Elric: The Balance Lost (Free Comic Book Day)

Regular readers of Talking Comics with Tim, before you ask yourself “Chris Roberson, didn’t you just interview him last month?” Yes and no. This interview focuses solely on Roberson’s plans for the new BOOM! Studios series, Elric: The Balance Lost, which will be previewed for readers this Saturday, May 7, via the company’s Free Comic Book Day offering. As noted by BOOM! Studios: “For 40 years, the exploits of Elric have thrilled comic book fandom, beginning with his introduction to the world of comics in Marvel’s Conan The Barbarian #15 in 1972. Now, Michael Moorcock, the godfather of the Multiverse concept, brings one of the most critically acclaimed and recognizable figures in the history of fantasy fiction back to sequential art! This Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) edition heralds the new ongoing Elric series featuring a crisis across multiple worlds that will involve Moorcock’s other famous fantasy franchise characters: Corum of the Scarlet Robe and Dorian Hawkmoon. Meet the Pale Prince in an epic that could only be called The Balance Lost! And make sure you don’t miss the new ongoing series this summer!” Thanks to BOOM! Studios’ Chip Mosher and Ivan Salazar for helping arrange this email interview, and (of course) thanks to Roberson for indulging another round of questions. Once you’ve read the interview, please be sure to check out CBR’s preview of the FCBD offering. If you find yourself in the Austin area this Saturday, be sure to catch Roberson at Austin Books from 10AM to 5PM.

Tim O’Shea: Ian Brill recently wrote of the Free Comic Book Day Elric issue, “Whether you’re new to the Elric mythos or a longtime fan you will dig it.” A) very brave of Mr. Brill to use a 1970s term like “dig” (I kid) and B) What is the key to writing a story that can equally appeal to new readers and longtime readers?

Chris Roberson: Well, to be fair, he could have used “grok” in the place of “dig,” which might have been a LITTLE braver.

But really, the trick is to give just enough information about the characters and the concepts to get new readers up to speed, without boring all of the longtime readers with stuff they already know. Based on my own experiences coming into long-running comic, TV, and novel series when I was younger, I don’t think new readers need to know EVERYTHING. They just need to know the basics, enough to understand who the characters are in general terms and what the basic conflict is. Reading to find out more is one of the things that keeps it interesting!

O’Shea: Elric: The Balance Lost allows you to build a story that swims throughout the many universes in Michael Moorcock’s fantasy novels. Did that require a great deal of reading or re-reading of his novels to get a good feel for the universes?

Roberson: Well, as someone who has worshipped at the altar of Michael Moorcock for a quarter century now, I have a habit of going back and rereading a bunch of his novels periodically, anyway. And it just so happened that when BOOM! approached me a bit over a year ago about doing this project, it was only a year or two since I finished a gargantuan marathon reread of ALL of Moorcock’s novels and stories.

But even though I had them all still pretty fresh in my head, I figured it was the perfect excuse to read some of my favorites AGAIN, and so took a month or two to reread a big stack of novels once more, this time taking copious notes.

One of the things that readers will quickly realize, I hope, is that this isn’t just an Elric story, though he is the character who is front and center throughout. This is more line a line-wide company crossover that takes in DOZENS of characters, a Secret Wars or Crisis on Infinite Earths, except that many of these characters either haven’t been seen in comics for a LONG time or have NEVER appeared in comics before.

O’Shea: Dabbling in the Moorcock multiverse, as a writer what are some of the qualities (about the make-up of these universes and characters) that you admire and that you are able to capitalize upon in your own story?

Roberson: Well, more than anything, Moorcock’s view of the multiverse is just a fantastic engine for telling stories in any conceivable environment, on the one hand, and for exploring ideas and philosophies, on the other. One of the key aspects of Moorcock’s cosmology is the notion of an eternal struggle between Law and Chaos. In the more fantastical settings, this plays out as a literal war between supernatural powers on either side, with gods, demons, and demiurges directing the movement of human agents like chess pieces moving across the board. But in the more mundane settings, stories set in what is effectively the “real” world, this same tension between Law and Chaos plays out, but more often as philosophical tendencies that push characters one way or the other.

