Interviews 

Kieron Gillen Charts A Journey Into Mystery [Interview]

By | March 7th, 2012
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

One of our favorite titles here at Multiversity is Marvel’s “Journey Into Mystery,” garnering several rave reviews. Whether we’re sharing the music that inspires the book or publishing long-winded raves for the book, we are more than happy to talk about “Journey Into Mystery” every chance we get, and we enjoy every opportunity we have to continuously sell you on the book.

Now, with “Exiled” looming in the distance, we thought it was quite a good time to once again ring the “JiM” bell, so we got in touch with one of our favorite writers and discuss the inner-workings of “Journey Into Mystery” and the future of the book. Believe us, it is quite informative: we cover everything from the opening “Fear Itself” tie-in, the current ‘Terrorism Myth’ arc and the upcoming ‘Manchester Gods’ arc, as well as a tease at an upcoming story with “The Mighty Thor’s” Matt Fraction and the future of “DOOM.”

Check behind the cut for our extensive chat with series writer Kieron Gillen, as well as a four-page unlettered preview.

Your two big books atMarvel are “Journey Into Mystery” and “Uncanny X-Men,” and while they’re not polaropposites, they’re very different books in terms of spectrum; one is on thefringe, one is really in the spotlight as the flagship X-Men title. What arethe major differences for you in how you approach the two titles?

