Back in the days of the Cold War, the phrase ‘Dead Hand’ was the name given to a Soviet nuclear defense system designed to launch a retaliatory missile strike against the United States in the event that all or a large portion of the Russian military high command was eliminated by a prior strike from the West. So even if we, intentionally or by way of some Dr. Strangelove-type screw-up unintentionally, bombed Moscow backed to or beyond the Stone Age, the Soviets had a system in place whereby the fingers on their freshly irradiated corpses could still, in essence, turn nuclear launch keys and wipe us all out. Not quite the pie-throwing finale that Stanley Kubrick had originally intended for Strangelove. (And just in case that’s not scary enough for you, there’s a good chance that system is still actively maintained. Good luck sleeping tonight.)
But that idea of someone getting a last strike against their opponent, even from beyond the grave, is one that stuck with writer Robert Venditti. And as his run on Valiant’s “X-O Manowar” is about to start its fourth year, it’s one that he’s cheerfully adding to the list of ways to keep Aric of Dacia’s life interesting for that book’s readership. I got a chance to talk with Robert about the book and the upcoming ‘Dead Hand’ arc, as well as share an exclusive preview of the inked line art for issue 34.
Did you have any kind of background with X-O Manowar, or even Valiant in general, before you were asked to pitch for the book?
Robert Venditti: I did not. I didn’t start reading comics until pretty late. I was in my mid-twenties, around 2000 or 2001 when I started, so I didn’t have a familiarity with anything, really. No Marvel or DC other than what people would know through general publishing knowledge, like who Superman is or who Batman is. Stuff like that. I’d never really been a comics reader and because Valiant’s original heyday had been in the 90’s, I missed that entirely.
So when Editor-in-Chief Warren Simons reached out to me about pitching for them, in our first conversation I was very up-front with them. I said, “I’ll be honest with you. Not only have I not heard of any of those characters you just mentioned to me, I’ve never even heard of Valiant. I don’t know what that means.” And he was happy about that. He wanted fresh takes; someone to look at the core concepts from the original era and come at it with a fresh perspective.
So when I put my original pitch together, I had based it on the first six or eight issues of the original “X-O Manowar” run, which I had read to get a sense of who Aric was. And then, of course, when I was hired, before I got deep into writing it I went back and read the original run from the Valiant era. But I didn’t have a lot of familiarity with it prior to that.
Did you pick “X-O Manowar” or was it aimed to you as something for you to pitch for specifically?
RV: Warren talked to me about a few different characters, and there were a few I was interested in, but X-O Manowar was the one I was most interested in for a couple of reasons. Primarily because it’s not often that you can look at a character in comics, or in really any medium, and say ‘Oh, well, there’s nothing else like that.’ It’s always an analogue of something else, pretty much. But there really aren’t any other 5th century Visigoths running around in alien battlesuits! This is the guy! So if you ever wanted to do a story like that, this is the one and only shot to do it with.
I always try and do something new with every project I take on, so here was something that was always going to be different, so I wanted to jump on it.
“X-O Manowar” was the lead-off book for Valiant when they launched in 2012, and in many ways can be seen as one of the lynchpin titles of the line. Does that type of responsibility affect your writing on the book itself?
Continued belowRV: For Valiant, if there’s one mission above all missions that they have, it’s that whatever the best story is, that’s what wins. With “X-O”, while it focuses on a character central to the line, and was the focus for ‘Armor Hunters’, and when “Unity” launched it launched through “X-O”, that kind of thing…it’s always about keeping the books standing on their own. We want the books to always be approachable and new-reader-friendly, because we’re getting those new readers every month.
But I’d say it’s the reverse. I’ll be writing an arc of “X-O” and Warren will come to me and say “OK, we want to launch ‘Unity’ and we want the first arc of that to be them trying to get [X-O’s] armor. So let’s try and think of an arc that will do that.” And then at that point we’ll try and think about it in a way that will link up with “Unity” and do those kinds of things. And after that “X-O” goes back and does his own thing.
And then they’ll come and say, “OK, we want to do a crossover event and we want X-O to be the focus. So what can we come up with that will do that?” And then we’ll start thinking about it. But it’s not like the whole time I’m writing the book I’m thinking about how it needs to be the center or in the middle of all this. The first crossover that Valiant ever did, in their first year, was a Bloodshot/Harbingers crossover that X-O had nothing to do with.
Any of the books can become the center at any point in time. It just depends on where the universe is going.
