During an interview at Emerald City Comic Con, writer Joshua Williamson talked to us about his upcoming SECRET WARS book, RED SKULL and how the team all plays off of each other while trying to hunt down the possibly still alive Red Skull.
COMIC VINE: You have some big stuff coming up at Marvel with SECRET WARS. I assume you're pretty excited about this since it's a pretty big event to get involved with.
JOSH WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I'm really excited. What's going on with the villains in SECRET WARS? In the Battleworld, the Red Skull is supposed to be dead. He was trying to mass forces. He's still a bad guy. He's completely evil. In no way is he a good guy in this story. And also, he's dead. Word starts getting around that he might be alive and he might be forming forces, so this team of villains, and a couple heroes or anti-heroes, go into the Deadlands, over the Shield to make sure he's dead, and if he happens to be alive, kill him.
CV: So there's the element of the hunt here?
JW: Yeah. You know me though. You read NAILBITER. You read GHOSTED. You know it's going to be dark.
CV: When I saw the info for it, I thought, "Oh, definitely a Josh book."
JW: Yeah. It's super-dark. You have to imagine someone like Red Skull, who is such an evil force, is so manipulative, and I've always been a believer that once you start to look for the darkness you realize it was all around you all the time. The story is very much a Heart of Darkness sort of story about how you keep going deeper and deeper into this thing and in the process of doing that, the journey to find the Red Skull, it starts to corrupt them. It starts to turn them as well. It gets kinda dark.
Even when he's not even there, the idea of him is so evil. Everything he represents is so messed up and horrible that the search for him starts to make them things they wouldn't normally do. He's one of the most evil figures in Marvel's history and you can't do a story with him, without it being dark. For me, with GHOSTED, NAILBITER, and BIRTHRIGHT, I like to deal with certain kinds of issues. I like to put people in negative situations to see how they respond.
When you have these hero characters, and some villains who are not as bad as the Red Skull, when you put them in these situations, it's interesting to see how they respond. And Winter Soldier is there and he's being forced to work with these villains and he's there for pure and simple revenge. He's there to...... there's unfinished business.
CV: More than just "it's Cap's enemy!"
JW: That's part of it too. There's a lot of that kind of stuff going on. Magneto is there. There's this closure there with him hunting a Nazi and what it does to him and the team as they go to get to him [Red Skull].
I was really worried at first. We talked a lot about stuff and I told them I wanted to go to a dark place with this book. I was very honest about it, and they've been super responsive to everything. It's been awesome.
CV: You've mentioned Magneto and Winter Solider, but you have a really diverse group of villains within this book: Jack O'Lantern, Moonstone and others. Did you pick the line up and what's your thought process behind picking these characters?
JW: It's a little bit of both. There were some availability issues and originally Winter Soldier wasn't there. We added him a little bit later, which I'm really happy about. He's crucial to the story. You can't do a team of villains without Moonstone on it. I'm a huge Thunderbolts fan. I love Thunderbolts. It was one of those things where if I'm going to have a book like this I have to have Moonstone on it.
We have Jack O'Lantern just because he's an evil, twisted, little bastard. It was nice having him because you know he's the type of character who will stab someone in the back or betray someone or go the wrong path. I really wanted different personalities to bounce off each other. With Karla, she's so analytical and very much thinking. She's a very thinking villain. Her with someone like Electro, which in our book is the Ultimate version and a bit immature, and he's the first one that starts buying into the whole Red Skull thing, becoming infected with his ideas.
With each character, it was mostly my ideas I'd throw out "I think this would be cool. What do you think of this character? That character?" In the end, I'm really happy with the team. In the terms of the dynamic, it works really well. Also, in terms of visually, it works really well.
CV: With Red Skull, are there a lot of propaganda elements in this book?
JW: He's an evil force of nature. Some of the evil forces in Battleworld use him as a symbol or their rebellion.
CV: How's the art looking on this book?
JW:Luca Pizzari is drawing it. He's been doing these awesome designs and when we first started talking, we bonded immediately. When the art first started coming in and we were chatting, we clicked. It was an awesome experience and he's very energetic and very excited about it. For him, he's been telling me that this is the kind of story he's wanted to do, so it really works out.
CV: Did Luca do a lot of changes to the character designs on his own or did you two collaborate for this project?
JW: It was a bit of both. We talked about things ahead of time with the design and there were certain things I had ideas about but weren't fully formed because we didn't have an artist when I first signed on. Once he came in, he took that and made it fully formed. He ran with it and I knew he was fully capable from seeing his past work. I knew he would bring this sort of energy to it.
Thanks to Joshua Williamson for talking to us during the very busy Seattle convention and make sure to check out SECRET WARS: RED SKULL when it hits local comic shops in July.
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