It seems like an obvious idea in retrospect, a federal agency that deals with the metahuman element in the DC Universe and operates like a cross between the FBI and S.T.A.R. Labs. However, the Department of Extranormal Affairs (DEO), despite being in wide use today in various DC books, started its existence in a mostly-ignored fringe comic that ran only 10 issues back in 1998: Chase. Chase was an anomaly in a lot of ways, actually. Dan Johnson was a completely untested writer whose first at-bat was an ongoing for DC Comics, and that kind of sudden break-in to the industry has always rare and probably always will be. This was also some of the first work from JH Williams III and Mick Gray, who went on to co-create the ground-breaking Promethea with Alan Moore and then to work with Grant Morrison on Seven Soldiers. And though DC was at the time experimenting with stuff outside the superhero mainstream, with a short-lived superhero/horror line, a superhero/romance book called Young Heroes in Love and other books, the notion of a book focused on an agent for a government metahuman agency was (and still is) off the beaten path.
Chase got the benefit of a high-profile launch with a guest stint in Batman #550, as she showed up in Gotham to track down one of Batman's villains, Clayface. This intro was written by Doug Moench, not Dan Johnson, and featured primarily art by Kelley Jones instead of JH Williams III and Mick Gray, so it maybe wasn't the best promotion for what the series was like, but it was an attempt by DC to give a new book some legs. Given that many of their new books were just dying on the shelves at the time, it was worth the risk, although unfortunately, in hindsight, it didn't really gain them anything. Chase was vying for support within DC alongside another cult favorite book, Chronos by John Francis Moore and Paul Guinan. Chronos got the nod, getting a stay of execution, and Chase was chopped. A couple of months later, Moore quit his book and Chronos vanished too, more or less squandering its stay of execution. Again, in hindsight it's easy to say DC made the wrong choice, since the DEO and Cameron Chase have remained, but the character of Chronos as written by Moore, a young man clearly influenced by the template of Starman's Jack Knight, more or less disappeared from the DC Universe.
During the time that it ran, Chase produced a number of entertaining stories. Johnson's tales took Chase and her DEO mandate throughout the DC Universe, from small town Ohio to lawless parts of South America to Chicago to Gotham. He made use of the Suicide Squad, Rocket Reds, Klarion the Witch-Boy, Batman, Green Lantern and plenty of other DC Universe elements in his stories. Chase was an outsider to this world, albeit one with her own mysterious powers developing, but she was definitely in the DC Universe, and this made for a fairly unique read. Chase hated metahumans as a result of her history (which was delved into during a few issues), but she turned out to actually have powers of her own, and both her job and her own sort of weirdness magnet nature drew her into their world regardless.
It's always kind of fun to get that "time capsule" effect when reading old series. Chase was published in 1998, and at the time, Dan Jurgens had put together a completely new Teen Titans team that appeared in Chase #4. Today, most if not all of these characters have disappeared, leaving the big names in charge of Teen Titans again. In issue two, we see a Justice League that includes Superman with blue electrical powers, Kyle Rayner as Green Lantern and Connor Hawke as Green Arrow. Klarion (the original) shows up in #5, looking quite different from his Morrison/Irving Seven Soldiers version. There's a flashback to Hal Jordan as Green Lantern in #9 that only works if he's gone through the "Emerald Twilight" events, since it definitely views him as a thing of the past. I wonder, when looking back at books from the "aughts," what similar seemingly big developments will seem like quaint and funny artifacts of their time. Will Elongated Man be back cracking wise with Sue Dibny back from the dead? Dr. Light back to being a goofball? It certainly doesn't hurt the stories in Chase that several of the trappings of the book basically don't exist anymore, but it does "date" the material to some extent. Of course, even the earliest comics are dated by things as ugly as institutionalized racism and as goofy as bad dialogue, so maybe these changes are, ironically, an argument for how things tend to stay the same.
While Chase was ahead of its time, you can definitely spot the influence of its era around it. One of DC's big hits during the '90s was Starman, which took the framework of the DC Universe and added a deeper character to it. While various characters in the DC have gained a lot of depth as time has gone on, it didn't used to be that you'd create a new character who was supposed to feel like a real person. Their background was often a tossed-off reference to a job they'd held, and how they got their powers. Cameron Chase was another new character created in the mold of Jack Knight, and there are several obvious parallels as well. Chase wasn't sure of all this superhero stuff, capes and powers and such, but it had an unfortunate tendency to infringe upon her life. She had a rough past, including difficulties involving her father, that informed the way she was now. And she was flawed, a diehard smoker who knew it was bad for her and someone with a fair amount of anger toward the world. If you look at Cameron Chase, you can see some of the comics DNA of Bendis's character Jessica Jones in Alias, though I doubt that this was a conscious influence on Bendis, who I would guess never even saw the relatively obscure Chase title. But like Jessica Jones, Cameron Chase is a world-weary character ahead of her time, more at home in pulps than in the brightly-lit world of superhero comics. Jones was only a couple years ahead of her time, as the darkness inflicted on the DC and Marvel Universe during 2004 made her fit right in, but Chase was about five or six years too early. I daresay Cameron Chase is someone that Greg Rucka would find quite appealing, given her damaged background and strong female character archetype.
