"Wonder Twins powers, activate!" Their rallying cry has endured for more than 45 years, but Zan and Jayna have made only sporadic appearances in comics and other media since the end of the Super Friends cartoon in 1986. Now, though, thanks to a writer famous (notorious?) for dusting off beloved characters that have fallen into disuse, the Wonder Twins' moment may have finally arrived -- much to their own dismay.

Mark Russell, the comedy writer who has made a name for himself turning The Flintstones and Snagglepuss comics into biting social satire, takes on re-imagining the spritely siblings in the six-issue miniseries Wonder Twins, debuting February 13 under the Bendis-helmed Wonder Comics imprint. With artist Stephen Byrne, whose credits include Justice League, Green Arrow, and massiely viral fan animations of Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  Russell has once again added his unique spin to familiar characters resulting in a deeply funny story that resonates. CBR spoke with Russell about how he sees Zan and Jayna, and why it's necessary to create a "handbook of humiliation."

RELATED: DC Reveals Full Wonder Comics Title Line-Up, Creative Teams

CBR: How would how would you describe your take on Wonder Twins? What are you setting out to accomplish with this book?

Mark Russell: Well, the Wonder Twins themselves I kind of view as one really good, well-adjusted person tragically split in half. So they're basically incomplete people. Which is I think the way every teen feels. They're dealing with deep deficits in their personality and they feel awkward and alienated because of it, not realizing that everyone else feels exactly the same way. That's the sort of dynamic I wanted give to the Wonder Twins. They are deeply alienated teenagers who are just beginning to work out who they really are. I wanted them, with superpowers, to go through the same process I think every teenager goes through whether or not they have superpowers.

Yeah, I've got to say, the scene about the nicknames with Batman and Superman was deeply relatable. So that's in continuity now, we can start calling Batman “Bee Gee” over in Detective?

I think so. Yes. That was Brian Michael Bendis' decision to bring this into continuity. Therefore, we could talk about it. I think in a lot of ways, what the series is, is a time machine -- it's a chance for me to go back and talk to my teenage self, what I would tell myself with what I know now. A lot of it is contained in this issue, like "don't worry, everyone's gonna get humiliated at some point or another during your high school years." It's not that important because, one, everyone's in the same boat, and two, you're probably not even gonna know these people in a few years. So I think the biggest thing that you can sort of leave people going through an awkward phase of our lives with is perspective, and that's what I'm trying to deal with the sort of after school special gone wrong.

NEXT PAGE: Wonder Twins: Zan and Jayna Will Face Their Own B-level Legion of Doom

You've kind of made this niche for yourself reinventing well-known but neglected characters with humor, often with a lot of pretty powerful satire as well. Where would you say that fits in within the sort of work that you do?

Russell: I think it fits very well was the previous oeuvre, as you say, reinventing old characters to talk about something that's new and going on with the world now. And I think what, in a lot of ways, what the Wonder Twins as it unfolds will be about will be about the sort of post-Millennial generation being handed this world on the verge of breaking, that is in many ways already broken, and somehow being expected to fix it. It's like showing up to your first day of work and finding out the place is on fire. This is the world we have left to the post-Millennial generation. And this is the world to which the Wonder Twins arrive when they come to Earth.

RELATED: Bendis Working on Young Justice Spinoff with Major Female Creator

It also seems like you do a bit of myth-building around the Justice League in this issue in some kind of unusual ways. What sort of things can you explore in a book like this that maybe you couldn't do in the main Justice League book?

Well, it allows me to go sort of off script a little and think about the sort of more tangential stories. Because the problem creatively with, say, like a Justice League story is that you're always dealing with the main heroes and therefore you're dealing constantly with these existential threats to the Earth. Their work is so important that there's no really no time to deal with like B-league, minor league villains or things that are huge to a teenager but petty to everybody else.

That was one of the things I wanted to do with the first issue: let's create this existential threat to the earth with Mxyzptlk that Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman, the major heroes are having to deal with. But really, they take time out of dealing with Mxyzptlk to help Zan with his personal problem of being humiliated in high school, because in the end that is the sort of Earth-ending existential threat to a teenage person. To him that feels as big as Mxyzptlk destroying the fabric of reality.

When the series begins we learn that Zan and Jayna are on Earth, living in the Hall of Justice, and trying to find their place and nobody especially knows what to do with them. What can you tell us about what brought the twins to this point and how they go about adapting to the situation?

