Tuesday Q&A: Zeb Wells
The writer talks about bringing Elektra into Dark Reign, reviving the New Mutants, Spider-Man meeting Obama and more
Posted Feb 10, 2009 12:00 am
Updated Feb 13, 2009 11:13 am
By Marc Strom
Zeb Wells has a darker story to tell.
One of the writers responsible for bringing Spider-Man into his Brand New Day, Wells kicks off the five-part DARK REIGN: ELEKTRA limited series drawn by Clay Mann on March 25. After her rescue from the Skrull Empire at the end of Secret Invasion, the Greek assassin will have to fight a war on many different fronts as she contends with the mess her impersonator has made of her life.
Beyond that, though, this past weekend saw the announcement of a NEW MUTANTS ongoing series written by Wells with art by Diogenes Neves, reuniting the original team beginning this summer. And to top it all off, Wells also wrote a certain team-up between Spider-Man and President Barack Obama in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #583 which you may have heard about, currently going into its fifth printing next week.
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DARK REIGN:
ELEKTRA #1
cover by
Lee Bermejo |
Marvel.com: Your next book is going to be DARK REIGN: ELEKTRA—how did that come about.
Zeb Wells: Well, [editor] Warren Simons called me about that, and asked if I had any interest in the character. [After that] I was trying to find a take and it actually took a while for it to click on what we wanted to do. What I found to be interesting about what we could do is make it so that Elektra has been kind of jacked up by the Skrulls at the beginning of the book, so that she's not as powerful as she's been in the past [when] it would be very hard to beat her. Now she's more on the run than she has been usually, and a little more vulnerable while she heals up.
Marvel.com: All of the Skrulls' former prisoners seem to be in different places now that they've come back, and Elektra, like you say, is clearly in rough shape physically. But where's she at mentally and psychologically?
Zeb Wells: I think she's very confused because she isn't quite clear—y'know, the Skrulls were messing with [their prisoners'] minds and their memories as well, so she's not exactly clear when she was abducted or what happened. And then again, everyone in the Marvel Universe isn't sure when or where she was abducted, so she's dealing with a lot of questions about her life and her behavior from the last couple of years, and a lot of stuff [is] coming back to haunt her that she wasn't necessarily responsible for.
Marvel.com: Has her experience as a Skrull prisoner altered her character or her world view in any way?
Zeb Wells: I don't think so. She was a fairly nihilistic character to begin with. I mean, she was an assassin and she never really had a huge problem with that, so I don't think she really had a lot of faith in the world beforehand. I think as far as her getting kidnapped by the Skrulls, it's just another thing for her to deal with.
Marvel.com: So she'll just be kicking ass and taking names like always?
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DARK REIGN:
ELEKTRA #2
cover by
Lee Bermejo |
Zeb Wells: Yeah, yeah. I don't see her as a character who sits around feeling sorry for herself.
Marvel.com: Does she have any sort of plan on how she's going to be taking her life back, or is she just making it up as she goes at this point?
Zeb Wells: At the beginning, early on we see that the different people who are mad at her are making no secret about it. She's being attacked early on, so she has a trail to follow of people that are trying to kill her, and basically her goal is to survive and follow the trail back and figure out why they're doing it so she can put a stop to it, because she's in no shape to fight them right now. So she needs to put an end to it as quickly as possible so she can heal up.
Marvel.com: Jumping over to NEW MUTANTS, I was just noticing as I was looking over all the stuff that you've written before that I think this is the first time you've written an ongoing series, isn't it? Or at least, for an extended period of time.
Zeb Wells: Yeah, yeah, and I'm hoping this will be a nice, long run. I haven't really had a long run on anything from the beginning. Hopefully this thing will go on for a while, [because] these characters are so awesome. There's no shortage of stories to tell; I'm hoping I can stay on it for a while.
Marvel.com: What made you want to make that move at this point, onto doing an ongoing series after doing these shorter runs for the last several years?
Zeb Wells: I just think I'm ready as a writer to do it. I think I'm at a place where I can handle it. I think that there [are] enough characters in that book, and enough interesting characters, that their stories can go on forever. I don't think there's ever going to be a shortage of things to say about those characters, and ways to observe them and see what they're doing.
Marvel.com: Were you a fan of the team growing up, and of the characters?
