While on the scene at SDCC, in between the time spent soaking in the general fever dream feeling of being inside of that insane event, I trekked across the city away from the convention in search of something else — something fearless, something strong-willed and noble… something Valiant. In a well-decorated, cozy little condo away from the convention hall, Valiant made their homebase, full of drinks and Guitar Hero controllers and, most importantly, comics.
See, San Diego Comic-Con is a different beast all together. If you don’t manage it correctly, you end up being swallowed up by the chaos that it creates. So when Valiant offered an invitation to come by their little off-site home and chat with Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt, I could hardly refuse.
Because this was special. Everyone in the comics world knows about the undying bromance between Lemire and Kindt. Two creators that came up in the indie comics scene, both seeing success at Top Shelf before moving out to various different publishing homes, Lemire and Kindt have worked together in the past, shared characters, laughs, good times and more.
And now the two are taking on one of their biggest projects, that of creating the second event at Valiant with “The Valiant,” a four-issue series that has a few lofty goals: to bring new readers in at the ground floor, to pull most if not all of the threads and characters in the Valiant Universe together, and to pave the way for a new era in Valiant’s history. Lemire and Kindt are certainly talented storytellers, and through the power of friendship with Paolo Rivera at their side, the sky is the limit.
Read on for my chat with Lemire and Kindt from the cozy Valiant condo as we talk about their working relationship, their interest in Valiant, working with Rivera and more.
Can you give me a bit of a primer on how the project came about?
Matt Kindt: I don’t remember where we were, but I remember being at Emerald City this year and just talking about working on something together. I was telling Jeff how great Valiant was, and then I’m not sure what happened after that. [Laughs]
Jeff Lemire: We’d been talking since last summer, I think, about the possibility of me working with Matt on something at Valiant. I think originally it was just going to be a fun, one-issue stand-alone thing that would be a fun, shoot-em-up Bloodshot story. He’d write some scenes and I’d draw them and vice versa; just something fun and short. And then it kind of grew. I kind of became a bit more invested in what Valiant was doing because Matt and some of my other friends like Josh Dysart and Rob Vendetti had been working there. I follow all their work and started to get really into this universe, I was enjoying what they were doing, so it became a bigger thing where I wanted to become a part of what Valiant was doing. We wanted to tell a bigger, more important story for the universe.
MK: Yeah, instead of just doing a one-shot, semi-throwaway. We wanted to do something that actually mattered, you know?
And you’ve already done a couple things at Valiant, Matt, because you started that zero issue last year of “Bloodshot,” now “Unity” and “Rai,” and Jeff, you actually did that variant cover as well.
JL: Right, the “Harbinger” variant cover. And Matt at that point was already working on two books for Valiant.
MK: Right, “Rai” and “Unity.” I just converted you.
JL: Rob and Matt and Josh were friends, and they just kept telling me how great it was to work with these guys. The characters seemed really cool. It just seemed like a fun thing to be a part of. So it grew from there and it grew into what has become “The Valiant.”
So obviously you guys have done work with rebooting superhero universes, and Valiant is certainly no exception. With something with the scope as big as “The Valiant,” how do you find approaching it on this bigger scale, this wider net and such dire straits?
JL: Well, it didn’t start off as a huge, grand thing. It started off as a much smaller, more intimate story about Bloodshot and the Geomancer, Kay McHenry. So it was really just going to be about those two characters; we started with this small, human story and built everything around that. It has a strong, emotional core and a rather simple through-line. The Geomancer, since she’s central to it, her mythology and history plays into it, and Valiant has so many immortal characters that the story just sort of became bigger.
Continued belowMK: That’s why Eternal Warrior became an easy character to use to get us into the story, and I think neither one of us has interest in telling a story that’s 100 characters fighting each other. But starting with this core story of three characters and then pulling back to a bigger story around them before circling back around to that smaller story is what can make a big event book interesting.
You’ve done work with Valiant’s Unity team. What do you find are the main differences between a book like that, which is an ongoing but still has that team dynamic, versus “The Valiant,” which still has a team to it but in a different size, in a different space?
MK: Yeah, it’s totally different to me. I feel like “The Valiant” is a self-contained story, something with a beginning, middle and end, whereas “Unity” is way more open-ended. I can float characters in and out and then tell small stories that build on each other.
JL: “Unity” is a team superhero book, whereas with “The Valiant,” it’s not so much a team as it is just everyone being involved with this story. It’s not about them coming together as a team and fighting this threat this month.
