Living up to it’s name, the new company, Artists, Writers, and Artisans (AWA) is launching their own superhero universe, a term that’s, perhaps, a poor descriptor the genre. Keeping things simple to start, they’re beginning with one title among their four: “The Resistance,” a six-issue miniseries by J. Michael Straczynski, Mike Deodato, Frank Martin, and Sal Cipriano with covers by Razzah. Described as a modern book for a modern world, we had the pleasure of chatting with J. Michael Straczynski and Mike Deodato about the book, JMS’s return to comics, and challenging assumptions about supers.
It’s been a while since the two of you have worked together on a book but reading issue one feels like you’ve been constant collaborators since. Was getting back into a flow with each other as effortless as it looks?
J. Michael Straczynski: Because I have the grace and social skills of a feral raccoon, there’s not a lot of interaction between me and other people. I write the script, give it to my editor, who sends it to the artist, who then goes off to do his or her thing.
Here’s the thing: when I run a TV series, I look for directors who share my vision for what the project should look like. Once I find that person, I get out of their way and trust them to do something amazing. As a creative person myself, the highest compliment, and the best gift I can receive is for whoever’s above me to just leave me the frick alone and let me do what they hired me to do. If I go off the beam, sure, reel me back in, but otherwise, let me have the freedom to follow my instincts. I take that same approach with the directors I hire and the artists I work with.
Mike was the best person for this book, his artistic sensibilities line up right with my own on this project, so once he was brought on, the most important part of the job was one. After that, as noted above, my task was to leave him the frick alone. When the art for each book is done, I may have a comment here and there, mainly noting some things for story reasons that need to be emphasized or reconsidered, but other than that, I don’t bug him. I trust him to do something amazing, and that’s what he’s done with this book.
Mike Deodato: I have always delivered my best when I am inspired by the story. JMS is one of the best writers I know, so…
[The creative process] was similar to most of my collaborations before: Less talking and more action. He did the writing, I did the visuals and, because we are the best on what we do and fans of each other’s work, the result was as good as we were inside each other’s minds.“The Resistance” has been described as a superhero universe that reflects today in the same way DC and Marvel reflected the todays of the past. Did this ethos drive the decision to focus more on the world, and the small human moments within, rather than the characters in issue one to better situate the reader?
JMS: The six-issue series goes from the broad to the specific; it starts by giving the reader this massive panorama of a story unfolding on a global scale, punctuated with strong character moments of people we’ll meet in more detail the deeper we go into the story. The book becomes increasingly personal with each issue while retaining the larger stakes. It’s a ridiculously hard dance to dance; you want to keep the big issues on the table while starting to drill down into individual stories.
There’s no question that on a cultural basis, we live in a much more global world in 2020 than we did in the 40s/50s when DC was on the rise, or even the 60s, when Marvel was hitting its stride, and this book reflects that reality. It also sheds a lot of the tropes of traditional superhero storytelling: a character wearing this symbol fights a character wearing that symbol (or teams up with a character wearing this other symbol) over and over because that’s what those characters wearing those symbols do. There’s a buttload of action in “The Resistance,” but it generally comes out of a more individualized, personal agenda (or reaction) to a given situation.
Continued belowThe world created by The Resistance is one where there are now somewhere in the vicinity of ten million people (survivors of a genetic plague) who have extraordinary powers and abilities. They come from every stratum of society: university students, short-order cooks, cops, businessmen, teachers, hustlers, creeps, the lost, the thrown-away, the discarded and the lauded. They’re not going to put on costumes and go fight bad guys. And while they figure out what they do want to do, every government in the world is trying to figure out what to do about them…and a lot of it ain’t great.
MD: I think this is exactly were the strength of JMS writing resides: the focus more on the character than over the plot. The emotion he puts on evry story he tells is what makes the reading experience so rich and satisfactory.
There’s a lot of devastation in the comic and, it may seem like a silly question but, why is this aspect vital to the story you wanted to tell? Was it a replication of modern fears or, as I suspect, something deeper?
JMS: I wanted to make the reader feel what it is to have the human race on the verge of extinction, not just to be told about it. That meant diving into the specifics, the fear and the terror and the impending abyss. Four hundred million humans died in the Great Death over just a few months…that’s just a number until and unless you spend the time to really illustrate that. And going forward, that fear, and the possibility of a return of the virus fuels extraordinary political realignments around the world, and pushes people to wonder why exactly so many of the survivors have powers…the paranoia of “why did you survive and not me, and why exactly were you given those abilities and who’s responsible and what do you think you’re supposed to be doing with them and who are you really working for, pal?”