In preparing for this talk, I went back and re-read “X-O Manowar” #0-33 and was really pleased at how standalone the title was, given how far out into the Valiant universe the tendrils go. Especially for something like ‘Armor Hunters’ where you used the book to go into backstory that tied into the main plotline but really read well on its own.
RV: I appreciate that. That’s one of the things they worked with me on. “X-O Manowar” #1 was the first monthly comic book I ever wrote. Warren really worked with me on that: how to structure a story, how to give readers a clean entry point. Or how to tell a story that’s going to be new-reader-friendly every time even with as cumbersome a concept as a 5th century Visigoth. Nobody knows what a Visigoth is! [laughs] That’s not even a culture that people on the street even refer to. A 5th century Visigoth in a hi-tech battle armor? That is a high concept to make new-reader friendly, so we put a lot of time into doing that.
In keeping things new-reader friendly, Warren said something that I thought was very interesting. In a CBR interview, he said you weren’t afraid to keep the book’s status quo changing. Do you think that kind of constant shuffling and rearranging of things makes it easier for new readers to come on because the cast in the book itself is having to reorient themselves on a continual basis?
RV: Very much so. Every arc is different from the arc that came before it, and we’re always going in new directions. Sometimes it’s new directions that I come up with, and sometimes it’s Valiant coming to me and saying, “Hey, we want you to introduce Ninjak. Do you have a story?” And I’ll go, “OK, who is Ninjak? Let me go find out what that story is.” And all of a sudden the book becomes spy fiction for a few issues.
It’s a very versatile concept, and the upside to it being multi-genre/historical fiction/science fiction/technology/cosmic/space-bound/earth-bound is that it fits into so many different situations. And I think that’s all part and parcel with the original high concept that Jim Shooter and Bob Layton came up with.
I think one of the strengths of the book up to this point has been not only building who Aric is as a character, but also your slow reveals of information about Shanhara, the armor that Aric wears. ‘Dead Hand’ feels like it’s going to continue that trend of revealing dark secrets about this thing that, on the surface, seems like a pretty beneficial object. Can you give us the pitch for ‘Dead Hand’ and let me know if I’m off-base or not?
Continued belowRV: In the ‘Armor Hunters’ storyline, we encountered this kind of special ops team whose mission was to hunt down these armors and get rid of them because the sentient armor that Aric is in possession of is actually a virus. It slowly, and over a long period of time, turns its wearer into a new suit of armor. It then duplicates itself and goes off to another world. So you have these highly destructive suits of armor, the most powerful weapons in the universe, who are duplicating themselves by corrupting and transforming the wearers into something less human and more machine until it becomes completely machine-like and, in that process, gains this propensity for violence. So these are extremely dangerous weapons that the Armor Hunters were hunting down.
In the ‘Armor Hunters’ tie-in issues of “X-O Manowar”, we hinted at this confrontation where the armors around the universe were starting to come back and close in on the world where the Armor Hunters were based. And that’s where ‘Dead Hand’ picks up: we see that battle, what the aftermath of that is, and what the ‘Dead Hand’ is, which is the Armor Hunters last-ditch Doomsday device. When everyone else is dead, this thing goes live with the single-minded purpose to go out and make the universe safe. And there’s no bargaining with it, no convincing it that what it’s doing isn’t very nice. No stopping it.
And we are going to get more backstory on the Armor Hunters and the armor, in more ways than one. Not just with Aric’s armor, but we’re also going to be introducing a lot of other armored characters in this storyline. We’re going to see other Manowars in action in ways we haven’t really before. What does it mean that these things go to other planets and consume other lifeforms and turn them into armors? What were those lifeforms? What were those planets? We’re going to see a lot of that, and flesh out the mythology to show you how much bigger it is than what you thought in the past.
Is this going to only be in “X-O Manowar”, or are there going to be spin-off issues?
RV: It’ll just be in “X-O”. Issues #34 to #38, but issue #33 is a key issue to read as well because it frames the entire concept that Aric is going to have to go through as a character, how he can view Earth in the wider scope of the universe.
Remember, he comes from a time where this civilization was over here and that civilization was over there, and if you wanted to, you could be completely self-contained and apart from each other. That’s not the world anymore. Not even just Earth, which is now much more of a global community. If you were to almost look at his old Visigoth home in the 5th century, taking that to a wider scale, that’s now planet Earth. Planet Earth is his Visigoth camp, and the wider universe is the Roman empire, you know? So that’s a huge leap for someone like him to have to take, coming from a time when the world was flat and you didn’t even know what was on the other side of the ocean. So those are some of the challenges he has to face being someone from the past living in an object well beyond our modern day understanding.
