DC Comics is returning again to Jack Kirby’s Fourth World in February 2019 with “Female Furies,” a six-issue miniseries written by Cecil Castellucci and illustrated by Adriana Melo about Big Barda and co. Castellucci is coming off work for DC’s Young Animal imprint after teaming with artist Marley Zarcone for “Shade, The Changing Girl,” while Melo is finishing art duty on “Plastic Man” with writer Gail Simone. The book is set before Big Barda escapes Apokolips to marry Scott Free, and will tell the story of Darkseid’s underutilization of Granny Goodness’s greatest, fiercest soldiers. You can check out the solicitation for the first issue, as well as Mitch Gerads’ cover below:
For their entire lives, the Female Furies have been raised to be the meanest, most cunning, and most ruthless fighting force on all of Apokolips. So why is it that Granny Goodness’ girls are left behind every time the men go to war? With the might of New Genesis hanging over the planet, and the Forever People making mincemeat of Darkseid’s army, Granny thinks it’s time all of that changed.
And so it is that Big Barda, Aurelie, Mad Harriet, Lashina, Bernadeth, and Stompa set out to beat the boys at their own game. Little do they know, the game is rigged and one mistake could spell disaster for our heroines!
This new miniseries follows on from the success of Tom King and Mitch Gerads’s Eisner-winning series, “Mister Miracle,” which ends its 12-issue run this week. While the two projects will not overlap, Gerads is providing covers for the series. “Female Furies” also comes on the heels of Warner Bros.’s previous reveal of a New Gods movie in production with Ava DuVernay (A Wrinkle in Time) set to direct.
In an interview, Castellucci described what’s under the surface of the story of the Female Furies, detailing questions of women and power and duty. “Sadly,” Castellucci says, “sometimes just because a woman is in power, it doesn’t mean that she is lifting all other women […] I think that there is an existential sadness to being so suppressed that you are constantly forced to turn to the dark, rather than the light. How do you bear it? And what does reaching for something more grand look like?”
You can check out “Female Furies” #1 when it hits stores in February.
