“Noble Causes” takes five-year jump

From Friday’s The Oklahoman:

By Matthew Price

Acting Assistant Entertainment Editor

WORD BALLOONS

The celebrity superheroes of “Noble Causes” get a new status quo in issue No. 32 of the Image Comics superhero series, scheduled to ship in March. 

Writer Jay Faerber moves his family of superhero characters five years in the future with issue No. 32.

“Everyone will have to learn who the family is all over again, to some degree,” Faerber said. “Some characters from the previous issues are in the book, but their circumstances have changed. Plus, there are new characters, a new locale, even a new tone. Issue No. 32 is essentially a new No. 1, but we wanted to keep our numbering consistent so we didn’t go down the re-numbering route.”

“Noble Causes” is about the Noble family, world-famous superhero celebrities.

“The original tag line I used to sell the series to Image all those years ago was: ‘The Kennedy family, with super-powers,’” Faerber said. “And that still applies today — the Nobles are larger-than-life and generally want to do good, but they’ve got a lot of skeletons in their closets. … The book strikes a balance between world-saving action and more character-driven subplots and dramatics. The focus of the book, however, is always on the characters and how they relate to one another.”

Several of those characters and relationships will have changed over the five-year gap.

“The biggest and most noticeable change is going to be the cast,” Faerber said. “We’ve gotten rid of a handful of characters, and introduced some new family members as well. And the older characters have all been redesigned — some more drastically than others.