They’re just such different books.  With “Uncanny” — and I’m about to paraphraseyour question back to you, but that’s what it is: as core a Marvel Universetitle as it could be. This is the X-Men going on heroic adventures, and godknows I’ve put enough spins on the actual subject, but its still fundamentallya superhero comic where they go off and have adventures. “Journey Into Mystery”is something which I’ve had to build from the ground up.
I don’t enormously change my methodology; I bring a slightdifference in tools to bear. With “Uncanny,” I’m working inside of a matrix ofwhat a lot of the other guys are doing, which brings its own joys really.“Uncanny X-Force” has been doing its own thing for quite a while now, but thefact that it has actually finished ‘the Dark Angel Saga’ means that some of theingredients essentially now get shuffled back into the X-Universe. Both me andJason have now taken bits of that and ran with it, which Rick also loves, soit’s the soft-crossoverness of it, which is right there. If you’re reading justone X-Men book, you’re getting one story, but if you’re reading all of themyou’re seeing all the tiny nods and the tapestry, if you will. It’s a centralthread.
With “JiM”, as I’ve said, it’s built from the ground up. Theonly person I really work with closely is (Matt) Fraction, and even then I’mbasically a “Thor” spin-off book that hasn’t been able to use Thor for thefirst fifteen issues. If you think about it, that’s really weird! I’ve usedThor in, like, two scenes — and after that a scene with him dying, and then scenes with him indreams. He’s still an important character in “JiM”, just not one I’ve had thechance to use because of the way continuity works.
That’s pretty much it. One is like being the lead part in alarger show, and the other is your off-Broadway, sort of underground hit.
With “Journey IntoMystery”, it’s somewhat the Asgardia sidebook to an extent — mainly in that itfeatures a lot of Asgardian characters in it and doesn’t have Thor as thecentral focus, but it’s more than that. In terms of scope, how do you view theentire “JiM” story — or rather, if there’s one thematic line to be driventhroughout the story, whether it’s the possible redemption of Loki or theevolution of mythology in general, what do you see it as?
The fundamental story at the heart of “JiM” is, literally,can the god of evil change? That’s the central story that runs through it. Ishe doomed to repeat himself, or can be he become someone else? Kid Loki isgenuinely lovable; people love that little kid! And if this was in any othermedia, if it was any other story, the books wouldn’t have its underlyingsadness. I think in our in culture, if you have this basic story — here’s thegod of evil and he’s been reincarnated, and he is going to basically try andnot become the god of evil again — if that was told in a movie, or told asanything else, you would assume he would make it. Our culture enjoys tellingstories about that. Conversely, we’re in the situation of writing in the MarvelUniverse, where there is the weight of continuity pressing down, and in someway everyone expects Loki to become evil. As much as he’s lovable, as much aspeople like him, they expect it to all go wrong, so people buy into his storyin a way they wouldn’t necessarily buy outside the Marvel Universe. It’s one ofthose very, very rare situations where the weight of commerce and fanexpectation works in the book’s favor.
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That’s the core story, though: can people change. Or rather,can this particular person change.
If “Mighty Thor” isthe book that takes the central focus and drives Thor forward in the ongoingsaga that Thor has always had, how do you feel that “JiM” stands as the worldbuilding around “Thor“?
