Yo, it’s Josh, your local Couch Soup comic book expert! Hm, maybe “expert” is a bit much. Yeah, let’s just make it the “resident Couch Soup comic book fan,” since I don’t know everything about comic books –  there’s only so much history and lore that one person can remember!

With Hollywood pumping out superhero movies each and every year now, sometimes you just want to take a break from staring at a screen and pull out a book; which you could say is a comic book… Eh? 

The point I’m making is: if you want to get into reading comics, where do you start? 

Everyone knows about DC and Marvel, two massive publishers with their own well established characters, with hundreds of issues already written for each of their IPs. What I’m going to do is make a recommendation of a new (or newish) comic series, one that has just started, without worrying about doing too much research on the hero before making my blind pick. 

My new comic pick – as you can tell by the name of the article – is Rogue Sun.

This comic’s story follows the life of Dylan Siegel, a rebellious young high schooler. Dylan’s father, Marcus, left his mom when Dylan was barely one year old. Within a few years, Marcus was remarried to another woman from a wealthy family. Marcus was recently killed by an entity that seems to know about not only his personal life, but something massive he has been hiding from the public.

Dylan was invited to the will reading and found out that his father was the hell knight known as Rogue Sun. Even more shocking, Marcus has entrusted him with the magical sun stone that gave him his powers. This naturally creates a lot of friction between him and his step-siblings.

Rogue Sun’s powers include super strength, durability, and the ability to manipulate flames for flight – or for roasting his enemies back to Hell. With Dylan controlling the suit and its power, he’s much like Johnny Storm; a young and cocky S.O.B. One of the most interesting powers, though, is that the sun stone lets him talk to previous people that held the mantle of Rogue Sun. 

In Dylan’s case, he sees his father Marcus, who tries to teach him how to use his powers properly in order to find the monster that killed him. Dylan, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with him. He’d rather have his dad gone, so that he can keep on doing things his own way.

Ryan Parrot is the main writer for Rogue Sun, and I’ve known his work since he was writing for the Power Rangers comics over the last few years (which you can read about in my previous article!). When I heard the news that Ryan was going to be writing a new superhero called Rogue Sun for Images comics, I was immediately excited to see what he had in store for the series.

What drew me in the most about the series is how awesome Rogue Sun looks, and how much of a flawed character Dylan is. It’s not often we see an origin story of a high schooler who is a bit of a dick to everyone he meets… but it’s also fun watching Dylan think he knows all about how the world works. With a mindset like that, he has made some terrible choices; ones that not only affect him physically, but mentally as well. 

Let’s be for real: we all made crap decisions as teenagers, choices that we ended up learning from, after they kicked us in the ass. A lot of the greatest moments in Rogue Sun are all about Dylan learning from these mistakes.

So far, I have been a fan of the artwork and story. I actually bought my first graded and autographed number 1 issue with the cover paying homage to what I believe is one of the most underrated 90’s comic movies, The Rocketeer. 

You know what’s great? There’s never been a better time to become a Rogue Sun fan. Volume 1 of the paper trade was just released a few months back, and volume 2 is coming out on May 23, 2023, which makes it easy to catch up with the lore. 

Let me know in the comments if you have already checked out the comic – or tell me about any other series that you think has great potential!