Many readers of this site will be familiar with the work of Rick Remender. Whether you’re a fan of his Marvel work such as “Punisher” or “Uncanny X-Force” or you’re familiar with his creator-owned endeavors like the critically acclaimed “Fear Agent,” Remender has been a busy and prolific creator in comics for over a decade now.
Debuting in stores last week, “Black Science” is Rick Remender’s first creator-owned series since “Fear Agent” ended in 2011. Our Pick of the Week last week, earning a Buy rating and described by staff writer Vince Ostrowski as “a mix of unabashed love for multicolored 60′s sci-fi grooviness, carefully tapped political exploration, hard-boiled narration, and protagonists with a penchant for living dangerously”, the book was an immediate sell-out and is already one of the most popular debuts of the year. And with good reason, of course.
After taking some time to focus on his Marvel work, Remender says that the return to creator-owned couldn’t be more welcome. “I don’t think that I recognized how necessary it is for me to be free and untethered to create comic books the way I taught myself to create comic books,” Remender told us in a recent interview. “I started self-publishing creator-owned comics in 1997 and I didn’t stop doing it until 2011. It was just built into my DNA and is part of who I am as a creator. So while I’ve had a lot of fun and learned a lot at Marvel and made a lot of books I’m very proud of, there was a big hole in my chest and this has filled it.”
“It makes me very, very creatively fulfilled on every level and we’re entirely in control of every aspect of the book, which… I really need that. It’s also helped me with my Marvel work as I’ve been able to relinquish control and relax a little bit more at the helm there and focus all of my OCD/neurotic control freak tendencies on my creator-owned books.”
And in terms of output, as a rather prolific creator at Marvel these past couple years, it’s interesting to see. As a guy who came up in the world of making and self-publishing, this big return for Remender to the world of creator-owned comics with “Black Science,” “Deadly Class” and more in the works has become therapeutic in a way. “Writing is cathartic, writing is therapy,” Remender said. “It should be. But there’s only so much of yourself that you can dump into a previously established character like Wolverine or Captain America, and I try and I give those books as much attention, as much time, as much energy as I do my creator-owned book, but it’s still me trying to dance through raindrops and unearth things about the characters that I can identify with, or would like to write — and these are characters that have long histories and they’re established and they’ve already been built by other people. So it’s like playing with somebody else’s toys versus building your own from the ground up.”
So with that two-year break from “Fear Agent” in mind, Remender has taken the time to learn a lot about himself and the world of comics as he readied his return, taking the lessons learned on previous endeavors like “Fear Agent”, applying them to his new titles and seeing how it crosses over into his for-hire work. “I guess I’ve learned to trust myself, to ignore the internet, to completely discard the nay-sayers and the vitriol in the forums. I think I’ve pretty much stopped looking at that stuff over the last couple years; I think it can poison your enjoyment of being creative, it can poison your balls so that you lose the fearlessness you need in order to do big interesting things with your characters. I think writing “Deadly Class” and “Black Science” amongst some of the other creator-owned things I have in the works and getting back into that has really enabled me to rediscover what it is that I like to do, and that’s now bleeding over into my Marvel work again.”
“So it’s sort of symbiotic, I think; being free to create my own characters in my own world and to design my own books and to have.. to make the thing entirely what I think it should be has reignited a creative spark in me that I think is starting to really, really bleed over into “Captain America” and “Uncanny Avengers.” As I’ve been doing this for eight months, I think we’re going to start seeing with “Captain America” #14 and “Uncanny Avengers #14,” those are the first couple issues of my Marvel work inspired by my new burst of creativity that was born of getting back into saddle on creator-owned comics. I think all the books that I’m doing have really greatly improved from my new creative energy.”
