1 Same question – what’s your elevator pitch for AVATAR?
A beloved hero’s “best friend” (ala Jimmy Olsen)/youthful sidekick,
crippled during a brutal supervillain battle, is given a chance to become that hero, oblivious to the
sinister machinations going on behind the scenes of his very own “origin”
story.
2 At this point in time, you’d already written Horus (and maybe Bathala?) – what was your approach to writing another guy with a cape? What was the impetus that got you excited to tell the story of Avatar?
One of the many things I’ve learned over the years is to never question
the inspiration.
If an idea presents itself, and I’ve kicked all the tires and deemed it
sound enough to take out on the road, on a journey that appears worthwhile,
headed towards an intriguing and interesting destination, then I just slam
those keys home, rev the engine, and head out on that highway…
So when AVATAR popped into my head, I didn’t really stop to think,
“Well, it has to be different from those other Superman archetype characters
I’ve written”; that consideration comes later, in the molding of the material.
Trust the process is another thing I’ve learned, so you drive down that
highway the inspiration has presented to you, and you trust that the journey
will be different from those you’ve taken before.
Plus, AVATAR (one of whose core ideas is: what if someone whose ability
to move freely had been taken away from him, was suddenly given a chance to
fly*) came around after a significant amount of time in which I wrote nothing, a sustained period where no
idea seemed potent enough to pursue. It was a creative wasteland I was tired of
inhabiting, and AVATAR was the rescuing hand that took me out of it.
So, really, there was no second guessing about me writing “another guy
in a cape”. It was actually me leaning in and embracing all of that, an
attitude that I’ve adopted time and again since then.
* In retrospect, given the creative rut I was in at the time, that
metaphor is definitely not lost on me.
3 If AVATAR reached up to issue 100, what would he be doing? How would you make that milestone issue super special?
I imagine issue 100 would be the culmination of the whole “Terra Armada”
subplot, when the fact that Tiercel is really a manipulative SOB who’s
positioned all these heroes as pawns and expendable pieces on his chessboard
has become common knowledge to Avatar and Horus.
The war they’ve been unwittingly trained for should reach its end at
that point, and, well, it really isn’t actually a happy ending, honestly…
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