Today brings the big announcement of another new Marvel NOW! book, as “The Fearless Defenders” will be coming from writer Cullen Bunn and artist Will Sliney. Stemming from Bunn’s work on “Fear Itself: The Fearless,” this series will find a team of female superheroes led by Valkyrie and Misty Knight teaming up to create the latest, greatest iteration of The Defenders.
I talked with Bunn about the team, where it came from for him, what this book is all about, and much, much more. Thanks to Cullen for chatting, and make sure to check this book out. It sounds like it’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun.
Cullen Bunn: I’ve been lobbying for a book featuring Valkyrie and a team of female heroes ever since I worked on “Fear Itself: The Fearless.” In that series, I introduced this idea that the Shield Maidens are gone, and the All-Mother gives Valkyrie the task of rebuilding the ranks of the Valkyrior, not from the women of Asgard, but from the women of Midgard. At long last, the book has been approved. It will follow Valkyrie’s quest to build this team from the women of the Marvel Universe.
That book will be titled “The Fearless Defenders.”
It’s going to be the new Defenders series with Valkyrie and Misty Knight playing a sort of odd couple as the lead characters.
That is an odd couple!
CB: They’re definitely an unexpected pairing, but I think that sets a tone for the series. Since I’m not revealing the entire team in the first issue, readers will have a number of preconceptions about which characters will take a spot at the table. But I’m hoping this team provides the readers with a few big surprises.
I have to take a guess, just because I was looking at your site and reading Wolverine…is Elsa Bloodstone going to be involved?
CB: (laughs) You’ll have to wait and see. She’s a favorite character of mine, and she would definitely fit the offbeat team-up model. If you read the Wolverine arc, you’ll see that I have plans for her.
I take it you’re a Nextwave fan?
CB: I was a Nextwave fan. That book was so much fun. It’s something that reads for laughs, but I love the scale of the ideas it presented.
But you’ll have to wait and see about Elsa joining the team. In the end, it will be a rather big group, but each arc will focus on our core characters of Misty and/or Valkyrie and maybe a few other team members or guest stars. The way Defenders has always worked best is a team that comes together to face some Defenders-scale threat (and there are quite a few of those planned), then disperses for a time. It all depends on the arc and storyline.
I think my mind immediately goes to Monica Rambeau being involved. I’d like to just sit here and guess all the characters.
CB: You and me both! (laughs)
I started listing all the characters I wanted to join the group, and it was a huge list of characters, which I couldn’t do. The bad news is that not every character can be a part of the team. The good news is, that doesn’t mean they can’t guest star in the series.
Marvel is giving me the opportunity to really explore Valkyrie’s character and build and expand her history and her future. I have some fun Asgardian stuff planned. At the same time, I can tell some more “street level” stories as well.
Seeing Misty involved with these big, magic-heavy stories… and Val engaged in more “down to earth” adventures is part of the fun of this series for me.
I’m kind of intrigued because Marvel always seems to be trying to make Misty Knight an important character.
CB: Yeah, she’s a tough character to get a handle on I think. I think it has to be the right type of book. She’s a cool character, but I think she can be tough to get a read on. I’m hoping that this is the book that will put Misty out there as a character readers can relate to. To some degree, she’s out of her element here, so that helps to open her up as a character a bit.
Continued belowYou said you’ve been championing this for 8 or 9 months. What was it that made you so passionate about this project?
CB: When I was writing “The Fearless,” there was a moment where I was trying to figure out what to do with these 8 hammers of the serpent. It dawned on me that according to some interpretations of Asgardian myth, there were 8 Valkyries. 8 Valkyrie. 8 Hammers. This gave me the notion that the 8 Shield Maidens were destined to rid the world of the hammer. But in doing so they themselves would vanish.
And I loved daydreaming about the choice ahead of Valkyrie I mean, if you had to pick 8 team members, who would you pick?
It inspired me and I got really jazzed about that. At the time, I was certainly seeing a lot of discussion about female superheroes being prominent in comics. But I just thought this was a great opportunity to tell some great stories with terrific characters.
I think that Marvel is always looking for that “elusive female audience.” I was reading something where Paul Tobin was interviewing Chris Roberson where he was asked what genre he’d make comics if he could just make one the dominant one. And Roberson’s answer was he wanted it to be good comics. Not just good, but great comics. I think that if you have someone like you on the book, you have a head start there. If you make a book that is about female characters and it’s a quality comic, the audience will respond to it.
CB: That’s my hope. I don’t want to do this book just because it is a female driven book. It is a female team, yes, but…
But it’s story driven.
CB: I want a fun story with those characters. And I just like the idea that they are giving me the chance to build this team a little more slowly. We’re not opening the first issue with a big splash of the entire team. This is a team that will…if I have my druthers…be built over a long arc or several arcs.
Who’s the artist, at least initially?
CB: Will Sliney. He’s done a lot of Star Wars stuff. He’s recently been working on the MacGuyver book for Image. This is his first big Marvel project, and he’s bringing his A-game to the pages I’ve seen so far!
