Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty

Gatecrashers: Why did you make the choice to have Steve go low key again, get grounded and give him a civilian supporting cast? What made you want to explore that side of Steve?

Collin Kelly: One of the easy answers is we just find Steve endlessly fascinating. I think Steve Rogers is an incredible character outside of the uniform. We know Captain America, we know he throws the mighty shield and he does it real well. But it’s when he’s out of the mask that he shows that vulnerability of just being Steve Rogers and that’s really what we wanted to explore. We knew we had the Outer Circle in terms of this grand conspiracy that was going to be pulling him into some incredible action, which means we needed to counter that by effectively going as normal-core as possible with Steve in his normal life. For those steps It just seemed like such a no-brainer to take him home, right? We were just talking about it originally and we’re like, “Well, emotionally what we want to do is kind of bring him home and help him find his core again.” And we realized, “Well, fuck. Like, where’s he from? Lower Manhattan? Yeah.” We started doing that research and that’s kind of where that started in terms of giving him the seed of where we wanted his story to be set.

Jackson Lanzing: Shout out to Tom Brevoort, who got to absolutely school us on Steve because we wrote the whole outline around Steve living in Brooklyn because that’s where he lives in the MCU and it brain wormed into us. Tom reminded us, “Actually, the MCU made that up. He’s from Lower Manhattan, here’s the building he’s from. It’s based on the building that Jack Kirby used to live in, there you go.” And it was like “Oh! Thanks Tom. Right on.” Tom Breevort is an endless font of true Marvel expertise. So that was a blast.

A lot of it also came from Alanna. I think the art class thing was in her very first email to us, where she went “Hey, I want to put Steve into a new mode. Could he maybe be taking community college art classes?” It sparked so much for us that we were able to dive in on that. In assembling that cast, what it let us do is something that Steve Rogers books often have to do, which is surrounding him with a diverse array of perspectives that can challenge Steve’s inherent current social and political thinking. Similar to what Tochi was saying about not really being able to completely divorce your characters from their political context at any given time, when you’re talking about Steve, it’s really complicated because he has an enormous amount of privilege just as a straight white man in America. But he also has an enormous amount of historical privilege. People who respect him and understand him in a way and he can sort of get away with pretty much anything, which is why Hydra Cap was such a danger, right? Because he has so much inherent trust. If this guy turns out to be a fascist like he can get you there really quickly, much quicker than most unmasked fascists can, but with us, we’re dealing with Steve who’s in the aftermath of that. He’s done trying to put the genie back in that bottle. He’s trying to move forward and figure out his place in the world and he has to some degree become more aware of his privilege and to some degree he hasn’t. 

In surrounding him with those characters we had Mia, who was a young sort of artistically minded woman. We had Hudson, a black man who’d been in New York his entire life and knew the city better than Steve did, knew the city better than most, and had sort of lived his whole life without having this kind of adventure, so he got to bring a different perspective. We had David, who both as a Jewish man, was able to sort of express some of the stuff that Steve was was initially designed to express, but also was able to act as Steve’s anchor to technology and like how the world has changed around that side of things. My favorite of his supporting cast, Arlo Wright, who’s the trade unionist that he argues with at the bar in issue 4, who just became so much of a part of the book that we had to keep him around. Even in our early conversations between the three of us, talking about these characters’ politics, it became clear to all of us that if Steve were to follow his moral core all the way to the end of that journey, he would probably discover that he is far more of a socialist than he would ever allow himself to believe. That he is a man who believes in equal rights, that he’s a man who believes in equal treatment under the law, that he’s a man who believes that people shouldn’t be left behind. He’s not a man who would believe in oligarchs. Obviously that’s a huge part of our book, it’s all about the danger of oligarchy. Arlo allowed us to express that very directly. We have that conversation where he effectively says like, “You know the American military is effectively a socialist organization, right? Like, we just don’t talk about it that way because when we’re in it, we think of it as service and that’s why you get all this stuff. But if we all think of ourselves as serving America, why is it that we all don’t get that kind of equal treatment? Why is it that some people do and some people don’t? Have you really thought this through, Steve?” To have Steve be able to start thinking about that and and and push that forward, that really only happens when you’re talking to normal, human people, Otherwise it’s some anarchist super villain who’s coming in and being like, (in a cartoonish villain voice) “Have you ever thought about communism, Steve?” and it’s like, well, no, you’re never gonna convince him that way, right? That’s not how you express that.

There’s a lack of these civilian characters who can speak to the political context in Steve’s life and so surrounding him with that suddenly meant that he could get challenged in those ways, while we told our big, wider science fiction, 20th century battle for history, the Sentinel of Liberty.