But readers should note that “Law and Chaos” are not simply synonyms for “Good and Evil.” There is not a moral component to that struggle, at least not in any objective sense. Law and Chaos are simply two different ways of approaching the universe, and the heroes in Moorcock’s novels can often find themselves fighting on one side or the other, and sometimes both or neither!

O’Shea: How are the dynamics changed when writing a story if the characters are fighting either on the sides of law or chaos (as opposed to good versus evil) a distinction you recently made in an MTV Geek interview? Does that allow you to explore more shades of gray in the story?

Roberson: It’s all situational, in Moorcock’s cosmology. Either side left unchecked will lead to negative consequences, and the ideal is for the two forces to be held in a tension where neither is too dominant. That’s why the Eternal Champion (of which Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, et al. are merely incarnations) can fight on the side of Law or Chaos, but doesn’t serve either of them. The Eternal Champion ultimately serves the Balance, which is the embodiment of that tension.

I suppose that “shades of gray” is an apt phrase for it, but I don’t tend to look at it that way. To see complexity and ambiguity as “gray” assumes that there is a black and a white on either side, moral absolutes of “good” and “evil.” In Moorcock’s cosmology, that doesn’t apply. It’s more a question of ethics and pragmatism than it is of morality.

O’Shea: In the FCBD Elric: The Balance Lost prologue, BOOM! has seen fit to do an Elric/Moorcock comics timeline dating back to 1972. Do you ever get intimidated looking at the strong creators who have worked with these characters in the past–or is that a non-issue for you?

Roberson: Well, I’m working with the characters and concepts of MICHAEL MOORCOCK! As much as I admire the work of so many of those comics creators who have worked with his characters before, I don’t think any of them intimidate me more following in HIS footsteps!

O’Shea: What strengths do you think series artist Francesco Biagini brings to the project?

Roberson: I have to admit that I wasn’t familiar with Francesco’s work before he was attached to ELRIC: THE BALANCE LOST, but as soon as I saw the character designs he’d submitted I knew he was perfect for the job. And the pages he’s been turning in have been AMAZING. This book is going to look GREAT.

Do you wish all your new projects could get the potential boost gained from having a FCBD presence?

Roberson: It certainly doesn’t hurt!

O’Shea: Will you be making any FBCD in-store appearances this year?

Roberson: I will indeed. I’ll be at Austin Books (in Austin, strangely enough) from 10AM to 5PM, with Sharpie in hand!

O’Shea: Speaking of multiverses, how hard is it to shift gears as a writer when writing the multiple universes and characters you write at present. And on the flip side, does writing different stories/genres sometimes help give you clarity–is there ever a time that a story challenge solution for Story A comes into your head while you are working on Story B?

Roberson: I find that it’s actually EASIER to work on multiple books at the same time, and I have adopted a rule that I won’t do two issues worth of scripts for any given title back-to-back. Spending time working on other, VERY different projects in between issues on any given book means that the back of my brain is able to bubble over with ideas for a month or so, and when I come back to write the next issue I’ve got a head full of new ideas to bring to the table.

Batman Beyond

The more I thought about it, the more pleased I was that DC will be publishing an ongoing Batman Beyond book. Sure, the series ended over eight years ago; and sure, the episode of “Justice League Unlimited” which served as an epilogue (helpfully called “Epilogue”) is also fading into the mists of history.

To me, though, a new commitment to Terry McGinniss’ alternate future signals — whether DC realizes it or not — a renewed commitment to the Multiverse. Remember, the “Beyond” future (or something remarkably similar) was officially made part of the post-52 Multiverse as Earth-12, and barring a radical departure from DC, Earth-12 is where I expect Terry’s adventures to remain. Put simply, the BB mythology is based on the continuity of DC’s various animated series, from “Batman” through “Justice League Unlimited”; and while that continuity isn’t radically different from the comics’, it’s different enough. Bruce Wayne’s caped career ends rather ignominiously, for one thing. (Also, no Jason Todd; maybe no Golden Age superheroes; and the histories of the Flash, Earth’s Green Lanterns, Hawkgirl and Hawkman, and Wonder Woman each diverge in significant ways.) Besides, if DC really wants to drop hints about how its modern-day characters ended up, it can always use the farther future of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Of course, like any good parallel universe, Earth-12 can offer its own set of cautionary tales to the main-line superheroes. I look forward to the inevitable crossover, the interactions it will inspire, and the questions it may answer (whatever happened to Nightwing Beyond, anyway?). Like the old Earth-Two, where a middle-aged Robin and eager young Huntress never really became a Dynamic Duo, Earth-12 offers a future where the traditional Batman is gone, so the legacy must adapt to endure.

