Bloodlines Homepage

BLOODLINES was the third DC event (after ARMAGEDDON 2001 and ECLIPSO: THE DARKNESS WITHIN) to crossover into its summer annuals. Instead of having a two issue miniseries that acted as a start and end for the story as ARMAGEDDON and ECLIPSO had done, however, BLOODLINES started in LOBO ANNUAL #1 and carried on throughout the other series before finishing in the two part BLOODBATH mini-series.

This meant that unless you read every single DC annual in 1993, you wouldn’t have a clear understanding of the story (such as it was.) At the time, my first exposure to the story was when I picked up GREEN LANTERN ANNUAL #2, which – as you can see above – is part 7 of the story.

Each issue introduced a new hero or villain to the DCU, someone granted powers following an attack by one of the Bloodlines Parasites which triggered their latent meta-gene. Some of these New Bloods would go on to have their own series/adventures in the DCU, most with little success.

As I have done with the other series, I’ll annotate the BLOODBATH series and give summaries of the annuals.

House Ads

Most of the ads for the BLOODLINES event were simply the covers of the annuals with a strap line of “New Heroes. New Villains. New Blood.” added to the bottom of the ad.

There were a handful of other ads and DC Nation articles, though, and I’ve collected all of the above that I could find into a page here.

Included in that page is a call from DC to write in and tell them which of the new characters was the readers’ favourite.

HITMAN on BLOODLINES

It’s no secret that most of the BLOODLINES characters weren’t successful; some of them had a mini-series or two, or appeared in issues of their annual’s series, and some never appeared again.

Hitman was by far the stand out character of the whole thing, going on to his own series that lasted an impressive 60 issues, as well as one shots and mini-series. Despite his origins in a company wide superhero event, the HITMAN series rarely bothered with superheroics as the plot driver – it was much more a character piece that occasionally had superheroes turn up.

It did, though, comment on the heroes and the event cycle a couple of times and I’ve compiled a few scenes on this page.

Where Are They Now?

There were a large number of characters created in the BLOODLINES event – if you’re curious about what happened to them and where they are now, you can find out on this page.

BLOODLINES in 2016

While I doubt anyone was crying out for it, a new BLOODLINES miniseries was announced in 2016, to be written by JT Krul. Rather than rehash what had already been done in the 90s, Krul instead opted for a more horror story approach, taking the premise of alien parasites invading people but instead of them becoming costumed superheroes, tried to deal with their reactions to the situation.

I’ve given it a brief write up on this page.