“Son, enough is never enough.”

A typical day of vigilante work turns sour for street superhero Voltage when he’s knocked out cold. He later wakes up in Tartarus’s Keep, a supermax island prison designed to confine superhumans. Unfortunately, his only ticket to freedom is just as bad as life in prison when opportunistic CIA agent, Harry “The Hangman” J. Morell blackmails him and five other malcontent supes to go on a suicide mission to North Korea to retrieve a superweapon. Voltage and his newfound crew set out on their daring venture and face mighty armies, scientific monstrosities and other dark secrets that’ll leave them with nightmares for the rest of their lives.

Process: I grew up with superheroes. Whether on the page of a comic book or on the silver screen, I loved watching superheroes go on their adventures. I think the superhero genre has a lot of story potential when creators are willing to go beyond the basic conventions of the genre. Crime Smiters is a more realistic take on the genre and explores superheroes more as people than as symbols.