RELATED INTERVIEW: Bendis' Young Justice Makes Wonder Comics His Ultimate DC Project

Well, like you said they're brought to Earth, they have no idea really what's expected of them. People don't really know what to do with them. Which again I want to sort of mirror the experience that most people go through in their youth. But very quickly the Justice Leaguers sort of figure out that the way to train these young superheroes is to sort of put them against minor league villains. I think they set them against the League of Annoyance, a sort of B-league super villain organization put together by the Legion of Doom. And so they go after really sort of that kind of pathetic supervillains. In fact, I wouldn't even call supervillains; let's call them villains.

But what I wanted to do was to show people on their way up, you know, who are still mostly potential, but also people who are on the way down, in decline. So much of what we see in superhero comics are people in their prime fighting or dealing with other people in their prime. Most of us spend our lives either becoming or declining.

I want to do a comic more about these people who are in different states of fulfilling your potential or having lost what they once were.

So how much is that sort of confrontation, or what we normally think of as superhero action, going to be a part of this book? Because we don't get to see a ton of their powers in the first issue.

I don't want it to be professional wrestling with superpowers, that's for sure. But at the same time, it is a superhero comic, I want to work as a superhero comic. So there is action and there is them using their powers to foil these super villains. But it is being told in a story that's much more ambivalent about the nature of super heroes versus villains. Jayna begins to sort of question whether or not this is the best way to deal with the world, whether what the world really needs is people going out and duking it out like they're part of some super powered bowling league every week. And if there aren't better ways for them to use their powers to serve the world ultimately becomes what the series is about, what the climax of the six-issue arc that I've written becomes about is this: if you have this power, is the best way to use it just simply negating other people with similar powers? Or is the world better served by some other use of them?

You mentioned the arc that you're going for over the course of six issues, but I also noticed that, as you did with Flintstones, Wonder Twins seems to tell a complete story in every issue -- or at least, what I've seen of the first issue. How does this influence the ways that you introduce characters and build toward the larger story?

Russell: Yeah, it very much influences the way I build the story and introduce characters, because I build the set gradually. The first issue has almost nothing about the villains that they will ultimately be facing. You really just focus on the Wonder Twins and their environment and then begin to build the cast of villains and tangential characters around them. Then we all sort of come together in one sort of climactic story at the end. So yeah, it's very gradual. But I wanted this to be a story in and of itself. Each issue has its own theme of injustice on earth. And in the first one it's about just sort of dumping the world on teens and people that weren't really prepared and expecting them to fix it. And the second issue is very much about the prison industrial complex, and so on and so forth. Each issue has its own theme. It tells its own story. But it all serves this big arc that comes together at the end.

RELATED: Naomi Will Forever Change the DC Universe, Promise Bendis, Walker & Campbell

You also seem to really enjoy playing with minor or incidental characters -- there are the teachers bantering about Jayna doing the announcements, the "Dutch boy" in class, and so on. What appeals to you about that sort of background character taking center stage?

I do like the minor characters. A lot of times they are the heart and soul of the piece. They're able to stay and give perspective on what is happening in the piece that the main characters are too embroiled in the action to really reflect on. They are the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of any story, you give your minor characters a chance to sort of speak and tell their own story and reflect on what's going on around them. Really, I think they take the place of the readers and allow the reader the same luxury.

One of the big things that going on in this issue is Zan's plan to become the most popular kid in school, which is very, very precise and goes wrong pretty much before it begins

Like every plot going to be popular. Destined for failure.

But I also love that his version of cool has him walking an alligator.

You were saying, this sort of plan is necessarily doomed from the start?

Yes. I think that in a lot of ways it's about confronting the reality of how we see ourselves versus the way others see us. And I think we see all, at one point or another, are seeing ourselves as the cool guy with the nickname the alligator walking down the hallway. Just out of pure psychic self-defense because we're not prepared to look at ourselves the way other people really see us. And Zan is confronted with being forced to see himself as the butt of humiliation, as not being the God of Cool as he wants to be. It's a very humbling moment for him and I think it's one that a lot of people are confronted with in their lives. But what's missing is a lot of literature about how to deal with these moments of intense humiliation.

That's kind of what I want to do in this comic, like here is a manual for people who are experiencing intense intense humiliation.

Great, thanks so much for speaking with me. Is there anything you want to add before we go?

I'm really happy to be writing Wonder Twins. I hope people give it a chance because I think it'll be an unusual superhero comic but I found it really gratifying to write it. I hope people feel similarly about reading it.