Book of Death #1 Cover Interviews 

Robert Venditti Eulogizes the Valiant Universe in “Book of Death” [Interview]

By | June 2nd, 2015
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

Over the past few years, the Valiant universe has grown by leaps and bounds, and many of those growth spurts happen around their large events. That trend continues this summer with “Book of Death,” a four issue miniseries by Robert Venditti, Robert Gill, and Doug Braithwaite, as well as a number of one-shot tie-ins. The event follows up on “The Valiant,” and uses the new Geomancer (introduced in that miniseries) as the catalyst to look into the future of the Valiant Universe. We spoke with Rob about the book, the event, and why Valiant is a great place to be creating right now.

Comics tend to take place in a perpetual second act – no real beginnings, and no real endings. Well, you get a chance to buck that; is it liberating or scary to get to write an “ending” to certain characters?

Robert Venditti: Every story has an ending, so as a writer you kind of get used to that. At some point, you have to say goodbye to all of your characters. But the endings we’re showing in Book of Death aren’t as clear-cut as you might think. These are teases of the future as recorded in the Book of Geomancer, a mystical document that contains the history of Earth. But the future isn’t necessarily set in stone. Now, we get sort of the context for this future in the actual “Book of Death” series, but beyond that, you get four full-blown tie-in issues: one for Bloodshot, one for Harbinger, one for Ninjak, one for X-O Manowar. They all tell their own character-specific stories. I’ve read the scripts for all of the tie-in issues, and they’re all such great, character-driven stories that are so much fun to read. The writers, Jeff Lemire, Matt Kindt, and Joshua Dysart, are each working individually to come up with their own stories, and, while they each began with the same mission statement, they’re all taking their own path to get there. The individuality and creativity they’re bringing to the stories is off the charts.

In your eyes, how certain are these futures? Is this going to happen or is this the possibility of what might happen?

RV: Well, I think that the answer you’re talking about would be specific to each title, be it “Book of Death: The Fall of Ninjak” or “Book of Death: The Fall of Harbinger.” I can only speak for the X-O Manowar one – when it comes to the other writers, I don’t want to spoil their stories.

We will see some the future concept play out in the actual “Book of Death” series, where each of the four issues of the series are going to have a future section drawn by Doug Braithwaite. I can say with absolute certainty that some of the things you’re going to see both within Book of Death and within the individual one-shot issues are going to take place. You’re absolutely going to see them at some point in Valiant’s future. Some are more near-term than others. For “Book of Death: The Fall of X-O Manowar,” which I’m writing, this is how I envision what becomes of the character. I’ve written 40 issues of “X-O Manowar” so far, and there are a lot more stories left to do, but this is what I’ve envisioned his ending to be at issue #100 or however long “X-O Manowar” will run for. I understand that I’m not going to be on “X-O Manowar” forever and that other writers are going to come in, but this is the future that I would write. It’s also important to point out, though, that while it’s the future, it’s just a glimpse. We have no idea what transpires between then and now.

So, one of the things that I’ve really admired about Valiant in general is that every few months there seems to be a big event that’s happening but it’s so completely accessible to a new reader. Someone who has never read the Valiant books before just picks up one of these books, whether it’s “The Valiant,” “Armor Hunters,” or “Harbingers Wars” or any of the other things that are going on, there’s is a real sense of how a new reader can get into this. So many readers may have never picked up a Valiant comic before. If “Book of Death” is the first one, what do they have to know to get on board?

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RV: This is something that is a priority at Valiant, and I try to do it with all my comics – I want every issue to be accessible to a new reader. I didn’t start reading comics until I was in my late 20s, so I know what it’s like to go into a shop and see all these comics and not really understand what’s going on because you’ve missed so much continuity. So I’ve tried to avoid that in everything I write. It’s definitely a skillset that I’m still developing and I want to continue to improve on. For “Book of Death,” everything readers need to know to begin the story is in issue #1. It’s new reader accessible; you don’t need to know anything beforehand. You can pick this story up and understand exactly what’s going on.

Now someone who’s been reading Valiant all along, you’ll recognize certain threads from the very recent series written by Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt, called “The Valiant,” where we saw the death of the Geomancer, Kay McHenry, who was killed by the Immortal Enemy. The Geomancer is a mystical person, a sort of conduit between humanity and Earth. They’re the eyes and ears of the Earth, from a human perspective, and can really let us know what the Earth is up to. But Kay died, and what we know from The Valiant is that whenever a Geomancer is killed by the Immortal Enemy, we roll into a Dark Age. In the wake of Kay’s death, a series of horrific natural phenomenon has started to happen. But now a new Geomancer, a young girl named Tama, has arrived from the future. She’s the key to understanding what’s making these terrible things happen. Gilad, the Eternal Warrior, needs to protect Tama from these events while at the same time try to figure out what’s happening and find a way to make them stop.

You’re picking up on the conclusion of “The Valiant” and that feels relatively natural. Was it challenging to pick-up characters in a situation that Matt and Jeff had set up, or were you guys in frequent enough contact that it feels pretty natural when writing the character?