Continued belowHowever, despite the recent renaissance in creator-owned comics that we’ve seen, in terms of timeline there is nothing particularly special about 2013/2014 as to why Remender is returning to the world of creator-owned comics. “I started cooking “Black Science” three or four years ago; it was originally something that I was discussing with Phil Noto and then it went through a number of different permeations and as it has developed it’s been changing and growing, and Matteo came on and we REALLY revamped it into something entirely unique and true to our sensibilities. So I guess we started production on “Black Science” about a year ago,” Remender said of the development process. “I think that the timing of it is really just happenstance, it’s just when it happened to come out. But the temperature for creator-owned comics in general is tremendous now. There’s an entire audience that are buying and reading books that were not there when I was struggling to get books like “Fear Agent” or “Strange Girl” going. It’s wonderful; the opening numbers on “Black Science” #1 are so terrific I can’t even believe it. It’s the kind of thing we dreamed about.”
“I remember back in, like, 2000-2002, we used to sit around and dream about a book that sold fifteen thousand copies in the creator-owned world. And I remember when Kirkman and Cory and Ryan got “Invincible” cooking up and it land 13… 14,000 copies that early, what a landmark achievement that was! And it really was. And now here we are in a world where creator-owned books by creators who are new on the scene are opening, like, 20… 25,000 copies? That’s the kind of industry we need.”
“We need a strong industry that supports not only the mainstream but also supports the independent and original comic books. It’s always blown my mind that, like, in novels the only kind of novels people buy are the 119th 007 novel or whatever. You buy original content in novels that they never did in comics, or it was always sporadic where one or two independent books managed to break through to the population of readers. And we’re seeing a renaissance in that stuff, we’re seeing a lot of people really very interested in creator-owned books.”
So now, with “Black Science” finally on the stands, Remender couldn’t be more excited to see how the book is taking off amongst fans. With the series receiving near-universal acclaim, it seems everyone is ready to dive into the world that Remender, Scalera and White are dreaming up.
And as much as the book seems like wild and far fetched sci-fi mayhem, the biggest influence on the book is actually Remender’s own life, especially in terms of character creation. “I’m sort of drawing from my own life experiences and people who I’ve known and then developing those people into strange amalgams of other people that I know, and creating these unique characters,” Remender said. “In terms of Grant Mckay, the lead Dimensionaut, he’s really an examination of my workaholic tendencies as well as my own anti-authoritarian leanings. He’s a strident individualist who dropped out of college to become self-taught, and has total disdain for any hierarchal organization or governing body or accreditation center that tells people how to think or puts constraints on what they’re allowed to do, who worships at the altar of the anarchist manifesto — and that’s an interesting character to dig into. Definitely a lot further down that road than I’ve ever gone with aspects of my personality that I wanted to extrapolate and magnify and then turn into Grant.”
Of course, Remender’s personality has popped up in his character before, which is simply an aspect of Remender’s process in developing the characters and the worlds. “I’ve spent months and months doing character worksheets and developing these characters so I know who they are, and as for how much of myself ends up in them, that sort of happens during the course of writing. I know how they interact an all the plot beats, I know the story, but the characteristics and the personality and the dialogue? That really starts to snap into place as I’m writing the comic book.”
Continued below“I would say that there’s an aspect of my personality in every creator-owned book I do, moreso than the mainstream stuff because I’m creating characters — Mary Spectre from “Night Mary”, or Bethany Black from “Strange Girl” or Heath Huston from “Fear Agent” or Black Heart Billy… or any of the creator-owned stuff that I’ve built up, really. Those characters are aspects of my personality mixed in with stuff not of my personality and then magnified or reduced into something unique that I can then understand how to write and say something with that’s more personal.”
And there is also the earliest mentioned influence on “Black Science” in terms of the late, great Frank Frazetta. “You look at a Frazetta painting on a copy of “Creepy” or “Eerie” or whatever and it tells you a story about a strange world that makes you want to know more about it. I wanted to do a book that allowed that kind of storytelling, where we would be able to jump to new worlds and jump to new locations, and to paint entirely new crazy worlds,” Remender said.
