Hello, Marvelites. You are listening to This Week in Marvel. I'm your host, Angelique Roche, and this is the official Marvel hot cast. And this week... we figured we'd share a short little interview with writers Jackson Lansing and Colin Kelly. Now, this dynamic duo has worked on books like Captain America, Sentinel, Liberty, Kang, Gardens of the Galaxy, Thunderbolts, and so...
much more. However, to kick off this brand new year, we thought it'd be appropriate to talk to them about their all new one shot, Timeless Number One. I am so excited to be back with two of my favorite, not just writers, but like humans. Thank you. You're at our top 10 as well. Oh. Oh, now I'm honored because I know there's a lot of people there. Timeless.
has become an annual Marvel tradition. But for those who may be a little new to the concept or need a little bit of a refresher, can you describe what these books are? Yeah, sure. I mean, they're a glimpse into the future of the Marvel Universe. For the last three years now, this will be the third, Marvel has been releasing these...
specials, these like big oversized one-shots called Timeless. And the first two were Kang the Conqueror stories, which makes a lot of sense. He's displaced in time. He's able to see the past and the future. And so you're able to explore it that way. And you tend to get one great story. Those were by Jed McCann.
So obviously great stories. You're gonna get really great stories with really incredible art that on occasion give you a sneak peek at what's gonna happen in the new blank comic, right? So at one point or another, Kang might... observe a thing or recall the thing that's to him is in the past, but to you is in the future. And so you as the reader get to get little promises, little tidbits, little teasers for everything that's going to happen in the Marvel universe on top of getting a full story.
in and of itself. And the challenge that Marvel brought us on this one was, hey, we want to do timeless, but no Kang. What does Timeless look like if we don't center this around Kang? What if it happens if it centers around something new, if it focuses on a new future, if we start to build something fresh? I love that. And so one of the things that I also want to talk about is a little different is something Jackson just kind of mentioned is that this is going to be new.
How does this particular issue of Timeless differ from the past issues, Colin? Yeah. So a big important thing for all of us was to create, as you said, something new, but not just a new story, but new characters. One of the things that we think is so important about the Marvel Universe is adding new toys to the toy.
If you can't create something new, then you're just playing the old hits. So what we went round and round and round with is what these new characters would be. So once we realized that we wanted to tell a story that wasn't happening outside... of time, but was rather happening almost more at the end of time. We pick up a story at the very end of the Marvel Universe where we are catching up with effectively a world that has been absolutely contained and controlled.
controlled by the will of omnipotent Khonshu. really holding the entire world in his grasp through his avatar, the eternal Moon Knight. These two have effectively locked down humanity and are planning on feeding our life force to some dark end. And there is only one hero left in the Marvel universe who can step up. And that is our new and exciting version of Power Man.
And that was the exciting thing for us ultimately about this was Power Man as a concept and as a title and as a name and as an icon is something that's had a lot of different meanings in the Marvel Universe over time. But... the phrase Power Man, what Power Man means, we...
have for a long time had a new take on that. We've had a thing that we've wanted to do someday with this character. And Power Man was one of the first things on the table with us. We sort of have an idea about how you can twist this. those two words into something that means something.
very significant and means something new for this character fundamentally. And fortunately they saw it the same way. So that was the one place where we didn't really have to go round and round. Like once we landed on that, we all knew, okay, that's going to be the center of this story. This new version of Power Man.
this reinterpretation of that concept, but one that is still fundamentally attached to the legacy of that character. That's going to be at the center, and then everything else got to grow out of that guy and what was going to be useful and challenging. and sort of uplifting him.