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NEW MUTANTS
#1 cover by
Alex Ross |
Zeb Wells: I was a fan around the time [of the] Inferno [crossover], so I missed the classic issues, but a couple years ago I went back and re-read those and really enjoyed them.
Marvel.com: What kind of tone are you going for in the book? Will you be going back to the tone of that original series, or doing something a little different with it?
Zeb Wells: It has to be a little different, because those characters have obviously grown up a lot since that series came out. I think it would be a disservice to the characters and people that have been reading about them if I just went back and tried to act like they're the same characters from that early run. I want to look at what those characters have been through since that series and then try to extrapolate how they would act as young adults. Because I think that's what they are now. I mean Sam has obviously been part of the proper X-Men team, and so I don't want this to look like [I'm] taking the characters backwards in any way. I want to make sure that people can see that it's a progression of the characters and that they're basically a team that's equal with the X-Men right now. They're just another team of mutants like the X-Men.
Marvel.com: When you were looking at them and imagining them as young adults, were there any interpersonal dynamics that you saw as really having changed between any characters from 25 years ago when they first appeared to now?
Zeb Wells: I think Bobby and Sam are gonna be really close because they seem to have gone through a lot more together. And then obviously the fact that Dani Moonstar has been depowered needs to be addressed, and how that changes her relationship with the team.
Marvel.com: You've said Karma will be the heart of the first arc on the book. Why her? Why were you drawn to her for this initial story?
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NEW MUTANTS
preview art by
Diogenes Neves |
Zeb Wells: I think her ability to project her mind into someone else's body and experience what they've experienced is powerful. And children victims play a big role in the first arc and she was a victim when she came over from her home country, so she has a lot of feelings about that. So I think that she was a good way into this story, because it deals with kidnapped children. Then Legion's in it, and certain parts of his personality are still just children, and Karma's the only one that can really get inside his head and figure all that out and deal with that. I really wanted to take the first arc to bring out her character so we can really see how she deals with people like that.
Marvel.com: Another thing I wanted to talk about was the Spider-Man/Obama story, which has its fifth printing coming out next week. What was it like writing that?
Zeb Wells: It was a lot of fun [getting] to work with [artist] Todd Nauck. From the time [editor] Steve [Wacker] told me about it to when it had to be out the door, I think I was told about it on a Thursday and I needed to have a few pages to Todd the next day so he could start drawing. So I just really wanted to write a story that would be fun. I figured a lot of people that didn't really read comics would be picking it up, and I only had five pages so I just wanted to tell a story that they might get a kick out of and that at the same time honored Obama and just what I thought about him, [to] show him being kind of cool and calm and collected as he seems to be in real life.
Marvel.com: When you were writing it did you have any idea of how big it would wind up being?
Zeb Wells: I figured Obama was really popular, and when I heard the idea I was like, "I would've wanted to read something like that, I would've checked it out." So I did think it was going to be popular. But I don't think anyone [predicted the success]. I mean obviously if it's going into its fifth printing no one knew it was going to be that big or sustain the demand that it has for so long.
Marvel.com: Any chance we'll see any more Spider-Man stories from you in the near future or otherwise?
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AMAZING
SPIDER-MAN
#583 first
printing cover by
Phil Jimenez |
Zeb Wells: Yeah, me and Steve Wacker have been talking and we're hoping that this next year I'll be able to do a few story arcs, but we're still working on the logistics of that.
Marvel.com: To finish, off, you've always seemed like something of a chameleon to me, in that you cover a lot of different genres and types of stories. I was wondering then what it is that draws you to any given story or any given character?
Zeb Wells: I think the most important thing, if you're going to write anything, is you have to have a take on the material that you think is going to bring something out of you or out of your writing that no one else could do. You don't want to do a story that you feel like everyone else can tell, you want to really get a take. And on top of that you really want the character to suggest the story to you. That's why I really like to do stories [with] characters that have a lot of back story or work with artists that have a very specific point of view in their artwork. Like when you work with someone like Seth Fisher, [his] artwork suggests what kind of story that artwork likes to tell. If you look at certain characters, those characters suggest what kind of story they'd like to see. That's what's exciting to me. And not every character grabs you like that, but when a certain concept or an artist or a character grabs you that way, that's what excites me about the whole process.
To read some of Zeb Wells' work, visit Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited.
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