MK: So we’ll have everyone in it, but not as one big team that fights something necessarily. [Laughs]
This also picks up threads from other books too, from what I understand. The Eternal Warrior’s series ended, but his story picks up again here. Same with Archer and Armstrong.
JL: And Kay McHenry has been in “Archer and Armstrong”, our Geomancer, so it really picks up threads other people started. We kind of take all these characters and evolve them to the next step.
MK: I think that’s actually where we started, was with Geomancer and Kay as a character. She’s an interesting character that just didn’t get enough screentime in the books. So doing a story that focused on her, brought her forward and made her interesting was what attracted me to do this.
JL: And then we wanted to use the character that’s least like her, and that was Bloodshot, you know? Because Kay is this very human character, she has a lot of flaws and she’s very human, and her powers and mythology is very connected to Earth and nature. Then you have Bloodshot, who is the most disconnected from nature and humanity. He’s a living machine, you know? Putting those two characters together and seeing how they change one another became interesting to us.
This is sort of the second big Valiant event, with the other being “Armor Hunters” going on right now. With Valiant being the up and comer of the superhero publishers, how does it feel to do the second big event/mainstay book for the publisher?
JL: Oh, it’s great. I think we all feel — Josh and Matt and Rob, everyone working on the books — feels like we’re still on the ground floor, where the characters are now established and now we get to build a world, build this shared universe. It’s like being at Marvel in the late 60s, early 70s. We’re at the ground floor for something that hopefully, for decades to come, will become something big. That’s pretty exciting.
MK: And you’re surrounded by creators who you’re already friends with already, or you already love their work. You’re all brainstorming, building a universe.
JL: You’re not just re-hashing old events, old ideas. You’re coming up with new stuff and building new things that people will re-hash ten years from now. [Laughs] If we do it right.
MK: Ideally, yeah. [Laughs]
That’s a great point, because what is neat about Valiant is that these are all old characters. Rai, for example, is from the 90s, as most of these characters are. But you can re-do them to feel completely brand new since there are no limits, no rules. Same with Kay. Are there other characters that you guys want to do this with, whether in this series or just in general?
JL: There are definitely a lot of characters I see a lot of potential with, that I want to work on after this. We’ll see how that goes.
Continued belowMK: That’s the beauty of doing “Unity” for me. I have a core group of three, and I can rotate in whoever I want. I get to sort of pick somebody and just add them into the story, play with them for a while and move on. There are a bunch of other characters I’d still like to get my hands on.
Lets talk about Paolo Rivera’s work as well. I understand he did a lot of design work for characters in this series. You guys are both artists; did you work with him on that at all?
JL: Not really. We were pretty hands off. We both revere Paolo’s stuff, he’s so fantastic, and when we first started coming up with what the story would be and talking about who could be the artist, his name came up and he was the number one choice. If we could get him, it would be incredible, right? Matt and I are both writers and artists, so we approach things as cartoonists where story comes first over draftsmanship. I think with Paolo, we saw someone who was a kindred spirit. He’s so accomplished as a storyteller. We just knew right away that he would just kill this, so we stayed pretty hands off. We have too much respect for what he does.
MK: He’s so good, you just want to stay out of his way. With everything, he just expanded on things we had in the script and just took it further. It was amazing. You just stay out of his way, that’s the best thing to do.
And this is his first big superhero-style book in a while, since he had retired from that for a while.
JL: I never thought we’d get him to do this, but it’s so cool. I’m a fan of his for sure.
MK: Same.
JL: The year when he was first working on “Daredevil” was when I was first working on “Animal Man,” and I remember we were nominated for all the awards against each other so I hated him. But now I love him, because they won everything and now we get to work together.
MK: Now we can all win together. [Laughs]
So you guys were saying that you approach the book as cartoonists firsts, but can you explain how that influences your writing the series for another artist?
JL: I just meant that, well, I think we approach our art through the view of the storytelling coming first. There are certain artists who clearly think the creation of a pretty image comes before executing a story or communicating your ideas. As artists ourselves, the storytelling always comes first before a pretty picture.
MK: That’s always the difference for an illustrator and a cartoonist. An illustrator can draw well and show a nice image, but a cartoonist is able to tell the story panel to panel. That’s what Paolo is great at, and we think about storytelling that way too, just because usually we have to draw what we write. So we go in writing for the artist, which is usually us, but I think it’s easier then for an artist like Paolo to take our script and then make it really work.
And in terms of something like “The Valiant,” is there anything in that you tend to think of differently? Because, as you said, it’s not a team book like you write with “Unity”, but it’s something with a different size or magnitude to it. Are there different things you have to take into consideration when doing this book, and how you want it to fit into the shared Valiant universe?