So in terms of building worlds, considering the book’s lofty goal of essentially being able to explore infinite world’s throughout the series’ run, Remender says that he doesn’t find the challenge of coming up with new places to go that difficult. “This genre actually makes that one of the most feasible, which is why I enjoy working in it, I think. The reality here is that we’ve set the book up with a bunch of Dimensionauts using a device that can punch through the boundaries of reality into another parallel universe, but the thing’s been sabotaged, the timer is broken so they’re basically ending up in other dimensions for random intervals of time and forced to survive or forced to acquire things or just forced to not kill each other. In my research and the more I study things like string theory and understand the nature of parallel universes and the modern thinking of it, that our universe is a flat thing that is only separated from another universe by a fraction of an atom and that every choice every living being makes then splinters out into an infinite amount of parallel dimension, meaning that basically anything you could imagine, any course of events, any one thing that comes into your head is a dimension that could exist.
“That means that anything I come up with, like a world where life evolve son the back of giant sea turtles, it makes sense and can work if my imagination is untethered, provided I do a little leg work and really establish how the world got this way and how it is that this parallel dimension ended up in the state that it is.”
And with the fiction comes an opportunity for Remender to work with actual science that he researched in preparation for the book. “The theory of a multiverse is one that the smartest among us believe is a fact. So with what I read and what I take from the real science and the real science theory, I then sort of build my own extrapolated reality and build my own fictional version of that and how it works, with just enough of a groundwork of real, theoretical science and how people actually assume that these things exist and how they operate, then taking my own theories about the hows and the whys and the natures of the universe and building a series around that.”
“At the core of “Black Science,” there is a deeper quest and there is a deeper meaning, in what is at first a survival story. But later on down the road, with the research that I’ve done in regards to string theory and parallel universes, I came up with my own theory about why things operate this way and what is at the heart of it all, and I use that to tell the greater story and the change of direction to the characters a little bit down the line.”
And after developing a relationship on “Secret Avengers”, Remender and series artist Mateo Scalera (who we just talked to about the series as well) really found a great groove in terms of working with one another on the development of “Black Science.” “We established a pretty nice working relationship on “Secret Avengers” that sort of carried through here, so I work up the stories and get the very basics done and then I talk it out with my editor, Sebastian Girner. Then I talk it out with Matteo over Skype, and he has suggestions and notes and thoughts, and I sort of implement those and we go forth from there. And I’ll tell him some of the creatures I’m thinking and he sends sketches in, we talk about the sketches, Dean colors ’em up… it’s just joy. Matteo is the exact kind of artist that I love working with. He’s a pure storyteller, but he knows how to spot blacks, he knows how to use a quill and a brush.”
Continued below“Of my fifteen years doing this, he’s definitely at the very top of the list of guys I enjoy working with. And we see each other at shows and we talk story, and we laugh and come up with craziness. It’s really very collaborative.”
Also coming from Image Comics and debuting early next year, we’ll be seeing the release of Remender’s second big creator-owned ongoing, “Deadly Class.” Taking place in a high school for assassins in 1987, it looks to be Remender’s most personal comic yet.
And while “Black Science” is a big, universal exploring adventure, “Deadly Class” is more grounded with a different focus. “It’s more of a character story than it is anything else,” Remender said. “It started off as a book called “Reagan Youth” which was an examination of a lot of the things I went through in the mid-80s growing up; I started high school in ’87 and graduated in ’91, so I wanted the story to take place in the years that I was in high school, these sort of formative years. I’d seen a couple guys shot, I had a lot of friends OD… I’ve been through some pretty hairy shit and I wanted to write that out as well as examine the angst and the drug use and all of the bullying and the rock and roll and the drugs and the sex and everything that went on in high school, sort of to unearth what it was like to be a teenager growing up in that era and dealing with that stuff.”
“At the same time, I was developing “Deadly Class,” which was an entirely different thing, which was just a high school for assassins. But I couldn’t really find my way into it. It was a good, clean idea but it just seemed like it was missing the thing that got me really excited, whereas “Reagan Youth” was missing the element that made it an exciting comic book. It was very slice of life, which is fine, but it was missing the energy level that comic books need to survive i this market.”