It would be so easy for the book to just skip to him being completely adjusted after the first arc or two arcs, but one of the things I think you do well in the series as a whole is reminding us, even this far into the title, that Aric is still adjusting to this different era and sensibility. Sometimes he’s behind the curve and other times he’s even more ahead of it than we are, bringing a clarity we’ve probably lost over time.
RV: That was something I struggled with from the beginning. I wanted him to be from the past, but I didn’t want him to be a primitive. I wanted him to be understanding and comprehending things, but still amazed by things like running water coming out of the tap, you know what I mean? All these things that we take for granted, but for him? His wife likes to leave the tap water running because it reminds her of a waterfall and helps her sleep. Little things like that I like to throw in just to remind the reader of what could be a pretty wild high concept for the book.
Continued belowYou’ve worked with a large number of artists in a pretty short amount of time with your work both at Valiant and DC. At Valiant alone, you launched “X-O Manowar” with Cary Nord, and then you’ve worked with Lee Garbett, Doug Braithwaite, and Diego Bernard, who is handling the art chores on ‘Dead Hand’. What are some of the things you’ve learned having to write scripts for so many different artists?
RV: One of the things, because of the production cycle of comics, is that a lot of the scripts are written before I know who the artist is. And that’s just the nature of the business a lot of the times; you cycle in artists, artists need a breather, things like that. So rather than try to tailor each issue to an artist, I try and just make them as open as possible. Something that anyone could pick up and feel free to bring their own sensibility to, because I don’t know who that artist is going to be.
Now, once I start on an arc, if you’re looking at a four-month gap between the issue I turn in and what’s on the stands, generally by the time I start an arc, I’ll turn in one or two scripts and then I’ll know who the artist is and I’ll write those last two for them. Then you can try and tailor things more, but most of the time I try and, like I said, keep things as accessible as possible and just let the artists do what they do best.
It always amazes me how everyone has their own style of storytelling. It’s all the same story, about the same character, but it all looks so different. The little things that each artist brings on their own. It’s one of the fun parts for me of being a writer, the surprises at seeing those pages interpreted and something I always look forward to.
The book kicked off with Cary Nord, which made absolute sense given his run on “Conan” to tap into the Visigoth part of the story. And going from that to the book’s current artist Diego Bernard, who is tapping into a more Ivan Reis-like feel with his handling of the technology, making it look both cool and grounded, it’s interesting to look at the artists you’ve worked with and how they can be completely different and yet each fit the book so well while still being their own style.
RV: It me, it seems like it’s an enormously complicated book to have to draw. There’s Visigoths, armor, spaceships…there’s everything. I feel very lucky to work with the artists I do to pull this off.
Not that I’m fishing for spoilers, but have the post-‘Dead Hand’ plotting sessions begun?
RV: They have begun. What’s coming up after ‘Dead Hand’ is very very big.
It’s actually a bit of both. We do a lot of planning and plotting, but Valiant is like a speedboat. The publishing line is sleek, and even though it’s at a place where there are a lot of pieces working together, we can all move very quickly if we need to and leave things open in our series for that kind of thing. Like with the Ninjak story I mentioned earlier, that’s part of the fun and the unpredictability of working here.
Casting the Valiant net a little wider, are there any current or upcoming Valiant books that you’re particularly enjoying or looking forward to?
RV: I love what Josh Dysart does with all his books. Just a phenomenal ability that he has with character and dialogue.
I like “Rai” a lot and what Matt Kindt’s doing there. I’m looking forward to his “Ninjak” with Clay Mann. I worked with Matt a lot back at Top Shelf publishing things like “Pistolwhip”, so something with spy fiction is so right up his alley.
And Jeff Lemire’s “Bloodshot” book. Jeff is also someone I worked with back at Top Shelf and have known for a really long time. “The Valiant” has been a lot of fun; I’ve read the whole series and I really enjoyed it.
Continued belowX-O Manowar #34
Written by Robert Venditti
Illustrated by Diego BernardALL-NEW ARC! ALL-NEW JUMPING-ON POINT! DEAD HAND is coming!
He survived ENTER: NINJAK. He waged war on PLANET DEATH. And now he must defend the Earth from an unholy reckoning…and the doomsday protocol codenamed: DEAD HAND!
This is it…X-O Manowar…face-to-face with a ROBOT ARMY HELLBENT ON THE DESTRUCTION OF EVERYTHING! Blast off with New York Times best-selling creator Robert Venditti (ARMOR HUNTERS, Green Lantern) as he begins the most shocking arc yet of his seminal run on Valiant’s flagship series!