Johnson was a regular on Usenet, which was at the time more or less where you went to discuss comics on the Internet, and he clearly knew his computer stuff besides. His knowledge of how the computer world actually works shows up throughout the story, as Chase does computer research or networks on the Internet, and it all feels considerably more like the sometimes obtuse technological world that was then the Internet. When the Construct, an old JLA foe that is a sentient computer, powers up in Peru in issue #2, we see actual software language in its start-up narration. Chase and her old detective partner, a slob and borderline homeless guy named Knob, met through Internet newsgroups, and she met her boyfriend online as well. Chase was not a computer hacker par excellence like Oracle, but she was clearly meant to have some skills, which makes sense given that real private eye work tends to involve a fair amount of Internet searching.
Throughout this feature, I've placed images of the covers of the ten released issues of Chase, and each one links to a page of artwork from the interior by JH Williams III and Mick Gray. Williams was really on his game from the very beginning, presenting an unusual and beautiful style of artwork that mixed gritty reality with spectacular fantasy elements. The pyrokinetic powers in issue one, the redesigned Rocket Reds in issue three, the creepy design of Dr. Trap and the spectacular combat sequences with the Suicide Squad and Teen Titans all showed a flair for the unusual. Williams also really captured the realistic elements of Chase's world without making them boring. The expansive nature of the DEO situation room and its bustling offices, the hostile and isolating terrain of Peru, the crowded store that hosts a Teen Titans event, even the distinctive look of Gotham City, Williams and Gray made these settings come to life. In addition, Williams's unusual panel arrangements and multi-layered storytelling were with the book from the very beginning. Witness the song that plays in the background throughout the entirety of issue four, a clever little visual trick to indicate sound in comics, one of the more difficult things to indicate in this medium. Look at the various insert panels and panel border flourishes, never interrupting the flow of the story but always giving it an almost fine art quality. Williams would take this experimentation to new heights when working with comics master Alan Moore on Promethea, but it's clear that the strengths in his artwork were there from the very beginning. And as you can clearly see, his covers were uniformly gorgeous.
I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention the rest of the production team on Chase. The muted colors were provided by Lee Loughridge, who walked that fine line between realistic and boring quite nicely. And Johnson's stories often called for a lot of text, from the Internet chat to the various reports that Chase filed to interrogation transcripts to deep exposition that filled up half a page. Comicraft brought a variety of different looks to the different kinds of text, never allowing the copious words to overrun the artwork.
The actual stores in Chase were generally one-part tales, with a growing subplot building about Chase discovering that she had some mysterious power that allowed her to interfere with other metahuman abilities. The story opened with Chase tracking down a pyrokinetic in Ohio, which placed fire powers in a dangerous, real world context and forced Chase into physical confrontation with the flame-powered angry teen, the first place her powers emerged. In issues two and three, Johnson gave the fans (or at least the vocal Usenet contingent, who were probably a good chunk of the low-selling Chase's fans) what they wanted: a tale of the Suicide Squad. Cameron was sent as DEO babysitter for a group of villains that included Bolt, Copperhead, Killer Frost and Sledge. The tale read more like a military special ops story ala Tom Clancy than a superhero story, as they were inserted into Peru to stop the Shining Path (a real terrorist organization) from gaining Construct technology in Peru. Everything in the story, from the briefing (which treats the JLA's intervention before the story as the equivalent of a superhero airstrike) to the insertion to the pick-up of a native guide, reads like a military story. There's a nice element of compromise and betrayal, as well, as Chase is betrayed by her villainous teammates and brought into a Russian splinter group using Rocket Red technology and trying to recover the Construct for themselves. While Chase was a book that focused on character-based conflicts, Johnson didn't skimp on the action, and there are plenty of exciting moments in this two-parter of the Squad using their power against armed opponents.
Chase #4 was a standalone that found a grumpy Chase babysitting a toy store promotional event with the new Teen Titans, a job that let her spend some time with supporting cast, her boyfriend Peter, little sister Terry and former detective partner "Knob." Johnson once again inserted a couple of fringe fan favorites into the story, with Booster Gold trying to horn in on the Titans' publicity and Firehawk showing up by sheer luck, which allowed all of them to battle the Clock King's supervillain group. Johnson poured a lot of setup into this one issue, introducing supporting characters, linking Booster Gold and Firehawk for later stories and giving us the first hint that Mr. Bones, former Infinity Inc. villain, was indeed the head of the DEO. This issue also demonstrated that while Chase was tough, she wasn't invulnerable, and her boyfriend was right to worry about her involvement with metahumans, as she was buried under the rubble of the fight.
