Writer Christopher Cantwell and artist Alex Lins take DC character to 'hard-boiled noir'

Plastic Man has never been an A-team DC character like Batman or Superman, despite his elastic potential. He came close; before and after The Matrix, the Wachowskis championed a film for the character, calling it "the closest script to a comedy we'll write," but it never got done. Perhaps James Gunn's rebooted DC cinematic universe will give Patrick "Eel" O'Brian his mainstream breakthrough, but in the meantime, a couple of new creatives are doing the Lord's work in the pages of DC Comics themselves.

On Thursday, DC announced Plastic Man No More!, a new four-issue DC Black Label series launching in September from the Eisner-nominated creative team of Christopher Cantwell (Halt and Catch Fire, Batman: The Brave and The Bold, Iron Man ) and Alex Lins (Immortal Hulk, Monarch).

"I don't know about you, but when I think of Plastic Man, I immediately think of David Cronenberg," Cantwell said in a statement. "There's an element of body horror to his story that I've always found fascinating. And I also found myself wondering recently – How would Plastic Man actually die? What would it look like? Is he immortal? And so I thought in the long and particularly nasty way that real plastics and petroleum products break down when and if they finally do.That's how I learned about depolymerization and the chemical process of "unlocking" – from a particularly boring afternoon on the old Internet, where I imagined what might happen to the eel if his entire cellular structure began to give way."