Last year, “Kim & Kim” took comics by storm. Fans were talking about it on social media and media outlets of all kinds covered the series. Like “We Can Never Go Home,” it put a big spotlight to Black Mask and now it has been nominated for a GLAAD media award. A second volume of “Kim & Kim” is coming soon but before that, Magdalene Visaggio teams up with artist Eryk Donovan for “Quantum Teens Are Go.” We had the chance to talk them about their upcoming series and here’s what they had to say.
“Quantum Teens Are Go” #1 debuts February 22nd via Black Mask. What is “Quantum Teens Are Go” and how did this concept come together?
Magdalene Visaggio: So there’s a little story here. “Quantum Teens Are Go” is about a couple of high school sweethearts who break into abandoned superlabs so they can steal things for their time machine, and the story ultimately comes from my efforts to recreate the feeling of The Adventures of Pete &a Pete, which the book does not succeed at.
Pete & Pete takes place in this surrealist suburbia, and I wanted to capture that, which is how I landed on the original idea: two kids build a working space ship. I ended up developing it as a romance to pitch to Rosy Press, but as I worked, I focused more and more on the sci fi adventure part, and increasingly gave it this anarchic attitude, a mode I was very familiar with from “Kim & Kim”. The thing was, “Kim & Kim” at that point hadn’t sold, and I didn’t think it ever would. So I ended up giving “Kim &a Kim” a lot of the same kind of vibe; I love garage operations, and “QTAG” does that as much as “Kim & Kim” does.
Other than that, I really liked the idea of doing a time travel story that has almost no time travel in it, and once the space ship turned into a time machine, that element lent itself really well to the story.
This is your follow up series to “Kim & Kim”. How has the experience working on “Quantum Teen Are Go” been different (at all) from “Kim & Kim”?
MV: The biggest one is experience. “Kim & Kim” was the first time I ever got to complete a book, and we were working at a breakneck pace to try and hit our deadlines; we were generally only about three weeks ahead of release through that whole thing. And “Kim & Kim” was collaborative in a really different way than “QTAG” has been; the whole team has a different dynamic, and Eryk pushes me as a writer and challenges my pages in a way Eva usually doesn’t. I think it really brings his creative voice forward, which I love, because he’s the co-creator, so Nat and Sumesh are his babies as much as they’re mine.
“QTAG” is also being give so much more lead time than “Kim & Kim” ever got; like I said, that book was really frantic, often being wrapped on the last possible day. “QTAG” has had a lot more time to breathe, and I think it’s benefited from how I’ve grown as a stage manager.
I’ve been lucky enough to read the first issue and gets into the making and science behind time machines. What kind of research went into this and could you talk about how you, as a writer, make this something easily explainable to the reader?
MV: Literally zero.
That’s not entirely true; I actually did a good amount of reading in time travel and, like, pop quantum mechanics for this, but ultimately I didn’t like it quite as much as using totally made-up bullshit. The realistic stuff doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi as Reed Richards making up particles on the fly. It needed to really feel like anything was possible.
In the end, I tried to make it sound like there was a reasonable basis behind the stuff I was saying, and I wanted my technobabble to not be composed of entirely random garbage, so I made a point of couching things in real life concepts even as I danced around them with glee. I mention, for example, a component called an “Einstein-Rosen incipient.” Well, wormholes are sometimes referred to as “Einstein-Rosen bridges,” so an E-R incipient would just be a key component in creating one. And since in relativistic physics, wormholes are a major part of what makes time travel conceivable – after a fashion – I imported that. But it’s bullshit dressed up in realistic-y language.
Continued belowI do that all over the place. In issue 3, there’s a stargate, and I spend some time talking about energy at the wormhole’s event horizon, but I still basically cobbled it together from pop science and Star Trek.
Nat & Sumesh are a bit of a different pairing than Kim & Kim. They’re much more of a straight forward romantic couple than the friendship of the Kims. Could you talk about their relationship and if you had to approach writing them in a different way than the Kims?
MV:Oh totally. The Kims’ relationship is so much more complicated; they’re incredibly intimate and close, but they’re kind of platonic, and they’re also business partners. There are a lot of levels going on there that make them hard to really quantify, and I kind of wing it on a day-to-day basis with those two. The best way to describe them is that they are each other’s Personal Whole World.
Nat and Sumesh are in a really different place. They’ve only been together maybe five or six months (as opposed to the Kims’ years) and they’re overtly romantic – but that romance is coming from this place of being totally disconnected from their real lives. They’re both so unhappy and they find meaning and acceptance in each other, something they can’t get elsewhere. And their relationship has this accelerant in their underground activities, which are often death-defying and violent, which has really pumped their connection and sense of belonging with each other up a notch.
The Kims are just trying to survive and lean on each other for support; Nat and Sumesh are revolutionaries over their personal lives, and they’re both looking for total transformation and escape, which they find the first inklings of in each other.
Eryk Donovan is an amazing artist and did some killer work on both “Memetic” and “Cognetic”. How did he join the project and what made him the right artist for this story?
Eryk Donovan:Essentially the story and characters of “QTAG” are right up my alley. I love the techy, punk rock vibe, it’s sort of a love letter to those awesome 80’s and 90’s family/young adult sci-fi movies I grew up with in a certain way.
When Magdalene sent the synopsis and character sheets, I just had some very distinct images in my mind of these people almost immediately, and I sorta fell in love with them right there.
Mags said when she first sent it to me “I’m not sure if this is something you’d like to do or not” and I’m over here like YES, THIS IS ALL THE THINGS I LOVE. Kickass punk teens invading abandoned facilities, stealing tech from robot guards, fighting of rival gangs, and building something crazy in the garage!? Sign me up!
Lastly, “Kim & Kim” was a hit. It ended up on a lot of best of lists with good reason, it was awesome. Why should fans of that series pick up “Quantum Teens Are Go”?
MV: “Quantum Teens Are Go” has a lot of the same DNA as “Kim & Kim”; like I said, I developed it at a time when I didn’t think “Kim & Kim” would ever see the light of day, so I wanted something that had a badass trans girl who hits people with things and fights robots. It’s a much tighter story than the first volume of “Kim & Kim”, with a stronger through-line and less episodic craziness, so it’s a different experience. But I think y’all are gonna like it; they go together like peanut butter and honey.
“Quantum Teens Are Go” #1 is available February 22nd at any local comic shop.