MD: In the art side, I wanted to make clear how deep was the impact of those catastrophic events to humankind.
You’re no stranger to playing with large scale superhero creation, Straczynski, most notably doing so in “Rising Stars” and with revamping the Squadron Supreme in “Supreme Power.” What is it about the formative events of heroes that attracts you to these projects, seeing as this is your return to comics after ending Joe’s Comics?
JMS: Lin Yutang once wrote, “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” This also goes to nature vs. nurture. How we come into the world, how we are taught to see that world, has a profound effect on how we move forward. How someone comes by powers is crucial to deciding what they intend to do with them. So that’s fertile ground for storytelling.
But I’d also like to go back to your question for a moment. You described “the formative events of heroes.” That’s the paradigm I wanted to address here. Imagine for a moment that the year Ford Model T’s first appear on the road, we take the position that everyone who gets a car is either a Hero or a Villain, a Cop or a Crook. You and I both know that’s a silly proposition. But that’s exactly how powers are viewed for the most part: you get a power and you’re immediately a Hero or a Bad Guy. “The formative events of heroes.” So we want to go a bit beyond that paradigm to see what’s on the other side. That’s not to say that the other paradigm is better or worse, that would be foolish and arrogant, only to say “let’s look over here and see what it looks like.” As the optometrist says during an exam, “Better like this or better like this?” No right or wrong here, just interesting questions that lead us in unexpected directions.
What aspects of the modern superhero genre did you most want to play with, comment on, lean into or discard when grounding “The Resistance” in today’s culture, fears and hopes?
JMS: See above. But notice, again: “superHERO genre.” Black and white. Binary. One of the things about our modern culture is that we’ve come to understand that binary choices are not all that exists, and most attempts to create binary choices involve encouraging false assumptions of false choices. That doesn’t mean you have your characters sitting around using their powers to reheat a cup of coffee. Again, that would be silly. There has to be action, and a lot of it, to justify a book in a visual medium. But the ways we get into those stories can be far more personal, more varied and explore different kinds of storytelling.
Continued belowTake, for instance, “MOTHS,” the next book up in this shared universe after The Resistance. These are people with latent powers which, once awakened, take on various forms with one common result: they have only six months in which to live. Why would someone awaken their powers if they knew, without doubt, that it meant having just six months to live? Would you do it for power? For money? For revenge? As performance art? To create something beautiful? What would matter enough to you, individually, to take that step? The answers don’t fit in the hero/bad guy matrix, but will be profoundly important to those involved and, we hope, to the readers.
Mike, coming off of a lot of Marvel books, and your Dark Horse project “Berserker Unbound,” have you found “The Resistance” to be a different sort of world to create and render?
MD: Yes, completely different, new and challenging. That was the main reason I felt so attracted by the project.
Finally, what sorts of powers can we expect to see and, if you can say, what power sets do you find the most interesting to interrogate and place in characters’ hands?
JMS: Most of the powers fall into the traditional categories, because there’s only so much you can do with the human body, but there are a few that are a bit unusual. I’d rather let those come out in the story than here. For me, it’s less about “what’s this person’s cool power?” than it’s about “what is this person going to DO with this power, why, and what does it mean to them and to whoever might want to stop them?”
When I co-created Sense8 for Netflix, the goal was to tell a very personal story on a global scale about eight characters who were telepathically connected; the telepathic part was the way in but it wasn’t the story…the story was what they did with it, and with each other. When I created Babylon 5, one of the major themes was that we change depending on what kind of power we are given (or which is taken away from us). It broke the science-fiction TV paradigms that humans are always at the top of the totem pole, that the characters you see in episode 1 will of necessity be the same characters you see in episode 100, and created the idea of a five-year arc that changed television to the point where now everything is multi-year arcs.
Maybe “The Resistance” universe — or the Axelverse, as I call it, after Axel Alonso, who started this whole thing — will resonate with a new generation of readers, and maybe it won’t. Maybe it’ll bounce off the wall and have no impact. But having the freedom to take that risk is what brought me back to comics after a four year sabbatical. So I guess we’ll see what happens.
Fingers crossed….
MD: Well, JMS and I have created one entire universe from scratch! Can’t think of bigger powers than that, can you? 🙂
Issue #1 of “The Resistance” is out March 18th.