What we have here is a character who has lived through history. We are not taking Luke Cage and saying, okay, Luke Cage gets in a time machine and he goes to the future. That's what Kang would do. If you were doing a Kang story, do that with Kang. What we're doing with Luke is we're saying Luke has lived through the future of the Marvel Universe. He has lived through what's coming for the next year at Marvel. He's lived through all the relaunches and new stuff and new characters and new things.
fans don't get to know about yet right he's lived through all that and he's lived through 50 more years of that he's near the end of his life this is old man luke coming into the end of his like the end of his saga and in luke's life And I want to really save a lot of this for the book so that people can discover it as they go. But...
Over the course of Luke's life, he has watched an enormous amount of tragedy befall those he calls friends and comrades. He has watched the world become what Colin described, that Khonshu monolith religious. containment sphere, right? That's what he's watched the beauty of the Marvel universe become this thing that's about to get fed upon. And he's the last one standing.
Why did you feel like Luke Cage was the right character for this? So part of that, I really do have to go to the fundamentals of our origin as writers of like... where Colin and I found initial partnership and the comics we were reading when that was happening. The Brian Bendis run on Avengers through, from Jessica Jones on.
is fundamental biblical storytelling for us. It lives just like Alan Heinberg's Young Avengers in this very core part of our creative process. We can't really separate it from... what we love. It just is, it's part of the bedrock. So Luke has been a character that we've wanted to
explore for a long time because he was one of our favorite characters when we were young people coming up at Marvel and really like diving into this for the first time. Well, and also the neat thing about Luke is, yes, he comes from that kind of Kung Fu Blaxploitation heritage, but what would catch...
up with him in Bendis' run, it's when he has to start stepping beyond that and starting to become a father. The thing about him is that he is, that was the time in his life when he was evolving into a really robust, deep character, which I think is why we fell in love with him.
Obviously, we are not two black men, right? We are shocking to the audience, I'm sure. But we can absolutely empathize and engage with the fact that he was someone who very much had an ideal of himself and was forced to grow.
of that through the power of empathy and the power of friendship to the people that he really cared about um beyond just like his bestie Danny Rand which obviously you know we always we always love best friends we always love stories about best friends yeah and this is where I will I will spoil one thing because it's on the cover people can
It's part of the pitch to begin with. So this is the last piece of this puzzle, right? We've lived through Luke's life. We're seeing him on this new side of his life. He's seen the whole Marvel universe fall to ruin. He has saved. Three things. And he has saved them not by hoarding them in some vault somewhere. He has saved them in himself. He has saved the blood of Bruce Banner.
so that he can access the Green Door and the Hulk. He has infused himself with it and has the strength inside of him and he controls it better than Banner ever did. He has the powers of the Sentry and the Void. able to keep them in balance in a way that Bob Reynolds was never able to. Because Luke is a fundamentally disciplined character and his growth is...
almost always about building up discipline and building up his understanding and then using that responsibly. Again, the reason we wanted to use Luke. And the third... And the last power in Power Man, so you can now see what I mean by we want to reframe that idea. The last power he's holding on to is in his right fist, and it's the Iron Fist.
which indicates very much that something has gone terribly wrong with Danny. What has happened with Danny, what happened to him, and what that means to the story throughout Timeless. is the meat of Timeless. So if you want to read in many ways, Power Man and Iron Fist, the end, that's what Timeless is. It is an ode to...
Not just this character, but to that friendship and what it is meant as a fundamental piece of the Marvel Universe that I think often gets overlooked for the splashier, bigger or more like horror centric characters. We want to bring these two guys out of the alleys of New York and show why they mean everything to the Marvel Universe. So basically, you wrote your feelings about each other onto a page. Always.
Always. I mean, write what you know, right? Write what you know. I think what we wanted to do with Luke was say... What does it mean to live through an age of heroes and to be on the other side of that and to be the last one holding that line and saying, as long as I don't die, the age of heroes doesn't die.
