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Official Site: Icon Comics

Powers is an American creator-owned comic book series by Brian Michael Bendis (writer) and Michael Avon Oeming (artist). The series' first volume was published by Image Comics (2000 to 2004). Subsequent volumes (beginning in 2004 along with David Mack's Kabuki) have been published by Marvel Comics as a part of the Icon imprint.

Powers is set in a world where superpowers are relatively common but not mundane. It follows the lives of two detectives, Christian Walker and Deena Pilgrim, police officers in a Homicide department devoted to cases that involve "powers" (people with superpowers). Walker himself used to be a costumed superhero named Diamond, but became a police officer after he lost his abilities. Though stripped of his powers, he still retains his contacts within the superhero community, even becoming engaged to an ex-colleague, who is later killed. In later issues, Walker is offered the chance to become the world's latest secret Guardian as part of The Millennium Guard, a secret group of intergalactic guardians, accepting the responsibility and the powers that come with it.

Deena Pilgrim, his partner, is also hiding at least one troubling secret. She contracted superpowers during a fight with an underworld thug named the Bug, an event which she kept under wraps. As a result of this, she unintentionally kills her abusive boyfriend in self-defense, and hides the evidence, although coming under investigation by Internal Affairs. However after a series of events involving Retro Girl going undercover, Triphammer cures Deena and she is no longer under the scrutiny of I.A

Bendis and Oeming (and David Mack) became friends while all three were working on individual small press projects. Bendis says that he also began to "analyz[e] why it was that I [had] never attempted to write a superhero comic" at the time, while he was writing crime books such as Jinx and Goldfish despite loving the genre. He concluded that Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen had really said all that needed to be said about superheroes, so he had "moved onto another genre where I thought I had something to say." Combining his love of crime fiction with a "VH1: Behind the Music look at superheroes" and his "love of the police procedural," he felt a concept evolving. These, plus his having read Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (the non-fiction book on which the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street was based) and Janis Joplin's biography combined with Oeming's initial drawings—and Oeming's having already expressed interest in producing a black and white crime/noir comic with Bendis -- brought about the creation of Powers.

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