“One day it just occurred to me to mix them, so I mixed all my “Reagan Youth” ideas and all my “Deadly Class” ideas and it became just “Deadly Class,” and the story is what it is. It’s an examination of all of the things that I mentioned, of teenagers growing up in that era and coming of age, with the added wrinkle that these teenagers are expected to become the world’s next greatest assassins.”
They were sent here by all of the greatest crime syndicates and governments around the world, to this very famous school that trains assassins to breed them to become the greatest killers for each one of their crime syndicates or governments or wealthy executives or whoever had sent them. A lot of them are legacy, whether their parents were also or are currently some of the top assassins in the world, and so that aspect of it really adds something that is incredibly exciting, whereas I’m boiling the drama and getting into the heart of these characters in the soap opera. You forget what they’re expected to be learning at the school and you forget what it is that’s going on, and that way I can surprise you with some incredibly violent and ugly stuff in a moment where you least expect it so I’ll actually have some impact with it.
“This is a school where your midterm might be that they turn the lights off and ninjas come out of the vents and you have to survive for an hour, or your final might be to kill your best friend before your best friend kills you. Things like that will be popping up, but in the course of a lot of really rich character work.”
Of course, fans of Image Comics might note that this won’t be the only book about kids at a less-than-conventional school currently offered by the publisher, but Remender doesn’t see that as an issue. Rather, it’s a reflection of what people look for in entertainment today. “The reality is is that there’s a large audience out there and they have an insatiable appetite for entertainment, so writers and creative types are drawing from the same well. The zeitgeist all produces pretty much permeations of the same fifteen things. I think that this could be compared to “Harry Potter” in that its a unique school with some kids who are dealing with being kids and growing up while also dealing with these very real, true threats that are other-worldly. I think it’s just like something we’ve seen in coming of age stories; it could be the same thing that’s attractive about Fast Times at Ridgemont High, about seeing a surf-stoner kind of stumble his way through high school and that stuff that we can all relate to, the awkwardness and the dating and all of that. But in this case you’ve got the added intrigue of potential danger and murder around every corner.
Continued below“This is an era of life that everybody has a lot of feelings about, with the added fun of, well, it’s not quite “Battle Royale” because “Battle Royale” is more hunt and survive, this is more…. as odd as it is to say, more like “Harry Potter.” It’s identifiable, I’d say.”
The school’s setting in 1987 will also be particularly important to the series as well, especially in relation to Remender’s life growing up. “t’s going to be me reflecting on who I was in 1987,” Remender said. “All of the cast and the school represent people that I knew, sort of amalgamations of people that I knew, and they all represent different subsets. One thing that I haven’t seen a lot of in popular media is the experiences that I had in that era reflected or represented in a way that feels authentic. It’s always, “HEY! And then there was Neon Shirts and Billy Ocean!” And it’s all the mainstream bullshit that’s represented.”
“So for me, I want to talk about a friend of mine growing up who got me into all the hip hop at the time, and I got him into all the punk, and a girl that I was good friends with in high school who was deep into the goth scene and converted me to Bauhaus, Joy division and Sisters of Mercy. Or the punkers that I knew, and the various subsets of punk and all the hypocrisy inherent therein and all the strength and philosophy. And then delving into character’s life…. and all the jocks and the characters who hung around trying to be like the jocks, and the different kind of subsets of those people. Just really examining how it was and how I saw it and what it was like for me growing up in that time in a way that’s true and honest without any sort of… I’m not going to change the language because people are politically correct now. Kids spoke in a particular way in 1987 that they will speak in this book, it’s going to be an honest representation of the era.”
So in that way, the book becomes the antithesis to the 80’s coming of age story established by John Huhges films that many of us are familiar with. “I make fun of John Hughes in the second issue of the book,” Remender laughs. “Because that’s always the idea of what our generation was, and what that era was, and really my experience was never anything like a John Hughes movie. I think that Breakfast Club smelled to me like a guy who grew up fifteen/twenty years earlier trying to write about our generation, and it never really felt… it felt close, it didn’t feel there. Everybody’s sense of what is authentic is going to be different based on who they were at the time and based on what they experienced, but this will be authentic to my version of when I grew up and experienced from the mid-80’s onward.”