I know I’ve said this a lot, but that opportunity for radical experimentation is a big part of what I like about a Multiverse. It allows DC (or whoever) to preserve its main-line characters on one Earth, while using the others to go nuts. Now, this can be taken to ridiculous extremes — you don’t want Regular Batman running through a Rolodex of alternate selves every time he lands in not-quite-familiar surroundings — but one or two (again, like the old Earth-Two and Earth-Three) are fine, and a few are probably manageable. The 2008 Justice Society Annual has already explored the new Earth-2, with its familiar Robin and Huntress, so Earth-12 may be a good complement.

But see, I am looking at this from the narrow perspective of main-line DC-Earth, much like I viewed the old Multiverse from the Silver/Bronze Age perspective of Earth-One. Already I am impliedly discounting Batman Beyond’s independent storytelling possibilities in favor of what can it do for the regulars? A Multiverse is a versatile narrative tool, but very easily it can descend into merely a curiosity farm. The infamous Countdown: Arena miniseries, a four-issue cage match for alt-history superheroes, is evidence enough of that. Even if the major parallel universes start off separate but equal, one always threatens to become more equal than the others.

Such a perspective has been hard-wired into the current Multiverse, pruned like a topiary so that only one version of its original, endlessly-replicated timeline remains. Thus, DC’s main superhero line isn’t just unique, it’s the model for the rest of the 52. From there it follows that what happens on the main DC-Earth matters — and what happens somewhere else … well, maybe not so much.

* * *

Conventional wisdom holds that the old Multiverse of DC’s “infinite Earths” was destroyed twenty-five years ago because it was too confusing for new readers. That has always seemed like a pretty thin rationale, but I don’t think DC was being disingenuous at the time. These days, though, DC has no incentive to do Elseworlds, or other such “alternate” standalone stories, because by definition they don’t matter. Where, for example, is the market for a Green Arrow Elseworlds which finds him on the run after killing a supervillain? Better instead to make that its own mini-event, running through Green Arrow and Justice League, thereby maximizing the shock values. Maim Roy Harper and kill Roy’s daughter on a parallel Earth, and the readers might not notice … but do the same on the “real” DC-Earth, and there are consequences.

Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters #1

I don’t mean to be snide or flip about this kind of thing. I was present at the introduction of Lian Harper in the pages of New Teen Titans, and the goofy sweater Roy wore as he held her still sticks in my memory. Still, I won’t try to put a value on her worth as a character. To me she existed mostly to show Roy’s domestication — “responsible single dad” naturally plays better than “ex-junkie” — but now, who knows what might have been done with her? I will also not attempt to place Lian’s death on some continuum of tastelessness (compared with, say, the Cylon No. 6 killing that child in the “Battlestar Galactica” pilot), because that strikes me as a futile exercise. I go back and forth about whether I think Lian’s death was gratuitous (although I’m inclined to say yes); but ultimately, as I argued a couple of weeks ago, what’s important is the story itself.

One could argue (and I haven’t read this week’s Green Arrow, so I don’t know if the argument has already been made) that the events of Cry For Justice #7 have a precedent in Green Arrow’s “urban avenger” phase of the mid-to-late 1980s. Basically, in the Longbow Hunters miniseries (and subsequent ongoing series), Mike Grell had Ollie ditch all the trick arrows in favor of the old-school pointy kind, mostly because they hurt a lot more. So this could just be the last gasp of that phase before Ollie goes back to his more happy-go-lucky, chili-cooking, unreconstructed-hippie self. (It could also mean there’s some movement on that SuperMax movie which supposedly sends him to supervillain prison, and DC is trying to get us used to the idea, but I kinda doubt that.)