“Journey Into Mystery” is nothing but an enormous blob ofideas. When I wrote “Thor”, I came into it quickly; I basically had so manytasks on me. It was a run that telescoped endlessly, so I never really had thechange to go in with a plan. I had the chance to react with my best instinctsand explore different areas that appealed to me. I’ve said this before, but I hadto come in, pretty much end JMS’ story in three issues, set it all up for“Siege”, run “Siege” where I couldn’t really write Thor because he was offdoing other stuff, and then immediately pull up another four issue story whichI had very little time to think about it and pretty much had to have happen ina one day period because Matt’s run started a couple days after the end of“Siege.” That’s a blitzkrieg, a hilarious roller coast of a mess. I didn’treally have a chance to do things in a considered way.
After that happened, I stopped, collapsed, and panted a bit,thinking, “Ok, what did I learn from that?” What worked, what didn’t work, whatsort of interesting unanswered questions… all that kind of stuff. All thoseinsights basically became the core of “Journey Into Mystery”. Sort of aroundthat period, I was approached by Ralph (Macchio), who was the editor at thetime, saying, “We’re thinking of doing a secondary “Thor” book. If you have anyideas for it, that’d be great,” and I put all of that in. What really workedwas “Seige: Loki.” That was probably the thing that really, really resonatedand worked better than anything else did. That was my grounding, and ‘the FinePrint’, the final arc, was kind of like “JiM” Year Zero in that effect where I setup the Disir and all these other characters.
But I was a little more interested in the ideas of what washappening when they weren’t bashing the shit out of each other. The traditionalThor story is: “The war has started. Here’s a big battle. Thor will hit the badguy. Thor wins.” What I was interested in exploring with “JiM” was the stuffbefore and after that; the stuff that is, essentially, in peace time, with thefundamental idea that there is a cold war going on and there has always been acold war going on. Writing it as a spy drama, but as fired through amythological filter. This idea of all the pantheons having a relationshipconstantly, which I set up in issue #6, the Mephisto issue, with the council ofgodheads and how they operate, and that’s still the wider picture of “JiM.” Ihadn’t actually read “Game of Thrones” at the time, but I’ve read it all now,and if I was relaunching “JiM”, I would’ve said it was “Game of Thrones” in theMarvel Universe with gods (and less mutilation and rape).
That’s what interested me: the politics of it all. But thenyou get to the Loki-ness of it. Loki fundamentally can’t solve problems likeThor solves problems. We talked about if Loki can change, but that’s the otherquestion — can Loki be Loki for different ends than we’ve previously seen him?Loki literally can’t hit stuff, especially without his magical power. He can’teven zap stuff! So if he’s going to solve problems, he essentially has to solveall his problems by being the trickster archetype, and that is a different wayof driving stories.
I was also interested in the literary basis of it. “Sandman”is a regular reference we get, and understandably so; “Sandman” in the MarvelUniverse is another way of describing “JiM”, but with a laugh track.
When I wrote the first ten issues of “JiM” tying into “FearItself”, it was designed to dovetail with the actual major arc of “Fear Itself”all the way, adding meaning and resonance and shade to it, while working byitself (I served a variety of masters). The way I always describe those firstten issues is, if “Fear Itself” is basically World War II, “Journey intoMystery” is the Enigma code. You can watch a film about the Enigma code withoutknowing anything but the bare shape of World War II, but the Enigma code stillhas a lot of fundamental meaning.
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Matt talked a little bit about this in the interview he didas part of the Axel-In-Charge column. He sort of mentioned we’re buildingtowards something big around Thor’s 50th. It’s quite hush-hush, butI can talk a bit about it. The one-liner I use is, “JiM” is the gods abstractlyin peace time, and “Thor” is the gods in war time. That’s kind of the way thesestories work. Abstractly, there’s a transition between peace time and war time,and there’s a way of getting a soft influence between the books in terms ofstories exploding from one to another.