What happens if this one guy gets to stick there and hold on to that side? That's not us writing about our feelings. We get to use our feelings to inform that. But what we feel like it is, is it's like a fundamentally true to Luke story. about what it means to be the guy who had to follow up Steve Rogers as the leader of the Avengers. Like, he's lived to that point. Now he's Steve in a lot of ways. He's the guy who's lived well past his expiration date. and he's still fighting.
and still holding that thing whenever the whole rest of the world has moved on. And long after Jackson dies in one of the many tribulation waves, I truly will wander the earth for a hundred years, accumulating power. And it will involve a dragon. I don't know how. But I will also find a dragon. I stand Colin with a dragon. You know, I do. So in the timeless tradition, we see glimpses of these possibilities of what's to come.
in the near year of comics, and there are some things coming up. I know you don't want to spoil anything, gentlemen, but can you just give us a little... little sneak peek of these featured moments like you know and and and what did you know you you really wanted to include and are any of them going to come true
Was that a come true? Oh, I almost guarantee you a lot of them are going to come true. Yeah, I guarantee a lot of them are coming true. Just to say, so one of the coolest things about this process was, you know, obviously we had to write this core story. say it was really cool to get kind of the synopses from every office being like here's what's up here's what's up here's what's up
Here's what's up. And I'm not going to pretend that we know all the details of every single thing. We definitely don't. We effectively got the top line of every single one. And we were like, holy shit. Holy shit. What? What? So like, it is a very exciting.
upcoming cavalcade of stories. What we have, what's been really cool in a lot of ways, actually, is that we got that list. And then what we did, what we've done in Timeless is we've dedicated I think more than has been done previously in Timeless, we've really dedicated space to showcase these off.
So there are these splash pages throughout the book that are going to give you these giant glimpses into the universe. I won't tell you how they come about. They're very tied to the plot and story and what we're doing and the sort of metaphysics of Luke's situation. But as you get... into each of those, you're gonna see individual glimpses of upcoming stories at Marvel. And I'd say pretty safely most of them are either already written.
drawn, like coming to stores or they are in the process of being, you know, made. The only one that I will happily spoil because we it's it's ours um and because it's already on the cover of a comic so it's not keep yourself out of trouble there jackson i see you yeah if you can if you can look at solicits you'll be fine, is that there is a glimpse at the future of Thunderbolts for Thunderbolts number three, which is out in a few months, in two months, which we'll see Bucky Barnes at
Kaiju Godzilla size, having a one-on-one slugfest with American Kaiju. And that... scene which we literally just did our final lettering pass on is an absolute delight and we can't believe we got to write it and...
We got, of course, we had to tease it there in the pages of Timeless. But you're going to see glimpses of what's coming for the X line. You're going to see glimpses of what's coming for Moon Knight. You're going to see glimpses of what's coming for the new Punisher. You're going to see glimpses of what's coming. for Spider-Man and for Venom, you're gonna be seeing glimpses of the entire Marvel Universe heading into the next.
uh phase including i think the next big event i think this is the first tease of the next big event so i think there's it's really nice there's a bunch of like really great individual moments along this that might not be readily apparent because we're not going through and saying In this book, this happens. In this book, this happens. We're just showing you images. And then...
You get to guess. You get to dig in. You get to do what Colin and I did when we first became friends at the comic shop and just go and get pizza with your friends and argue about, oh, I think this is what this means. No, I think this is what this image means. Ideally, that's what this allows fans to do. not just spoil content for them, but to give them a chance to like dig into those stories and guess about what's coming.
I just looked through our document very carefully, and I think I can say three little teases. Nice. I think I can say that New York will have a bloody time. Okay, bloody New York. I think we should... Prepare for a baby shower because someone's having a little one. And I think we can say that while the Fantastic Four might be fantastic. Five is a better number. What? What is happening? What? We don't even know what that means. Good sirs. Okay. This is the fun part.
So, you know, there could have been a billion ways to do this. Like, what do you hope that readers are taking away from this particular story? I really hope that this gives readers a sort of seismic shakeup in.
their sort of marvel universe reading experience i think over time we get as as comic book fans we sort of dig into these things like historians and we track where the characters go and we see where they go and we have a book that we get into and a book that we don't or whatever, but it's all in the Marvel universe and it all kind of feels like it's of a piece and it's moving along.
