Spoilers for Static: Season One #1 ahead!
In a new Static Shock comic DC introduced their own variant of the Super Soldier Serum, one far more political in nature than its predecessors.
Static: Season One from Vita Ayala, ChrisCross, Nikolas Draper-Ivey, and Andworld Design is part of a larger relaunch for Milestone Media, which began life as an imprint of DC Comics in 1993. The imprint was founded by African-American creators who desired more representation in superhero comics. The company’s first wave of characters included Hardware, Icon, and Static—who went on to star in his own acclaimed animated series. The Milestone heroes all live in the fictional Dakota City, and many of them got their powers through an event called “the Big Bang,” in which police officers gassed street gang members with an experimental gas, causing random people to mutate. Some of the mutations, such as Static’s, were beneficial, but others were not as lucky, some being left grotesque and hideous. The “Big Bang” gets a new spin in the relaunched Milestone titles—bringing it in line with current events and giving it an undeniable political touch.
As mentioned earlier, the first “Big Bang” happened when police gassed gang members; in the new and relaunched Milestone, it happened after police subjected young protestors to the gas, made by Alva Industries. The gas had never been tested on humans before, and the unfortunate protestors were the test subjects. Readers see the gas' victims, some of them mutated into horrifying monsters; many of them wish they had died in the Big Bang.
Alva Industries’ gas can be viewed as a variant on the Super Soldier Serum, but unlike the Serum, the gas is much more political, to the point the two cannot be separated. The student protestors gassed during the Big Bang could have come from a Black Lives Matter rally, and the scenes of the gas taking hold are truly horrifying. These protestors were asking for dignity and the right to be recognized as human beings, but their protest got them killed or turned into monsters. Marvel has touched on some of the political aspects of the Super Soldier Serum over the years, particularly in books such as Truth as well as the television show Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but those were added after the fact whereas Alva’s gas is part of the concept from the get-go.
DC has introduced a new variant of the Super Soldier Serum, in Static: Season One #1, one that fully acknowledges its political roots, and is grounded in the world fans know.