Back during “FearItself”, you had basically described the book as the “Secret Avengers”, butsince then the original gang has broken up a bit. We’re still focusing somewhatstrictly on Loki as a solo entity, and less as a team. Now he’s workingalongside Daimon Hellstrom and ‘the Terrorism Myth.’ Was that a consciousdecision to bring it down to a Loki focus, or do you still want him workingwith other people?

It mixes up a bit, is the easiest way of putting it. Thequote-unquote classic “JiM” story in my head is “Loki recruits people for amission, they go on the mission, save the world maybe, maybe not.” Whateversaved actually means. So in the first story, it was the complete Dirty Dozen in terms of getting thesequestionable individuals and taking them to this really big task. With “TheTerrorism Myth,” it still kind of keeps that format; Loki still ends up workingwith somebody else towards a larger purpose — in this case, Hellstrom, Leah andThori, which is still a team of four. If we look forward at “Exiled”, it’s alittle bit different, but it includes the Disir, all the New Mutants, Hela,Thor, Sif, Tyr, the Warrior’s Three, Leah, Thori, and Mephisto’s in there as well.
Who Loki’s agents are will change quite regularly. If youlook forward to the next arc, which I’m currently calling “the Manchester Gods”(but that might change),Loki’s working with a load of people from Otherworld.You’ve got Arthur, you’ve got Captain Britain, you’ve got the Lady of the Lake,all of these archetypal British folklore figures. It mixes it up.
The first thing thatstrikes me when you say ‘the Manchester Gods’ is the rather famous Neil Gaimanbook, “American Gods.” Is this arc sort of a riff on that, or is the title sortof incidental?
It’s almost completely the opposite of “American Gods!” WhenI started to think about the larger structure of “JiM”, I was talking to afriend who said, “Isn’t that “American Gods,” Kieron?” And I thought, “Fuck, itis!” There’s a lot of deconstructioning nods towards “Sandman,” especially in‘the Terrorism Myth’, which is basically a Sandman analogue trying to take overthe world. If you take apart ‘the Terrorism Myth’, it’s basically a completeinversion of the first arc of “Sandman,” and there are a lot of “Sandman” jokesin there. Remember the Fear Lords? I pretty much analogized all of the FearLords to be one of the Endless. There are a lot of meta-gags there.
With “the Manchester Gods”, it doesn’t work like that. It’sone of those places where I’ve gone quite out of the way to make it clear thatI’m talking about something else, which will make immediate and obvious sensethe second any of the artwork appears. I don’t want to spoil it too much, butit’s the second of my big stories riffing on the idea of the emergence ofwhatever the 19th century was. Obviously the other half is‘Sinister’ (from “Uncanny X-Men”) and ‘Sinister’ is a very hard critique, but‘Manchester Gods’ is something else.
The weird thing about “JiM” is there is lots of weirdoedipal stuff going on. As I’ve already said, ‘the Terrorism Myth’ is a jokeypiss-take of “Sandman” as well as everything else it is. It’s doing a kind ofnod and wink, but in a very affectionate and loving way. ‘Manchester Gods’ isattacking a load of other things in it’s own Loki-esque way. It’s quite playfully rebellious, and I hope it comes across well, because I really hate books thatare dialectically opposed to the forebears, and it’s one of my least favoritetraits in some creators. I hope that the fact that everything I am doing issort of a nod and a wink makes it a bit more affectionate than that, butthere’s certainly an element of – say – picking a fight with Alan Moore, or picking a fight withquite a few things in ‘Manchester Gods.’
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With ‘Exiled’, thebig crossover between “Journey into Mystery” and “New Mutants”,  this is the execution of many seedsthat have  been placed over timefor you, at least as far back as “Siege”, correct?
Definitely. It’s weird… the idea of ‘Exiled’ came completelyfrom the editorial team, who sort of saw all these connections and thensuggested to me, Dan and Andy, “Fancy doing a crossover? Quick, one month, fiveissues, intro issue, two issues each, boof!” And we literally got together in acoffee shop in New York and talked nonsense for an hour, then in the last fiveminutes worked out what we were going to do. It’s just very easy to do acrossover between two books that have so much natural connective tissue(connective tissue is one of those phrases we writers like to say, and anythingwriters say a lot makes me put question marks behind it).
Even during “Fear Itself,” I had talked to Dan and Andy inthe X-Office to make sure that what I was doing in Hel and Hell in “Fear Itself”didn’t blow up what they were doing in Hell and Hel. If you’re reading allthose books, you can see how they tie together. Essentially what happens in“Fear Itself: New Mutants” becomes a micro-twist in issue #5 in “JiM”, in termsof how all that running around and deal making was actually bullshit becausethere was a bigger problem going on which no one knew about. So they’re alreadypart of the cast, and the second the idea was introduced, then we startedbuilding something consciously. The first conscious move was the Helpuppy inissue #632, where Dan and Andy said, “Oh, give us a Helpuppy! That soundscool!”, and of course that is weirdly the inciting incident of the wholecrossover — the Helpuppy being delivered.
But yes, we’re going back to Hela’s Valkyrie thing withDani, which I had picked up from what Matt was doing in “Uncanny”, the Disirwhich first appeared in the “New Mutants” issue of “Siege” and “Siege: Loki.”