And ideally, Timeless comes in at the end of the year and the beginning of the next one to surprise, to shake up, to give you a totally different way of seeing things. This is a new future with two... effectively new characters. Like it is Luke, but it's Luke through a lot of different experience. And then this is Moon Knight, but it's not Moon Knight as you'd expect it. Going through just the most insane fight sequence that one Cabal could possibly draw. Just like...
the most incredible Juan Cabal art we could imagine, right? So I think at a baseline, what readers are going to get is something brand new. New characters, new setting, new feel, incredible new art. all giving them a glimpse at what's coming, but also giving them just a single story that doesn't, they don't need.
a bunch of past context or a bunch of future context for this story to matter, for it to be emotionally impactful, for it to be exciting. This is a one shot in the truest sense of the word, which is something that Colin and I are really, really passionate about. It's making like single issue comics that matter rather than. having it be a thing where you have to like
read, you know, 12 issues to really get something. And I think, I think fans of our Thor annual, and I know a lot of people really enjoyed our Thor annual are going to find a lot more of that flavor. Oh yes. Effectively when we sit down and you're like, you get one chance to, you might get only. one chance to write this character, write the living out of it. And in the same way that our Thor annual wasn't exactly, it wasn't a go from point A to point B.
We definitely challenge the reader to start to think about what a reality-altering time wave might look like. What is mythos? What happens when these kind of strange powers rewrite the way a story gets told? We are very uninterested. and telling very...
I mean, we love a good straightforward story. But we're not, we don't tend to write them. No, we get very bored by them. Yeah. As exempled by Kang the Conqueror. So people should also be excited about reading a story in a slightly different way than they might normally.
reading i'm not that it's upside down or anything but we do challenge you to wrap your head around some concepts that we really won't explain until the end yeah and i know sometimes that gets frustrating for readers they're like what the is going on we hope that leads them in So they say, what the is going on? And I think ideally by the time that we get done with this, what I hope readers take away from this is that the Marvel universe is a crucial bulwark against.
against hopelessness, against darkness, against despair, against a lot of things that are constant in our world right now. And that our future and our Moon Knight and our Khonshu kind of represent. The things that we are using those characters to talk about and that they are digging into as a story here are the kind of things that... we're all dealing with on a day-to-day basis. It's all about hopelessness and how the Marvel Universe is about, in many ways, holding on to that hope.
being resilient through that hopelessness and remembering that heroism is something that comes from inside of us, that it comes from each of us, and that we have to fight to keep it alive, that we have to keep that flame going. So my hope is... This book isn't just a great fight sequence and a wild esoteric like meta text, but it's also ideally. just a story about the Marvel Universe and why it matters and a little end of year celebration when it comes to where it's been.
and a kickoff to where it's going next. And whether or not Power Man or Eternal Moon Knight or the plots that we're setting up here become things that you gotta worry about next year. I'm gonna let the Marvel Universe tell you that in due time, but what I think what we do really want this to do is, if this is the only time these characters are seen, that it feels vital, that it feels great, and it feels like you got.
you got your money's worth out of that uh you know what 40 pages of comics like it's a it's a it's a wonderful opportunity and one that we've just really relished getting to write And from a purely selfish standpoint, much like Cosmic Ghost Rider, we hope people fall in love with this version of Power Man and just start slamming every single forum saying, we want more Power Man. Yeah, I mean, that would be cool. Because we want to write this character forever.
we've fallen in love with this gruff hard talking SOB and we absolutely will write him to the end of the days. Thanks once again to the dynamic duo of Jackson and Colin for coming on the show and having a little chat with me. Be sure to pick up Timeless number one. It's out. Right now, you can get it from your local comic book shop or on digital.