The curtain has been lifted on one of Valiant Entertainment’s recently teased series with the announcement that writer Magdalene Visaggio (“Eternity Girl”), artist Nick Robles (“Euthanauts”), colorist Jordie Bellaire, and letterer Dave Sharpe will be relaunching “Doctor Mirage” in August. The five-issue series will take the titular character, Shan Fong, in a new direction, as she loses her connection to the Deadside, the source of her power, which cuts her off from the ghost of her dead husband Hwen. Shan will try to put the pieces back together and return life to the way it was before, but she’ll have to tackle far more than magic to do so. As Visaggio put it an interview with io9, “She thinks that she can bring Hwen back, but she doesn’t really see quite yet is that one of the biggest things standing in her way right now is her own trauma.”
The original Doctor Mirage, Hwen Mirage, was created by Bob Layton and Bernard Chang in 1993 for the original Valiant Universe. Hwen would go on to star in his own series, “The Second Life of Doctor Mirage,” from the same creators. When Valiant rebooted their universe in 2012, the character was rewritten to have died and passed his mantle to his wife Shan. Shan and Hwen’s adventures played out first in “Shadowman,” and later in two miniseries: “The Death-Defying Doctor Mirage,” and “The Death-Defying Doctor Mirage: Second Lives.” Both Shan and Hwen have showed up in recent issues of Andy Diggle, Alex Paknadel, and Doug Braithwaite’s event series “Incursion,” which concludes May 22nd.
“Doctor Mirage” #1 (of 5) hits stores August 28th. You can head on over to io9 for preview pages for the issue.