In terms of thecreation of the Helpuppy’s and Thori specifically, I don’t want to put words inyour mouth but did you do this specifically so that people had a reason to getgiddy or mushy over an adorable animal? The common fan reaction I see is the“Squee”, if you will.

Oh, it’s hilarious. But no, it was actually a later idea. Itkind of comes from a couple of things. One is, as Laurenn McCubbin, an artistfriend of mine, said, “It’s pretty much your love letter to your wife, isn’tit? “My wife is an enormous dog fan, we’re just about to get a dog, she’s thewoman who is on the dog tumblrs and she’s occasionally forwarding me picturesof cute dogs. That was absolutely part of it, just thinking about dogs a lot,in the same way that when I was getting married and worried about my Marvelcontract, I did ‘the Fine Print’, a story about going to Hell and eternal damnationvia contract. Now I’m thinking a lot about dogs, so I did a story about dogs! But I fully admit that I was aware that people on tumblr would flip over it, sobless them.
The other part of it was killing of Helwolf, his dad. I’vesaid before that Kid Loki was a character that surprised me, and I didn’trealize how compelling Kid Loki was going to be until I actually literallystarted writing him, and Helwolf is a little bit like that. When I startedwriting him, I knew I was going to kill him. He was dead by issue #5. When Iwas writing him, though, he became an agreeable bastard. There’s quotes of AlanMoore talking about Rorschach, and he meant for people to hate him. The problemwith Rorschach is he’s a little bit too charismatic, and people end up —despite the fact that the guy is a monster, and everything knows he’s a monster— there’s something really interesting in him. With Helwolf, the cheerful needto eat everything, “I’m probably going to hump your leg, then rip your leg offand eat you”… that’s quite adorable in it’s own way!
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Even before people said how much they liked Helwolf, I wasaware that they were liking him perhaps more than I wanted them to because soonLoki’s going to kill him. When Loki killed him, he was rather nice and peoplerather liked him, so I wish I could bring Helwolf back, you know? And Thori wasmy solution! The idea struck me after I’d already written the first issue of‘the Terrorism Myth’, which was originally going to be #632. I was in Singaporeand immediately e-mailed my editor and said, “Quickly, quickly, put anotherissue in here.”
We’d also just finished a ten issue story that was part of acrossover. I wanted a clean one-off issue that people can pick up which wouldintroduce everything about “JiM.” The thing with the Helpuppies allowed us togo through the entire cast, and more importantly that structure, and mostimportantly to state the theme of the book: Thori is literally the puppy thateveryone thinks is evil, but can he change? That was what made what is a verysappy Christmas story something a little darker, because Loki is very aware ashe is to everyone else, he has that relationship with the puppy now.
It was one of those rare instances where everything sort ofcame together and it worked very well. And when I say it worked really well, Imeant it worked exactly as I wanted it to. It’s one of my favorite issues ofthe series.
Back to ‘Exiled’,throughout the “Fear Itself” arc of “JiM”, there were certain moments where youwere definitely working up to a larger picture. If “Exiled” is all of thesedifferent elements colliding, is the crossover just how you’ve chosen to do itnow, or was this a story that always would have happened and the crossover justhelps it along?
It’s pretty much the latter. With “JiM”, there are morestories around then I will be able to tell during the run, and that was alwaysgoing to be true unless it was an enormous success. In what was a realistic runof “JiM”, some stories probably weren’t going to fit in, and I sort ofsuspected the actual “real” story of the Disir would be one of them. So thiswas a great excuse as I was kind of saving it for a rainy day, and the factthat this came up made me realize we could do it now and it allows me to do this,this and this. It’s basically a situation of where a crossover allowed me to doa story that I probably wouldn’t have written elsewhere. God bless Dan andAndy, but they’re basically letting me put what is quite an emotional story over at the heart of the crossover, and I’m happy they’ve given me the chance to tell it.
I often talk a bit about “JiM” having a raconteur structure.It’s like a guy who has all these stories and is going to tell them and hemight go off on an anecdote, but he will circle and go back to his point. Thisis one of the stories essentially that I had and had set-up, and when people goback they’ll see it. Our perceptions of the Disir have changed; we literallymet them as monsters who just wanted to eat souls. Literally, they werefrenzied creatures. What they became is something increasingly tragic until youget to the point where Loki says, “How come I get a second chance and theydon’t?” which is the fundamental difference. But at the same time they’re badguys, and they’re bad guys in lots of different ways.
So I’m very glad to get the chance to tell this story. It’sone of my favorites. What makes me most pleased is, I follow a lot stuff onlineand occasionally people will speculate, and occasional people will “get” a plotthat I’m heading towards, which is good because if no-one managed to guess anything at all, it’d seem like I’mpulling it all out of my ass. I don’t think anyone has spotted what I’m doinghere, which I’m quite gratified by, because I’m also sure it’s not one wherepeople will think, “Oh, that’s come out of nowhere.” They’ll get it.
You’ve mentioned thatthe Disir is a large focus of ‘Exiled’, but are they basically both the goodand the bad guys, so to say?
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Oh, I’d say they’re definitely the bad guys. I think theeasiest way to say it is that they’re the bad guys. This is a part of theirstory which has not been told, and that’s the initial inciting incident in thefirst issue, which leads to the situation which ‘Exiled’ runs off. ‘Exiled’ isthe title pretty much everyone is exiled; the story of the Disir is that theywere exiled from Asgard, and all the characters in their way are exiledthroughout. It wasn’t my title, actually, but it works really well.
I don’t want to say too much about it, but it is rarely assimple as that guy is the bad guy. People have reasons for doing what they’redoing. Except Mephisto. He’s just a wanker.

That actually leadsdirectly into the next question I had, about Mephisto — with “New Mutants”, werecently had an issue all about Mephisto. You did the same thing in “Journeyinto Mystery” with the ‘devil walks into a bar’ issue, but with “New Mutants” wehad ‘devil goes on a date and turns out to be kind of a sweetheart.’ Theimpression that I get is that these differences in characterization are onpurpose, but if Mephisto is one of the villains of the story, how do youbalance writing a crossover with a book where Mephisto isn’t a villain?