RV: We’re all in the same room pretty often. Once or twice a year we’ll have writer’s retreats and we go through what’s going on in our own books so we do have close relationships with each other. Now, Matt and Jeff specifically are guys that I’ve known going on 10 years now because I started my career working in the warehouse for Top Shelf Productions, doing their convention booth and things like that. So I knew Matt and Jeff – I’ve been friends with them for a very long time. And other writers like Joshua Dysart, Jen Van Meter, and Fred Van Lente, I’d never met them before, but I’ve gotten to know them both as friends and professionally as well. In those terms, we do communicate with each other and keep those things streamlined, but really it’s about coming up with the stories you want to tell, and how you’re going to build on top of what’s already gone before. That’s sort of the challenge in working in a universe that has its own continuity with different books and different writers. You come up with what you want to do and then you figure out how to make it fit and how to use all the existing continuity to enrich your story, rather than hinder it.

This book has two different artists working on it. You mentioned before Doug Braithwaite is doing sort of the future scenes and Robert Gill handling the more present day. What difference do you see in working with those two artists and what can readers expect from each of them in a book?

Robert Gill artwork from 'Book of Death' #1

RV: They’re both enormously talented guys. Doug and I worked together last summer on “Armor Hunters,” but this is my first experience working with Robert Gill. They both have such great skill sets in what they’re able to communicate on the page, not just in terms of storytelling, but also in the emotion of the characters. This is a much different story than “Armor Hunters” – it’s not cosmic, there are no aliens. It’s something that’s very grounded. Robert is so great at being able to communicate that down-on-the-front-lines experience and bring the horror element across. And Doug Braithwaite, he’s just such a tremendous storyteller, and people will be amazed when they see what he doing in these 8-page future sequences, the amount of visual information that has to be conveyed, so much of it sub-textually in the storytelling between the panels. It’s phenomenal to see. He’s turned in all his pages already for the first issue and they’re a joy to look at it. It’s a complicated task that he was given, but he nailed it.

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Doug’s one of my favorite artists in comics, for exactly the reason’s you mentioned. He seems to be able to take the most complicated, surreal sequences and turn them into these works of beauty that make perfect sense on the page. In terms of where the story is going to go, how long down the road are the potential futures that we’re seeing? Like you said before, are we teasing for issue 100 of these books or are we teasing for some time that’s much much longer?

RV: Some of these things are going to happen very very quickly, while others will happen further down the road. I think when people read the first issue and they see the amount of content that’s in the future sequences, they’ll realize just exactly how many new concepts and new characters are being introduced. I’m hoping that’s part of the fun for the audience, to view that stuff and use it as a checklist going forward – like, “Oh wait, I remember that from Book of Death” and then you go and scratch it off the list. And you’re kind of reading and wondering when the dots are going to connect.

Obviously this is focused mainly on the Geomancer and Eternal Warrior, but what other characters are we going to see pop up in the series?

RV: We’ve got all the fan favorites – this is an enormous cast. You’ve got X-O Manowar, you’ve got Ninjak, you’ve got Eternal Warrior, you’ve got Livewire, you’ve got GIN-GR the giant robot…and you’ve got some others I’m not even going to give away because it would be too much of a spoiler. I would venture to say that in some capacity or another, the majority of the characters that we’ve seen in the Valiant Universe up to this point are going to show up in some way.

You’re going to do that in 4 issues?

RV: Yeah! [laughs] Plus I’ve got a whole bunch more that we’ve never seen before too.

Wow, that is exciting, that’s very, very cool. It seems that Valiant is a place that creators just love to work. Everyone I’ve spoken to working at Valiant just raves about it. What makes Valiant different to work for than other publishers?

RV: I don’t know, I guess it’s different for everybody. And I don’t think that because you like working for Valiant it means you don’t like working for somebody else. I’ve been pretty fortunate in terms of the experiences that I’ve had, going back to the beginning with “The Surrogates” at Top Shelf. I’ve always had positive experiences with my editors and my projects. I can say what makes Valiant such a great place to work – what works for me is the people. I didn’t know any of them before I started on this path. Doing “X-O,” getting to know Warren [Simons] and Dinesh [Shamdasani] and Fred Pierce and Hunter [Gorinson] and Josh Johns – I could list all the names, and they’re all great people. There’s all different sorts of reasons you get into the arts, but for me one of the reasons why I chose the career path that I did was that I didn’t want a job where I went to work and there was all these office politics – that I didn’t like the people who I work for and work with. That’s not what I’m in this for. I want to be friends with my editors and my fellow creators and people in the company who I work with. To me that’s one of the vast benefits of being in this industry. If I wanted a job where I hated the people I work with, there are certainly plenty of those out there.


Brian Salvatore

Brian Salvatore is an editor, podcaster, reviewer, writer at large, and general task master at Multiversity. When not writing, he can be found playing music, hanging out with his kids, or playing music with his kids. He also has a dog named Lola, a rowboat, and once met Jimmy Carter. Feel free to email him about good beer, the New York Mets, or the best way to make Chicken Parmagiana (add a thin slice of prosciutto under the cheese).

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