Tony Harris & B Clay Moore Revive The Whistling Skull Without The JSA

At Bleeding Cool we have a… very special relationship with Tony Harris I think it is fair to say. Whether concerning Fake Geek Girls or destroyed commission art. he is what some people would call “a character”. And you never quite know what the co-creator of Ex Machina is going to do next.

In 2010, Tony Harris and B. Clay Moore were to launch a creator-owned comic book series through DC Comics’ Wildstorm Studios, called The Further Adventures of the Whistling Skull. And then DC Comics closed. Two years later, they had reframed the comic book entirely as part of the Tony Harris’ Justice Society of America series to follow 2000’s JSA: The Liberty File and 2003’s JSA: The Unholy Three, to become JSA: Liberty File – The Whistling Skull. Those six issues were meant to be the first of a forty-issue series-of-miniseries, but six is all we got.

But now it seems that Tony Harris and B Clay Moore are doing it in reverse. Getting the rights to the story back from DC Comics, removing all the references and appearances of DC Comics characters The Cat, The Clock and The Owl from those previous JSA series, and inserting their own replacement characters back in as they would have originally published in 2010. And they will be publishing the new remade Whistling Skull graphic novel through crowdfunding Zoop, launching later this month.

The Whistling Skull – Special Edition Hardcover by B. Clay Moore & Tony Harris

The definitive edition of this out-of-print classic is here, with new material added! In a remote village in Switzerland, the townsfolk face a terrible threat. People keep disappearing without warning or explanation, and the authorities are powerless to help. But the secret organization known as the Skeleton is aware that something sinister is going on, and they’ve dispatched their top agents to investigate: the eerie crimefighter known as the Whistling Skull! With his assistant Knuckles at his side, the Skull can draw on the benefits of decades of crimefighting to uncover what’s happening in the village. But this is not the same hero who went on all of those adventures. The last Whistling Skull disappeared after fighting side-by-side with the heroes of his generation, and though his predecessor has the memories and skills of every man who has come before him…he’s never been on a mission before. Can the new Whistling Skull prevail when faced with pure evil? Or will the horrors that were inflicted on the village soon spread to the entire world?

Creators getting rights back from DC Comics can be hard, but it does happen. Getting rights to a series in which DC Comics characters actually appeared however can be a lot harder. This may give some now hope, and maybe a chance to try again.