Mephisto is complicated. A lot of this is probably better toask Dan and Andy about, because that is very much their area, but with what Ido with Mephisto… when I look all the way back to “Seige: Loki”, Jamie and I werebasically thinking of Hela and Loki and Mephisto as basically rockstars. As in,they’re rockstars backstage, chatting, and that’s kind of how the story works.Loki is pretty much Bowie — he’s got the androgyny, the eye-liner and nailvarnish. Hela is pretty much Lady Gaga — she turns up with the costumes.  Mephisto is pretty much the RollingStones. All of the Rolling Stones, rolled into one, in that sort of “Sympathyfor the Devil” decadent-ness, with great sideburns.
When I was reading “The Dark Stuff, “Nick Kent’s series ofinterviews, there’s a part with anecdotes in there about Mick Jagger. MickJagger fundamentally does the accent of whoever he’s talking to unconsciously;this is what they say, anyway. Whoever he’s talking to, he becomes a bit morelike them, and the anecdote uses him speaking with three different guys withcompletely different accents and he’s pretending to be Jamaican and then he’spretending to be Scottish, then he’s pretending he’s from New York in the sameconversation. It’s that weird MPDness, and I’ve kind of put that in myMehpisto, in that Mephisto lies. He’s the father of lies. You seem him talkingto the bartender and he’s quite casual; he’s talking slang, he’s talking aboutpretzels, and if he’s talking to Hela, he’s amping it up a bit. He’s becomingmore of the “I’m the Lord of Hellfire” character. That’s Mephisto for me; hehas to lie to be.
So my personal take on him and the date is, is that his trueself, or is that the devil lying? The devil lies. It’s what he does! But it’snot him lying to get something, he’s just lying because that’s who Mephisto is.Maybe that’s part of the true self of him. Maybe it’s not his true self. Maybethere is no true self! Mephisto is complicated and monstrous in ways which I thinkeven Loki would be lost at. So that’s personal of squaring the circle there, asin “Just because because he’s acting like this to one person — and he can beacting like this completely genuinely — doesn’t mean his other interactionswith someone else are ingenuine, because everything about him is ingenuine.”He’s a devil!
Looking forward, andI know you’ve briefly talked about this before, but you’ve stated that “Journeyinto Mystery” does have an end point (I believe after about thirty issues orso). There are all of these seeds all over the place, some that you admit thatyou’ll get to and some you won’t, but I think there is a very clear — and Ihope it is intentional — Walt Simonson influence in your work; specifically inthe “Fear Itself” arc, the return of Surtur and the return of “DOOM.” If we’relooking at the “JiM” run as a whole, and we see that this is how it beginsduring “Fear Itself”, is it fair to assume that this is where the series willbe heading?
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That’s an interesting argument. Not taking away from anyoneelse, I think Simonson’s is the greatest run on “Thor.” I think that’ssomething most people would agree to, and I certainly would as well. It’s whatI read when I was young, and I have the collected edition about a meter awayfrom where I’m sitting in my office. I was completely doing that call back to “DOOM.”I don’t do many callbacks in terms of “Thor” history; Matt is actually muchbetter at the calls to real myths than me, so that callback to Surtur — Especiallybecause those captions are written in a very clipped style, and I quite liked theidea of intentionally doing the “DOOM” in tiny letters (as opposed to the enormous graphic element of Simonson). At one point, I wasgenuinely considering for the next twenty issues ending every issue with apanel of him hammering away. Walt does it for 12 issues, I’m going to do it forthirty! — I think it’s safe to say it is probably going to be important.
I say “JiM” is going to be about thirty issues. That was myinitial idea, and if it is thirty issues long, the first ten issues were “FearItself” tie-ins. That means that whatever happened in the “Fear Itself” issues isgoing to have to be important. That’s just how longform narratives work, justbecause so much emotional effort has been input to influence this, it all fallsout from there. In some ways, it turns this into the longest crossover of anycomic ever, which I’m kind of fine with. I want to be the best comic booktie-in of all time!
But in a real way, all the things that Loki did in thatfirst arc are going to come back and haunt him. In a true trickster narrative,that’s how it all works; you set up traps and then some things you overlook. Inthe final issue of the “Fear Itself” tie-ins, you have the bit where Loki istalking to Leah, and Loki says, “The whole plan would not have worked if thegoats had not gone home, and the goats went home by themselves instead ofstaying where they should. If they didn’t disobey me randomly by being goats,everything I did would’ve fallen apart,” and that’s it! That’s Loki — no matterhow good he is, he’s also getting lucky, and the luck has to break once ortwice for it to all fall apart.
So to be big and obvious, I ended that first essential actof “JiM” with that image of Surtur in Hel starting to work on something. That’sgoing to come back and bite him in the ass. There’s no way I would not touchthat. Actually, that’s not quite true. If they cancelled me and I had fourissues left, I would not touch that! But in the ideal “JiM” story, yes, Surturwill become heavily involved at some point.

