Icon #2

Jun 1993 · DC · 1.50 USD; 1.85 CAD; 1.00 GBP

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“Police Action”

★ 1st appearance — Payback

About this Issue

Icon #2 (cover-dated June 1993) is the second chapter of Milestone Media's flagship series and the issue in which Dwayne McDuffie planted the seed for one of the most audacious long-form character arcs in superhero publishing history: by its final pages, teenager Raquel Ervin — Rocket — learns she is pregnant, setting in motion a storyline that made her the first mainstream superhero in comics to navigate single teen motherhood while still actively crime-fighting. The issue also marks the first appearance of Payback (Kevin Franklin), a Bang Baby whose tragic backstory ties directly to the corrupt cover-up at the heart of the Dakotaverse's origin event, giving the young series its first morally complex antagonist-victim. Together these two story threads — social realism colliding with superhero action — announced that the Icon series intended to take the genre somewhere it had rarely gone before.

writer Dwayne McDuffie · artist M. D. Bright · inker Mike Gustovich · colorist John Cebollero · letterer Steve Dutro · cover M. D. Bright, Mike Gustovich

ComicBooks.com Value

Our Model is In Beta

Raw (NM) $1

CGC 9.8 · 9 in census $38

CGC 9.6 · 10 in census $20

CGC 9.4 · 3 in census $20*

* estimate — limited direct-sales data at this grade

Our model’s value — refined as new sales data arrives · CGC census counts shown where available

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History

Milestone Media was founded in 1993 by Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, and Derek T. Dingle with the explicit mission of creating a diverse, creator-owned stable of characters to address the near-total absence of Black and minority leads in mainstream superhero comics. DC Comics published and distributed the Milestone line under an arrangement that kept the characters in Milestone's ownership and placed them in their own Dakotaverse continuity rather than the main DC Universe. McDuffie served as the series writer throughout, with interior art by M.D. Bright and inks by Mike Gustovich; Bright also provided the cover for this issue. The conceptual groundwork for Icon and Rocket — including the deliberate ideological tension between Icon's conservative politics and Rocket's liberal idealism — was baked in from the company's formation period in 1991–1992.

Trivia · 8 facts

Cover date: June 1993 (DC Database); published by Milestone Media and distributed by DC Comics as part of the Dakotaverse imprint.
Written by Dwayne McDuffie; interior art and cover by M.D. Bright and Mike Gustovich.
Story titled 'Police Action': Icon and Rocket make their first public appearance as the official hero duo of Dakota City, intervening when a hostage-taker seizes City Hall.
First appearance of Payback (Kevin Franklin) — a Bang Baby who can transform into a reptilian monster and who holds Mayor Thomasina Jefferson hostage to force a confession about the Big Bang massacre.
Payback's backstory reveals that the 'Quantum Juice' laced into the experimental tear gas used at the Big Bang was a government cover-up — an early exploration of systemic political corruption in the Dakotaverse.
By the issue's final pages, Rocket discovers she is pregnant — launching what would become the series' landmark teen-pregnancy storyline and making her the first mainstream superhero in comics to be depicted as a teenage single mother.
The issue also introduces S.H.R.E.D., Dakota's elite police special-weapons unit, as a recurring institutional presence in the city.
Icon #1–8 (including this issue) were later collected in the trade paperback Icon: A Hero's Welcome (1997, ISBN 978-1-56389-339-1), reprinted in a new edition in 2009 (ISBN 978-1-4012-2549-0); select issues including #2 were also reprinted in Milestone Compendium: One (2021).