continues to support its Milestone line beyond this special one-shot. Initially launched in the 1990s by legendary Black creators Denys Cowan, Dwayne McDuffie, and others, Milestone’s comics featured groundbreaking Black characters (and their stories) like Static, Icon, Rocket, Hardware, and more. Though the Milestone characters were eventually folded into the larger DC Universe, DC has re-committed to the original Milestone vision in recent years, revitalizing the Milestone line and universe with a series of titles for the characters listed above—and more beyond even them.
May 2022’s Milestone Initiative was an exciting step in DC’s plans to support diverse and inclusive storytelling, as it showed commitment not only to those already-established creators and characters, but also to unsung and previously-unheard-of voices. “Graduates” from this Initiative class have already been showing up in DC books like Poison Ivy and DC Power: A Celebration #1, but this New Talent Showcase is a welcome next step in the publisher’s support of these creators. Hopefully this showcase will be the start of new and vital careers in comics.
DC’s new one-shot, New Talent Showcase: The Milestone Initiative #1, is already promising to feature comics’ “stars of the future.” Milestone comics and its characters are an essential part of DC Comics’s past—this upcoming showcase proves they’re DC’s future, too.
Check out New Talent Showcase: The Milestone Initiative #1, available May from DC Comics!