Breach

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The article refers to the comic book series. For The Wallflowers album, see (Breach). For whale breaching, see Whale behaviour.

Breach: verb to break (she will breach her contract if she doesn't comply). noun break (your breach of confidentiality will cost you your friends)

This article or section contains information about a scheduled or expected comic book release, or a series already in progress. It is likely to contain information of a speculative nature and the content may change dramatically as the product release approaches and more information becomes available.

Breach is a 2005 comic book series from DC Comics. written by Bob Harras with art by penciller Marcos Martin and inker Alvaro Lopez. The series is centered on a US Army Major named Tim Zanetti, who gains superpowers in a scientific experiment gone wrong. Zanetti was working for "Project Otherside," a secret sub-Arctic nuclear reactor where scientists are probing other dimensions. In an accident at the facility, Zanetti is caught in a dimensional rift and afterwards is found in a coma with his body forever changed. His body is placed in an isolation chamber for the next twenty years, at which point he awakens. His body has become a conductor for a mysterious and deadly energy, able to "melt" biological substances only with a touch, and so he has to be dampened with a special containment suit. Left behind while Zanetti is comatose and presumed dead, are his wife Katie and son Tate.

There is a reason why the premise is very similar to that of another DC Comics character, Captain Atom. Breach was originally intended to be a modern reboot of Captain Atom, until management at DC decided not to revise the character, who was last rebooted during the late 1980s. With the development of Breach already underway, the decision was made to partially rewrite the plot and characters and create a brand new superhero.

Like Captain Atom before him, Zanetti wakes years after the experiment which transformed him. He discovers that his former colleague, Major Mac McClellan, has taken his place in his former family, marrying Katie, and has risen in the military to the rank of General. For some still unknown reasons he decides to tell Zanetti that his family had died the very moment he came to contact with the rift. MacClellan plans to use Zanetti, now dubbed "Breach" as a tool agains invasion by the race of transdimensional creatures called the Rifters.

The Rifters are creatures from the far side of the dimensional rift that created Breach. They need to inhabit and take over human bodies in order to take a physical form. Once in human form, they also possess the same deadly attributes of Breach himself, but are totally enslaved by their natural instincts. The declared goal of the Rifters is the global destruction of what they refer to as "the weak ones," the humans, and a particular Rifter agent, Jakob Kekana.

Kekana was a young herdsman in Africa when he was possessed and deformed by a Rifter. Now known simply as The Herdsman, he has been sent to track down Zanetti and probe him to discover why he is not bound to the parasitic Rifter mind. He has acquired an unsurpassed power, strong enough to take down even Superman. For still mysterious reasons, Talia al Ghul is helping the Herdsman, who far from considers her a "weak one".

Breach distances itself from the standard superhero formula by focusing on the tragedy, rather than the triumph, of its title character. Constantly driven to the verge of madness by the Rifter infection in his body and mind, Breach holds onto the memories of his family to keep him sane. This binds him to a strict moral code that, for example, has stopped him from kill two Rifters that possessed innocent children.

Breach has tangled with the Kobra organization and has met up with members of the JLA, including fights with Superman on more than one occasion.

Breach has been cancelled by DC and the eleventh and final issue will be released in November 2005.