EXCLUSIVE: Jonathan Hennessey On His New Legendary Comics Series EPOCHALYPSE

I'm just a fantasy and science fiction nerd from way back who got bitten by the bug by virtue of being old enough to see the theatrical debut of Star Wars and watch anime shows like Grandizer and Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (aka Battle of the Planets) before high-strung, Boston-area parents groups succeeded in ripping such shows from the UHF airwaves.

 

The damage had been done, however. And I was never satisfied with simply watching stuff like this. It seemed a natural corollary to want to contribute to it, to make it as well. While I eventually came around to actually being interested in the world we're all living in (and as a teen tried to quite comics and RPGs cold turkey) I never shook my love for fantasy.

 

I had a stint working in Hollywood. I worked under comics creator James Dale Robinson (Starman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) with his feature directorial debut Comic Book Villains. I was also a modest production assistant on a couple of cool projects like Wes Anderson's Rushmore and Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids. But I realized that a less-than-stable career being a mid-level crewmember on movies and TV wasn't going to get me anywhere creatively. I focused on writing again.

 

The idea for Epochalypse had been with me a long while. So I dusted it off and began developing it again in earnest. Comics seemed the perfect format for the story: no way would a prose novel, for instance, so compellingly dramatize this setting and these characters. So I found my way back to the medium from which I'd wandered. I haunted portfolio review lines at comic cons looking for artists to collaborate with. (I'm destitute of the ability to draw.)  And then I haunted those same shows years later on the prowl for editors to shop it to.

 

That didn't lead anywhere at first. But it did afford me the opportunity to try my hand at writing nonfiction graphic novels for traditional book publishers.

 

In 2008 and 2013 I had published comics versions of two of the most pivotal documents in American history: The U.S. Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation and The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation. (And next year, Random House will release The Comic Book Story of Beer, which I co-authored with a good friend who's a professional brewer). In some ways, those books are "neither fish nor fowl." History buffs tend to turn their noses up at comics. And there are not a few comics fans who would rather do anything than study American history. But those books did well enough to pique the interest of comics editors as to whether or not I was up to the task of a high-concept fictional story like Epochalypse.

Epochalypse turns the familiar time travel story inside out. Usually in a time travel adventure, you have a hero or handful of characters who leap from one place in history to another. An adventure ensues, and then they return home.

 

But in this series, some inexplicable force causes everyone to spontaneously and involuntarily time travel. 600 years of history disastrously collapse into a single new timeline. And no one seems to know how to undo it. Radically different people, technologies, cultures, and ideologies that were never meant to coexist are suddenly smashed together. 

 

The violence of this event — "The Incongruity" — killed almost everyone subject to it. It brought civilization to its knees. But now a kind of emergency government of scientist/administrators has risen from the ashes. They pledge to untangle history and send everyone back where they belong.

 

To enact this, however, they need to neutralize and contain every person and artifact that arrived from the year 1952 or later. So they have constituted an elite police force to round up these anachronisms. Our hero is one of these lawmen. But he discovers that some of those people from the future are not content to go quietly.

It would have been much more challenging, I'll admit, if in between trying to initially jumpstart Epochalypse and finally getting it to the point of seeing the light of day I hadn't squeezed in ten years of general historical research. We still have a ton of bias towards our own perspectives and experiences. I'm sure I'll stumble with some correct historical representations along the way. But for me, it's a terrifically stimulating puzzle to piece together how characters from the 1820s, 1640s, 1930s, 1880s, and even 2100s would think, talk, and behave.

 

The story needs to come first — otherwise you're just performing an exercise in counterfactualism. But history is so rich, there's really no need, I find, to stray too far from "what really happened." And the cast of Epochalypse really gives us a chance to take explore how key episodes from the past affect the present and the future.

 

After all, we are all truly living in a fluctuating amalgamation of the three. All our days of the week, for instance, are named for pre-Christian pagan gods (Wednesday is really "Woden's Day," Thursday is "Thor's Day," etc.) And we drink soda because the ancient Greeks and Romans believed the fizzy waters from mineral springs were blessed by divine powers with restorative and healing powers. Epochalypse in one sense is just a far more literal version of the world around us.