Chase's injury provided a good chance for Johnson to engage in issue five in something also inspired by Starman, the "Times Past" type of story. While Chase convalesced, her family and friends reminisced about her past. Knob told a tale of how he met Chase, when she was a private eye, and it's clear that her metahuman involvement is not strictly down to the DEO. Though he never really had time to explore it, it's fairly clear that Johnson meant for Chase to be something of a weirdness magnet. Her case in this issue involved Klarion the Witch-Boy (as the client, not the villain) and a cult that was trying to blackmail him to gain his power. Also in keeping with the format established in Starman, the "Times Past" issues would feature a different artist illustrating the tales in the past. Since Chase was so short-lived, there were only two of these issues. Issue five was illustrated by Bob Hall, probably unknown to a lot of modern comics readers, and issue nine, a Green Lantern flashback, by Charlie Adlard, best known now for his work on The Walking Dead.
Issue six would finally reveal the nature of Chase's father and why she hated metahumans so much. When a metahuman event at Chase's office traps her in an elevator with her sister, Chase finally tells her sister the truth about their father. He was a hero named the Acrobat, in a group called the Justice Experience (whose groovy visuals and names give little doubt that they were running around in the late '60s). A villain named Dr. Trap, a terrifically creepy visual design by Williams, killed her father and left the body on the kitchen floor for her to find. This issue, the first to eschew action entirely for character development, was a strong read that most resembles some of the popular, dialogue-driven work done by Bendis, Rucka, Brubaker and other notables in the modern superhero market. Of course, in today's superhero climate, Dr. Trap probably would have raped and eaten their mother or somesuch, as well as killing their father.
By this time, and probably before, the writing was on the wall for Chase. Letter writers mentioned the low sales and hoped the book wouldn't be cancelled, and that might be part of the reason why the book's last two-parter was a return trip to Gotham to team up with Batman. Drugs that turned their users into monsters were the ostensible reason, but the latter half of the story revealed that to be a ruse, as Chase was to track down the secret identity of Batman for her real assignment. This being in the early days of Morrison's JLA, Batman was well on his way to "asshole Batman" characterization, but that standoffish nature worked quite well in this story. For one thing, Chase didn't like him any more than he liked her. For another, he had good reason to be paranoid, as Chase used a variety of realistic detective techniques to try and uncover his identity. She tracked his Internet usage and made educated guesses, and might even have cracked the secret, except that Alan Scott, another superhero operating in Gotham, was brought in to throw her off the trail. This was a clever use of the Golden Age Green Lantern's rarely-acknowledged ties to Gotham City, as well as a nice use of his role as the head of a broadcasting company instead of just a golden age hero. By the end, Chase was on her path to becoming a little more sympathetic to superheroes, or at least questioning her motives in being so hostile toward them.
Sadly, this was a moot point in her development, as the last two issues of the series didn't tie into the modern era of Chase at all. Issue nine was a flashback to Chase's detective days, again putting her up against the cult that she'd run into back in issue five, and this time involving her with Hal Jordan, Green Lantern. Issue ten was... actually issue One Million, in a tie-in to DC's One Million event. The story took place far in the future, and showed what the DEO was up to in the 853rd century. This was a really entertaining science-fiction tale about people using technology to emulate powers, and the DEO using similar technology to take them down, a sort of super-powered drug enforcement agency tale. Each power came with an archetype, based on the hero or villain who had used it, and one of the DEO archetypes was the Chase, which could interfere with metahuman powers. It was a bit of a stretch, kind of like if you found out that the future Justice League consisted of Detective Chimp, Airwave and B'wana Beast, but it worked in this title, and provided a good standalone story where the Chase agent started to question the doctrines of the DEO and had a resolution of her own story. The One Million issue didn't really resolve all the stories and subplots that had been started in the pages of Chase, but it did provide a satisfying story on its own merits.
After the book ended, Chase didn't disappear entirely. The DEO became a fixture in the DC Universe, and for a while, every Secret Files came with a story written by Dan Johnson that explored how the DEO interacted with various heroes and villains. There was one particularly great one where he explained the government structure that tied together the DEO, Checkmate, Suicide Squad and the rest. I suspect that this story will be rendered moot by the new power structure in Rucka's Checkmate, but it may not, as its integrated, realistic nature seems like it would appeal to the well-researched Rucka. After that, Chase and the DEO made infrequent appearances in other books, with notable appearances in JSA, Outsiders and Teen Titans.
Chase is a book that serves as the foundation for a lot of things in the modern DC Universe. Marc Andreyko has made Cameron Chase into a regular over in Manhunter, and in fact has brought Manhunter under the aegis of the DEO and Director Bones, both introduced in the pages of Chase. Those who enjoy the grittier vibe of Manhunter or Gotham Central would definitely be wise to check this book out. In addition, the DEO pops up everywhere in the DC Universe, and has become ubiquitous enough that they even had Heroclix made out of them. At the same time, however, the Chase issues are remarkably hard to come by. Even Mile High Comics, of the deeply stocked back issue bins, only has issues 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7, each commanding over five dollars an issue in Near Mint condition. This would be a great time for DC to do a trade of the complete series, collecting the issues, the Secret Files features and maybe even the Batman lead-in. I'd be first in line to pick it up, certainly, and I already own all the original issues.