The story, though, seems to me to be what would it take for Green Arrow to kill a guy? (Again, Longbow Hunters postulated that it would take Black Canary being tortured and probably raped, but that was a while back.) Okay, so now we have Cry For Justice, and for the next few years or so we will be dealing with the fallout from Green Arrow killing Prometheus. Never mind that we were finally putting behind us the fact that Wonder Woman killed a guy, and she even did it on TV. Now the story has become what happens after Green Arrow kills a guy? Well, I imagine there are two distinct outcomes. Either he goes to jail (or is otherwise punished), and Warners sees how well that SuperMax movie might be received, or he doesn’t. Personally, I don’t think Prometheus is dead, mostly because CFJ writer James Robinson was so effusive about the character that I can’t believe he’d say goodbye after one miniseries.

Anyway, Green Arrow’s 70th anniversary (November 2011) will be here before you know it, and I don’t expect DC will celebrate it with Ollie in the clink. One day, sooner rather than later, readers will look back on Ollie’s history and say “remember when he killed that guy?” By then it may be an integral part of his character — heck, it might even be reconciled with his political views — but it might also be so incidental that it could well have happened on another planet.

And that unsubtle transition brings us back to the Multiverse, where these kinds of questions can be asked and answered with more freedom than the main-line Earth can offer — and, not incidentally, can have consequences which last longer than an editorial whim. Maybe on Earth-41 Oliver Queen turned himself in, retired from crimefighting, and helped Roy rehabilitate his own superhero career. Maybe he went to jail for life. Maybe the real Prometheus ended up killing him, and Roy became Dark Arrow.

It feels transient and it seems like a cop-out, but a Multiverse can really put the focus on stories, because once you make those kind of definitive, fundamental choices, odds are you’ll have to live with them. After all, the point of a Multiverse is to make just those kinds of choices. This false conception of “what matters” is short-sighted and self-serving. Only the stories matter, and regardless of continuity, good stories endure. I suspect that’s why Batman Beyond is coming back, and why “The Fall Of Green Arrow” has its work cut out for it.

Grumpy Old Fan

Although I wrote quite a lot over the past year about DC’s weekly series Trinity, I kept coming up with questions that went outside the scope of my weekly notes. Fortunately, writer Kurt Busiek was nice enough to participate in the following e-mail interview, conducted after Trinity concluded (and after he returned from a well- deserved vacation).

We discussed the nuts and bolts of producing Trinity, its connections to a couple of Busiek’s other DC projects, a few nitpicky items, and what the year-long series leaves behind.

* * *

TCB: How did the weekly format affect your approach? Did you feel obliged to pace the book so as to satisfy both the weekly audience and the “wait-for-traders?”

kdb: I always feel obligated to make a project satisfying in whatever formats it’s planned for. So yes, we wanted each individual issue to be an enjoyable read, and we wanted each trade paperback volume to be an enjoyable read. Which was a little tricky, since we didn’t know, going into it, whether it would be collected as 4 TPBs (meaning the volumes would end at #13, 26, 39, and 52) or 3 TPBs (meaning #17, #34 or 35, and #52).*

That said, we were aware that with a weekly schedule, it’s only 7 days to the next chapter, so if one week is light on action (or virtually all action), that would likely be balanced out by the next installment. Or maybe even by the story in the co-feature.

TCB: What sorts of decisions went into breaking the series into individual two-story issues? Were there any labor considerations, for example to give the artists time to rest up for the next crowd scene? Did you and Fabian Nicieza write particular second stories for particular art teams?

kdb: We did try to juggle things for the strengths of the various co-feature artists, yes. But we had flexibility there, because we had enough lead time so that we didn’t have to have them in strict rotation. If we needed two chapters in a row from Scott [McDaniel], for instance, we’d just have to make sure we were plotted far enough ahead that while he was working on chapter one of two, Tom [Derenick] and Mike [Norton] had their own chapters to work on. As a result, the co-feature chapters didn’t come in in order, but we had enough time that we didn’t need them to; we could juggle talent and material and match them up right.