Definitely. The task of the main characters is to restore history. To send everyone back to their "home times." Our hero, for one, cannot fathom why anyone would oppose this in the first place. He is naive enough to think that he can make everyone to comply with the anachronism laws by the power of empathy and persuasion.

 

But the truth is, the people who have survived The Incongruity simply want things from the future — especially since The Trustees' efforts to return them home so far have come to nothing. And those who arrived from later than 1952 may have their own reasons for not wanting to turn themselves in to the custody of The Trustees.

 

Johannes, our hero, has for many trying months now been on the trail of a brazen black marketer of anachronisms: a shadowy figure called The Salesman. But Johannes is not making much headway in apprehending The Salesman. And this villain is steadily becoming our guy's obsession, his "white whale." The characters turn to chasing down The Salesman's customers, several of whom have fallen in with some extremely dangerous company. This will bring what's left of society close to open rebellion against The Resynchronizers. As Johannes grows increasingly impulsive in his pursuit of The Salesman, The Trustees themselves start paying attention to what's going on in this provincial territory where Johannes is operating. And that, our hero will find, is going to be the wrong kind of attention. Johannes also begins getting troubling glimpses of what happens in the future — and how this relates to The Incongruity and his own mission in life. As the series goes on, key characters may find themselves asking if history is worth saving in the first place. And everyone will have a different answer — depending on the specific set of his or her own origins.

After doing Shadow Walk for Legendary Comics, Shane turned his sights on a next collaboration with them. He's the bigger name in comics here; certainly it's not me. So I never had to pitch to him or anything. He looked at the material and, I'm very gratified to say, saw something in it and jumped on board. I love what he's done with it!

 

Unfortunately, he is on the East Coast and I am on the West Coast. So there wasn't the opportunity there for an intimate back-and-forth. I probably would have screwed that up anyway, on the "too many cooks spoil the pot" model. Because what seemed to work best was simply writing the best stuff I'm capable of, handing it over, and then getting out of Shane's way. Of course, our editor, Bob Schreck, was a brilliant intermediary, and he too had a strong and worthy sense of what this book should look like. 

Well, in my case, I have never actually written for movies or TV, and my work in that field was a very gruntish, hands-on, behind-the-scenes kind of deal — struggling to coax actors in and out of their star trailers to go to hair or makeup or to the set where a director is pulling out her hair because the light is perfect and the sun is going down, or racing across three hundred yards of open prairie to get a stalled van out from the background of a cowboy stunt sequence, or endlessly moving hundreds of freezing, hungry, and tired extras from one side of a stadium to the other (and exchanging all their colored fan regalia on the way) every time the director of photography comes up with a creative new angle for the action of a football movie. For all its frustrations, writing is nothing like that! And in any event. comics is as close to an instant gratification as you can get when you have a vision and want to bring it to fruition. Anything can be drawn on the page. You don't have to worry about a team of set carpenters being able to build it, or a legion of visual effects people being able to code it. It's incredibly fulfilling. 

Speaking of films, have you given any thought to the possibility of Epochalypse being adapted to live-action? 

Golly, of course. Most of us are exposed to movies and TV before we develop the skills to read comics, so we sort of "live" in that visual world. And our dreams, which are so central to the human experience, are much like movies — which, like dreams, we usually experience in the dark.

 

But that question is really putting the cart before the horse. The flexibility and intimacy of comics, anyway, gives the writer so much more of a free hand. There is enough pressure to produce excellent comics work without having to grieve over how many millions of dollars you just added to the budget and days to the shooting schedule because of the one little action sequence you devised or location you added.

It would be an honor to be given the keys to almost any of these characters for a few outings. But when it comes to superpowers and the scopes of stories, I tend to be a "less is more" guy — particularly lately, with the arms race over who can raise the stakes the highest flying out of control and the fate of the universe itself always hanging in the balance. On the Marvel side, I really liked the concept behind the somewhat short-lived late 1980s book Strikeforce Morituri, which anticipated the wild practice of constantly killing off main characters a la Game of Thrones.