COMICS: Jonathan Hickman Calls SECRET WARS A "Horror Story"
Secret Wars scribe, Jonathan Hickman recently spoke with Entertainment Weekly and said the upcoming event was like a "Horror Story". Hit the jump to check out what else he had to say.
This May the Marvel Universe is going to change as worlds collide in the massive SECRET WARS event. In anticipation of this writer Jonathan Hickman spoke with Entertainment Weekly to discuss the story's origin, event fatigue, and his future with Marvel Comics.
EW: This is something you’ve wanted to do for awhile, and is something you’ve been building toward with Avengers. But it’s also a big crossover event. Is it difficult to do something that’s a conclusion to a story you’ve been working on for years, and also have it achieve all of these other ambitions outside of that?
Jonathan Hickman: The interesting thing is that is hasn’t changed at all since I pitched it. Where we’re headed was always the endgame. I guess you could say, could I convince editorial and convince everybody at Marvel that it was a good idea and something that they would want to publish. Three years out, it looked like an interesting thing. [Convicing Marvel wasn’t easy] because Avengers is not really a happy story. The Avengers books, we kind of billed it as a mystery—what’s behind all of this stuff, what’s causing all of the incursions? Which is a total lie, because it’s not a mystery, it’s a horror story. And we just didn’t tell anybody, so everybody is waiting for this kind of, “Ta da, whodunit” kind of stuff at the end and that’s not what the story is.
EW then asks why he decided to look at this story more as a horror to which Hickman responds by saying he wanted to show what the heroes do "when they can't win."
HICKMAN: The premise of Avengers is that it’s a book about light and life, and New Avengers was always about darkness and death, and they contrast each other. What nobody saw coming was that the New Avengers book would completely eclipse the Avengers book at the end of the second act and rocket us into the stuff that’s going on now. We get to a point where all of the arguments that we’ve kind of been talking about in both books — what do heroes do when they can’t win? — that’s kind of the story that I wanted to do. Some of them stop acting like heroes and some become villains, some go quietly and some do not. Some rediscover who they are.
Entertainment Weekly goes on to ask him if he has plans to continue to work at Marvel after Secret Wars. Hickman then says that while he will take a few months off that the doors are still open for him back at Marvel
HICKMAN:Marvel is a fantastic place to work. They’ve treated me exceptionally well. We’ve had pretty upfront and honest discussions about what I’m doing next, which is catching up on my sleep a little bit. I’m taking a couple months off. But I’m not a big fan of saying I am or I am not definitely going to do things, especially when I’m as tired as I am right now. I’m positive that I will continue to do stuff for Marvel, I’m just not going to do stuff in the six months that follow Secret Wars. I don’t have a book I’m going to work on, I don’t have a pitch sitting on some editor’s desk. I’m trying not to even think about it. You know, one of the cool things about Marvel – people don’t talk about this enough – Marvel is a fantastic place to learn your craft and experiment in a way that you can’t in other areas of comics. The same thing is true of DC, but at Marvel I’ve done a lot of experimentation on telling stories a certain way, doing these Byzantine, crazy, plot-centric things that I don’t know that I would do if I wasn’t operating under a contract and had a
book to work on.
Lastly, Hickman responds to a question of whether he is "Concerned at all about event fatigue."
HICKMAN: Most of the normal events are structured like a movie: you have to have a big opening. Readers nowadays, are just savvy to storytelling. We consume so much of this stuff that it’s really hard to be surprised. You have to carefully cultivate a surprise. That’s really hard to do in blockbuster-type stuff. I think people get tired of seeing a story every summer that they kind of can figure out because it has to be a certain way. This is like Secret Invasion in that it’s been percolating for years. The amount of extra stuff that’s there, that’s organically happening—there’s no inciting incident. There’s no spaceship that’s gonna fall out of the sky so that you feel a sense of tension.
For all that Hickman had to say about SECRET WARS and Marvel hit the source below.