As a rough rule of thumb, we started out giving Scott spooky stuff or crime stuff, Tom big superhero action and Mike “people” stories, but varied that around as we got more of a sense of what they could do. Tom turned out to be very good at space stuff, for instance, and Scott far better at “cosmic/trippy” stuff than anyone might have imagined, possibly even him. By the end of it, we were making sure he got the psychedelic stuff, because we knew he’d knock it out of the park, while at the start we were thinking of him for shadows and mood…

TCB: Especially considering the artists’ deadline pressures, I thought Trinity‘s art was consistently good. Among other things, I feel like I’ve been to Thayer’s Notch now that I’ve seen it drawn by Mark Bagley and Art Thibert; and I was very impressed by Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens’ psychedelic Worldsoul/Krona story. Not that you had low expectations for the art, but were there any scenes or sequences which looked better than you’d written them?

kdb: I agree with you on the art being consistently good — credit the artists, of course, but also credit Mike Carlin, for lining up such a good squad of guys and making sure to manage their schedules right.

As for which scenes looked better than I imagined, I’m tempted to say “All of them.” Getting pages in was a treat, because everyone found ways to go a little further, make it a bit bigger, or funnier, or more affecting. From giant battles to big mystery to chapters like that great Norton/Kesel chapter about the Riddler, which was just perfectly paced, it was a pleasure all the way through.

TCB: Mike Carlin edited most of Countdown, and worked on the “weekly” Superman titles of the ’90s. Was he more helpful with regard to the logistics of the book or the creative aspects?

kdb: Mike weighed in on the big-picture stuff, going over the outlines, the big ideas and so on, but when it came to the chapter-by-chapter stuff, Fabian and I had a pretty good sense of how to play it out, and Mike rarely asked for changes. So I’d say that after the big story decisions had been made, he was very supportive creatively, and had to be the scheduling logistics taskmaster more often than anything else. And his experience juggling a large creative team helped out a lot.

TCB: What was it like collaborating with Fabian? How much input did he have into those scripts, and/or the book’s overall direction?

kdb: Fabian was insanely helpful. On the one hand, Fabian and I have worked together in a lot of different situations, going back to when he was a promotions manager at Marvel and I was a sales manager. We get along, we have a similar enough sensibility that we can pretty easily pull in the same direction, and he’s an inventive and professional writer. One of the reasons Mike didn’t need to involve himself all that much in the chapter-by-chapter plotting was that we pretty much had it covered — Fabian was kind of an extra story editor, where I could call him up and bounce ideas off him, and get feedback and suggestions from someone deeply involved in the story, who wasn’t pulled in a million directions at once by other emergencies.

At the same time, Fabian brought tons of creativity and no ego to the process — he knew going in that I’d be basically driving the bus, and his job was to help. I probably trampled all over his stuff dozens of times, replotting co-features, tweaking the dialogue so much that at points it amounted to rewriting rather than co-writing — but it was all in the service of keeping the two pieces of the issue together and working at speed; it’s simply easier, sometimes, to rewrite rather than talk all the details through.

So in the end, the credits are a bit misleading. Fabian’s name doesn’t appear on the lead chapters, but he was essentially a contributing writer on those, a sounding board, a suggestion guy and more. And my name is only listed as co-plotter on the co-features, but I had a lot more input than that. It was very organic — we were on the phone a lot and figured things out together. So I was driving the bus, but Fabian was co-pilot, or something. He had a number of very good suggestions, pushing me to think harder about Gangbuster and Enigma and others, and making sure I didn’t set something up and then let it fade away when it should play a larger role. He’s had a lot more experience with gang-written books than I do, so he saw pitfalls and structural issues sooner than I did, and kept us from falling prey to them.

And then I’d rewrite all his stuff; what an ingrate!

TCB: Appropriately enough, Trinity itself seems to be the third part of a trilogy, wrapping up storylines from JLA/Avengers and JLA‘s “Syndicate Rules.” How much of what became Trinity did you have in mind when you were writing the earlier stories?

kdb: Almost none of it. We put Krona in the Egg at the end of JLA/Avengers because it seemed like a good place to leave him, somewhere that could lead to something rich, but we hadn’t figured out what, yet. And then in “Syndicate Rules,” we didn’t do a lot with the Egg itself, but built up ideas like the Void Hound, or the CSA’s favor- bank rules, knowing that they’d be paid off later, but again, not precisely how. So it’s more a case of putting things into places that feel like a satisfying resolution for the moment, but have a built-in springboard for further explanation. It’s more about knowing that there’s stuff you can do that’ll work than knowing exactly what stuff that’ll be.