Music will also play a large and defining role in the series, which is another aspect of Remender’s personality that he’s seeded into the series. “I think that music defines kids and people find the scene that they most identify with and that music sort of speaks to us when we’re hormonal and dealing with emotions at such a heightened state, especially during puberty and your teenage years. Nothing is more important than your favorite album at the time, nothing is more important than that singer who writes those lyrics that speak so personally to you. How that stuff ends up defining character is probably at the heart of a lot of these characters. I think at the core of that is looking at why they select these things and why does this kid like this kind of music and why does this kind of music speak to this kid, and then defining the backstory that helps us understand why people gravitate towards certain things.”
“There’ll be all sorts of pop culture conversations as characters riff on bands they like and don’t like and basically things I experienced growing up in that era and conversations that I had, arguments that I had with friends and just kind of reliving that stuff. To me it’ll sort of stand as a public journal of some aspects of that era that I haven’t seen necessarily reflected in popular culture in a way that I have felt was authentic.”
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And joining Remender on this 80’s journey will be artist Wes Craig, whom you may remember from the recent “Batman” Annual earlier this year. “He’s a genius. When people see the book, it’s going to be — his work has always been genius, but what he’s doing here with Lee Loughridge, without hyperbole, I can honestly say it’ll be the best looking book on the stands that week if not that month. It’s an absolute artistic achievement,” Remender says of the book. “The first two issues are done and we packed each one with 29 pages each, so people are going to be getting basically 60 pages of Wes and Lee for $3.50 an issue, we didn’t raise the price at all. He’s the hardest working guy, super nice, and he’s definitely the next superstar I’ve been lucky enough to work with.”
And it also helps that Wes and Remender relate very much in regards to the material in the book. “We immediately became friends. He’s as natural a collaborator as Tony Moore or Jerome Opena or Greg Tocchini or Matteo, any of the guys that are sort of the regulars that I turn to to make comic books with. Wes and I have spent hours and hours on the phone as we have with our editor Sebastian Girner just talking up the era, and he’s my age so he really gets it. When you see a skate rat bombing a hill in San Francisco in the series, it looks like a 1987 skate rat. So we talk scenesters, we talk everything that was going on in that era, we talk story and we talk a lot, so it’s a really true and wonderful collaboration. ”
“I couldn’t feel better about the book. As great as Black Science is, I think this book will speak to an entirely different audience in a way that I don’t think has been served in a long time, if ever.”
So with two ongoing series at Image in addition to his regular Marvel work and other series to come later, the future is looking as bright as ever for Remender. That he’s taking the time to try out so many different styles and genres simply speaks to the creativity that Remender is prepared to add into the world of comics.
“They’re very very different books,” Remender says of “Black Science” and “Deadly Class.” “Both have ensemble casts as opposed to things like Strange Girl or Fear Agent, which were very focused on one lead in each one; these books have two or three leads in the first arc and then we drift into some of the other characters and they become the leads in the second, third, fourth arcs. The only unifying factor between the two books is that they each have that ensemble cast.
“In terms of tone, one of them is grounded in reality sprinkled with a bit of ugly fantasy in terms of the assassin high school, and the other is grounded in nothing — it’s a free form jaunt through imagination. And both are grounded in character work, and I find that the people who enjoy character and enjoy caring about the characters as opposed to just huge shit happening in front of you, those are the kind of people that seem to gravitate to what I do and stick around for the important stuff.”
“Those types of readers, those types of people will really enjoy both of these titles, because the first 10 issues, both of them have a number of beating hearts in terms of character arcs that are satisfactory, I feel, and have been worked to the point where they are as good as I am capable of producing.”
“I work with a great editor and great artists and I trust their input on the book and we make something that’s pure to our intentions and gets us excited, and if people like it that’s terrific because then I can sell more comics and I can keep doing this.”
“Black Science” #1 is in stores now. “Deadly Class” debuts in January 2014. For the other portion of our interview about the recent events of “Uncanny Avengers,” please click here.