JL: It’s interesting, I think. A key goal for the book for all of us was for it to be an entry point to the Valiant universe for people who hadn’t read anything yet. People who may have seen stuff or heard about Valiant, this can be the perfect book that they can pick up; it’s self-contained, you don’t have to buy a whole bunch of spin-offs or tie-ins to get the whole story — you buy four comic books, get a complete story, and be introduced to every character. But then, taking that into consideration, you want to do that in a way that isn’t heavy on exposition, you know? “Bloodshot is this.” You have to give glimpses, you tease, you give enough information that they know what’s going on but they want to then go find more.
Continued belowMK: To me, it’s almost like a ride. You’re on this ride, the ride is the story with Geomancer and Bloodshot and the Eternal Warrior, and then you see the texture of the whole universe go by. It’s part of the story, but hopefully you think, “Wow, that’s amazing. I want to see more of this or that.” I think that’s sort of how the story feels to me.
In terms of writing together, how have you found that balance? Are there characters that you take on more than the other, or —
MK: Oh, yeah, it’s a total power struggle.
JL: I’m not allowed to write Ninjak. [Laughs] That’s the only rule. He loves Ninjak. Which is fine.
I can’t blame you there.
MK: He’s the best.
JL: I wouldn’t know. [Laughs] Yeah, it’s very natural. Matt and I have known each other for almost ten years. We both did indie comics and came up that way. Worked at Top Shelf, worked at DC for a bit. We’ve known each other for so long that it’s a very natural friendship, even when we first met. Writing is almost like that. It’s not like we sit down and come up with a story and do work. We just start talking and before we know it we have a story.
MK: We’re on the same wavelength in that way. We like the same things, we like the same kind of story. We like the same kind of storytelling. To me it’s just easy. Some people, you like the same thing but you don’t like it for the same reason. I think we do. It’s a huge difference.
JL: We talked the whole story through together. We came up with everything and talked about it so we knew what was going to happen, and then we just divided it up “Ok, you write this scene and I’ll write that scene.” It was very natural. If I hear him getting excited about certain scenes then, OK, he’ll write that one. There’s no rules like that.
MK: And you get all the action scenes in the first issue and I get all the ones in the second.
And Matt, as someone who has worked at Valiant for a while now, are there characters you find you gravitate towards?
JL: Ninjak.
MK: [Laughs] Yeah, Ninjak. He has everything. He has the best gadgets, he’s the coolest. He’s a ninja and a spy, which is the two best things put together when you’re twelve years old. That’s what I wanted to be, both of those.
JL: I wanted to be a soulless killing machine, that’s why I gravitate towards Bloodshot. [Laughs]
MK: And here you are, living the dream! But, yeah, Ninjak is great. Eternal Warrior, I love him because of the amount of story you can tell. You can pick any time period and have him in it and tell any story. I think he’s another one that I really like.
JL: I gravitated towards Bloodshot right away. I’ve always had a thing for those tough guy archetypes. The Punisher, Bloodshot, even when I did “Sweet Tooth,” the character of Jeppard was very much a Bloodshot or Frank Castle type. I just wanted to do a really cool like that. But I also saw a lot of potential in Bloodshot that maybe hadn’t been realized? I remember feeling like I had a lot of personal connection to the character; he’s very detached, doesn’t have a lot of humanity to him, and I thought that was something I could bring as one of my strengths. I felt like there was potential there that I could tap into.
I also realize that we’ve gone this whole time without bringing up the villain of the series, who is also an older Eternal Warrior villain.
JL: Right, the Immortal Enemy. He’s making his Valiant debut in “The Valiant.” He’s very much the counter-point to Gilad, and to Kay really. Gilad must protect the Geomancer and the Immortal Enemy must destroy her, so yeah, he’s a pretty terrifying character.
MK: It was funny too, because I don’t think we ever wanted to get him in the series?
Continued belowJL: No, I think we came up with the villain and realized it could be the Immortal Enemy.
MK: It was one of those things where you realize it should be him, just because of the world we were writing. It ended up being a perfect fit.
So you’d already created a villain for the book?
JL: I think we’d written the first issue by the time we realized it should be the Immortal Enemy, yeah.
Did you have to go back and tweak things?
JL: Not really. It was more of just calling him that instead of calling him something else. [Laughs] It just made so much sense that, yeah.
MK: He was called the Immortal Adversary. [Laughs]