TCB: Apart from simply being shorter, do you think Trinity would have been significantly different as, say, an arc in Superman or JLA?

kdb: Oh, it’d have to be. Keep in mind that the JLA doesn’t turn up until #3, and then is erased from reality for the middle third of the story. If it was a JLA story, we’d have gotten tons of complaints from people who thought we were using JLA as a vehicle to ram the Trinity down everyone’s throats, at the expense of the rest of the League, and then that we weren’t even letting the League be part of their own book. So it’d have had to have been a much, much different story.

Same for if it was in Superman – it’s not a straight Superman story; it’s a story that has Superman as one of the main characters. So to build it more fully around him would change a lot. It doesn’t really fit any existing DC book — to properly describe it, it’s either a book about the Trinity, with a whole bunch of guest stars, or a book about the DCU Universe, with a special focus on the Trinity. So if you don’t call it Trinity, you need to call it DCU or DC Nation or something like that. (It was originally pitched, by the way, as “DC Superstars: Starring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman….and The DC Universe!” Which would have fit pretty well, as it worked out.)

TCB: It seemed to me that Trinity shared some of its story structure, at least superficially, with JLA/Avengers. Both stories begin with a quest to gather certain powerful items, which are then used to create an alternate timeline. Although the two stories have their differences, are the similarities just coincidental?

kdb: I think they’re coincidence. The quest-for-power-objects part of JLA/Avengers was there to help make it a travelogue/showcase of the two universes, an excuse to have a lot of fun locations for the fights. In Trinity, it was the villains going after power-objects, and that was to set up the building mystery of the Tarot connections and the personal items that were used in the Trinity spell.

TCB: Another JLA/Avengers question. In JLA/Avengers, I got the feeling you were lamenting the heroes’ various personal tragedies, and saying that no matter how appealing it looked, the combined DC/ Marvel timeline was just a pipe dream. Here, though, the experience of the deified Trinitarians suggests that the characters’ tragedies are inevitable, and perhaps even necessary. What do these stories say about the usefulness of these events?

kdb: In JLA/Avengers, the “tragedies” you’re referring to were things like the Scarlet Witch losing her children, or Hal and Barry being dead — I’d call that the kind of upheaval and calamity that happened to the heroes over the course of their careers, but which they had to accept as their burden to bear to restore the world to what they should be. In Trinity, you mean the legends, with the death of Robin and the Max Lord thing and such, right? I don’t know that we’re saying those are necessary, merely that they were big events that sent the heroes off into directions that isolated them, and they had to overcome those and reconnect with their true missions, rather than obsessing about personal failures.

TCB: Apart from those tragedies, how important generally was it to tell a story about these particular versions of the characters? Was it simply a case of using what had been established and/or what was current? Could you have gotten the same points across with more “timeless” versions?

kdb: I think they were reasonably timeless versions. We didn’t dwell all that hard on minor details — we used recent history in the legend stuff, but we used it in the process of illustrating who the characters are at their core. In another era, with different histories, those legends would have been different, but I’m sure we’d have found ways to say what we needed to say.

TCB: Were there any characters who, for whatever reason, didn’t make the final cut? (Personally, I was a little surprised not to see the “Sword of Atlantis” Aquaman.)

kdb: DC didn’t seem to know what they were going to do with Aquaman, so even though I created that version, I didn’t want to force him into the story. The big loss, to my mind, was Metron — we’d set up that Metron was interested in what would happen to the Cosmic Egg, and then couldn’t use him as we saw it play out because the New Gods were off-limits due to Final Crisis.

And we couldn’t use Madame Xanadu, because of her Vertigo series, but that meant that Charity got to play a role, which spun the story a bit differently, and that was fun.

Overall, though, we got to use most everyone we wanted to.

TCB: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are each inspired by their parents in very different ways. However, Trinity didn’t really concern itself with those differences. Why not?

kdb: It didn’t really come up. We could have made that another aspect of their trinitarianity, if that’s even a word — Superman was raised by loving parents, Batman’s an orphan, Wonder Woman had a single Mom; Superman’s adopted, Batman’s a natural son, Wonder Woman was created…but after a while adding more details starts to feel like you’re just piling them on, not going deeper into the characters.