To wrap up, and thisone is a bit of a reader question and slightly off track, but does TomHiddleston’s performance as Loki influence you in any way?
Oh, definitely! There is a really good article, and Icompletely forget which critic did it, about Morrison’s run on the X-Men. (Editor’s note: we have since found the article; it is “Why Grant Morrison’s Magneto Sucks” by Geoff Klock) Hebasically argued that Morrison’s take on Magneto was basically “stupid oldman”, and he argued it convincingly and he did it well, but he completelymisunderstood how powerful the archetype of the movie Magneto’s performance was.This was such a definitive performance and it created Magneto in the mind ofthe public, so they just didn’t buy his take. In the same way, Loki will nolonger be able to go back to being a cackling old man. Let’s say I was kickedoff the book tomorrow, and someone came on and basically said, “Ok, we’remaking Loki evil immediately.” If they did that, I don’t think they’d go backto “old ugly guy.” I think fundamentally Loki is someone who is conflicted, andis now preferred in the slightly hot, good-looking way, shall we say?
Hiddleston kind of warped the people’s perception of Loki ina way that will essentially mean that, even if I’m kicked off the book, we’renever going to have the old Loki. What I most like about it is that is what Iwas kind of doing anyway. Tom Hiddleston’s really good, and when I wrote“Siege: Loki” — not that he’s completely doing a Bowie take or anything — but alot of artists drew Loki quite old. We made him quite younger looking, quite alot younger looking.
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 So that’sdefinitely there, and an awareness of what people find interesting about hisperformance is very much what I find interesting about Loki as well. I mean,wasn’t that great in the cinema when you had that weird realization that nobodyapart from those that read “Thor” knows that Loki’s a traitor, so when Lokibetrayed Thor there was genuinely a gasp. Anybody reading comics would’ve said“duh,” but we must not forget the power of that compelling moment because theybought the fraternalness of it and the fundamental intelligence of Tom’sperformance. He’s not a cackling monster, he’s a man with needs and all thatgreat stuff.
He’s not a direct influence because I was doing thisbefore “Thor” happened, but I was very pleased with that happen and seeing thattake on the character become the culturally dominant one, because that’s theway I write him. You see people who come from the movie who go into “Journeyinto Mystery” and even though it’s Kid Loki, they get it. They can see how thatlinks to this other character they have an understanding of from seeing themovie. He’s a complicated and conflicted guy, even if he’s 12 or 13.
I think I remember,back when “Thor” came out, you said something along the lines of your onlycomplaint being that Loki was too tall.
Yes! That Loki’s much too old! 

Matthew Meylikhov

Once upon a time, Matthew Meylikhov became the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Multiversity Comics, where he was known for his beard and fondness for cats. Then he became only one of those things. Now, if you listen really carefully at night, you may still hear from whispers on the wind a faint voice saying, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not as bad as everyone says it issss."

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