There certainly stuff there to explore, and maybe someone will do a story about it. But we had enough going on that we didn’t need to add that in, too.

TCB: Here are a couple of really nit-picky questions about the altered timeline. First, why did Hal Jordan become Sky-Knight if John Stewart was still Green Lantern? I take it Hal quit because he couldn’t operate as GL on Earth, leaving John to be the GL of Sector 2814 everywhere but Earth. Also, why did Interceptor wear those goggles?

kdb: Interceptor’s visor has hi-tech sensors in it — it allowed her military bosses to observe what she saw; to see and hear what she did. Part of her being an agent of the government rather than a solo act. Hal Jordan quit being Green Lantern at some point and then built a new identity to keep being a hero, and John became our sector’s GL. Neither of these really came up, but like you say, it’s nit-picky. Given the way comics work, we could see either character again and learn more about them, I suppose. I really got to like Interceptor, and would love to see Supergirl meet her, in a compare/contrast story. Each one would think the other’s life was unbearable; it could be a lot of fun.

TCB: He only popped up briefly here, so where might we see Khyber again?

kdb: Anywhere! He’s out there, but he’s very secretive, so he could pop up anywhere, or stay under the radar for years. He could make a good JLA villain, or get involved with some espionage/intrigue characters, or whatever. We hinted at him in “Syndicate Rules,” by the way, when I was planning him as a JLA villain. But I don’t think anyone noticed.

TCB: The Tarot plays a pretty significant part in the story, especially early on. I imagine that is the kind of thing you want to get right, because you’ll probably have some readers who will know if you got it wrong. Did you have to do a lot of research before you felt comfortable with it? Did you consult any experts?

kdb: Fabian and I got a number of reference books, and used those — I sort of delegated much of that to him, because, well, I was juggling so much stuff I didn’t have the time to be more than cursory about it, and he was willing….

TCB: Trinity works in a lot of Clark’s co-workers from his pre-Crisis days as a TV anchorman. That seemed to me to indicate a fondness for the Cary Bates/Elliott Maggin/Curt Swan era of Superman. Apart from your own work on the Trinitarians, and the ways they’re being handled currently, to whom do you look for inspiration for each of these characters?

kdb: Everyone. I’m not looking to recreate any particular era, and my Superman, for instance, is informed by what Weisinger and his crew did, what Julie [Schwartz]‘s creative staff did, what Byrne and Stern and Jurgens and Ordway and others did…. I like the Bronze Age Superman a lot, especially the Cary Bates issues, but when I write Superman it’s a synthesis of all the stuff I like about Superman over the years. I don’t try to hit particular notes, I simply have a sense of who the character is from reading all those comics, and that guy in my head is the guy I try to get on paper. Same for Batman and Wonder Woman … I’m a big fan of Englehart’s Batman, for instance, but I’m not specifically trying to capture that, it’s just one piece of the mosaic that makes up Batman to me. Wonder Woman’s history is a lot more fragmented, so I suppose I’m more guided by the stuff from what George [Perez] did to what Gail [Simone] is doing today, but there’s certainly parts of the Bronze and Silver Age Wonder Woman in there, stuff that resonates with me and feels appropriate to who she is today.

TCB: Any immediate plans for Trinity‘s supporting cast, including Konvikt, Tarot and Gangbuster, Enigma and Stephie/Void Hound, and Tomorrow Woman?

kdb: I can’t say, at present. I hope we’ll see a lot of them — including the Dreambound — but if there are plans I’m not at liberty to announce them, and if there aren’t I’m too sneaky to admit it.

TCB: Finally, can you share what’s next for the new Earth-Trinity? Should we call it “Earth One,” or was that just a wink to fans of the old Multiverse?

kdb: “Earth One” was a deliberate choice, and done in part at DC’s request. There’s definitely more than a wink going on there.

But again, I can’t say, at present, what it’s leading to…

kdb

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* [It turned out to be 3 volumes, with vol. 2 covering issues #18-35 -- TCB]