Collin Kelly: To Tom Breevort’s credit once again, he’s the one who kind of sat us down and was like, “Superheroes only talking to superheroes is boring. They can only share superhero perspectives with each other, which are so rarefied and disconnected from the people, which is really where the Marvel Universe sits, is these heroes that walk among us.” So that was a great note from him. It is something that we have carried into all of our Marvel work and I think it’s exemplified by issue 4, wherein Steve just talks to a bunch of normal people about their normal lives and for what it’s worth, that is the one issue that we went through our first outline phase where Tom had no notes, and Tom has notes. He has notes out the wazoo. He always has notes and they’re great notes, but to get an issue where he says “no notes” or “reads good”, everyone else is like, “Wow, you got no notes, reads good.” That had very little action. That was just characters. That was just Steve Rogers talking to people and I think that’s really where the book ended up shining.

Jackson Lanzing: “Reads well, looks good.” I want to have it printed on a T-shirt. I’m like, “best note I ever got.”

I think to put a little point on that to where it allowed the rest of the book to function, the one thing that wasn’t in any of that original stuff – and I said a lot of that stuff kind of came initially from Alanna and Tom and where they kind of wanted to take Steve – was Bucky. What we realized as we were getting into the book was that by supplanting Bucky in Steve’s life with all of these civilian characters, suddenly Bucky Barnes’ story territory opened up, and he no longer needed to be next to Steve as a sounding board. He didn’t need to be that person in Steve’s ear, which is sort of what he had become over the course of Coates’ run. Now he could be on his own adventure, which was really important for us because we felt like there was a ton of fertile territory to start telling stories.

Gatecrashers: That’s awesome for me because Bucky is my favorite Captain America character. 

Jackson Lanzing: Ha ha! Us too!

Gatecrashers: From there, what made you want to look at the shield and build a story around the shield itself as a symbol, and even past that, what made you want to look at the points on the Outer Circle as the various abstract human notions that run the world? What was the thought process and the inspiration behind all that?

Jackson Lanzing: Well, as I said earlier, the book is about oligarchy, right? Before we ever get started on any story, really, Collin and I have to know exactly what it’s about. Because there’s two of us, that means we have to talk it through. It doesn’t just get to be instinctual or like, “Oh, this is just what I want to write about.” We have to talk and come up with a word the book is about or a phrase the book is about. We really come up with our thematics early and then we stick to them. 

With Steve and Sentinel, we started talking about how do you make this book political – because Steve Rogers books are inherently political – without doing a road trip book, which is what’s been happening for the last several years. Without doing a book that basically does the old Green Lantern/Green Arrow, you know “Go into an interesting social scenario and essay it a little bit realistically,” which I think would probably have been our instinct on Steve, if it hadn’t been done for the last like five years. We had to come in and say, “You know, what else is there to tell?” And in looking at the problems that the world was facing and the things that we really felt passionately about and the things that we felt were starting to become real threats in our world, on a day-to-day basis, oligarchy was the big one. People with too much money and literally no oversight who governments look to, who people look to, which culture looks to, which technology looks to, which finance looks to, who everybody looks to, to shape history and then everybody else is becoming reactive to these small pockets of individuals with way too much money and power. As we started to realize that we’re like, “Okay, well, then the ultimate villain for something like this would be a series of oligarchs, would be people who represent that and represent maybe something about those 20th century forces.” And so the Outer Circle and the symbol, that came way before we ever got pitched on the book. That came out of Collin and I talking about how that symbol isn’t the American flag and what could it mean if it meant something.

Collin Kelly: Everything about Cap has always been that shield, right? It is like this almost fetishized version of what it means to be Captain America. You can see that shield, and you immediately think of Cap and kind of everything that he ‘stands for’, but what he stands for is a reaction to the times. It’s a reactionary thing. It doesn’t actually stand for anything, as Jack keeps pointing out, it’s not the flag. So the history and the mystery there, it made it incredible, in the Grant Morrison concept, it made it a very totemic object. There was a lot of cultural and emotional power in that Shield, so being able to uncover it as the mystery, making that the literal representation of the themes that we wanted to play was a real no brainer once we started looking at it, and especially when we look at the Outer Circle, we can circle back around to, haha (sarcastically) circle back around, to the idea that it is, once again, it’s not super villains. Steve isn’t fighting super villains. He is fighting people, right? He is talking about people. He is engaged with people on all levels of this. Yes, the Power and the Money to a certain degree have supervillain iconography, but they are not themselves super villains. They are just people living the life that they think is best, which is incredibly toxic.

Jackson Lanzing: In terms of the five and with why those five, and why we decided to personify it that way. That came from that email that was like, “Turn this into 20 pages and tell us everything.” In the initial outline of the book we just said ‘Outer Circle’. It’s five oligarchs, they’re playing a game, and the idea there is again, the game, right? This isn’t Secret Empire. This isn’t a traditional conspiracy. This isn’t five people who are all working together to pull the strings of the world, which usually has basis in anti-Semitic tropes we really didn’t want to be playing with. So we’re like, “How do you do that without doing that?” And what we looked at was like, “What do we actually see when we look out our window?” Well, we see money running things. We see power running things. We see technology running things. We see culture influencing and running things and then, what’s the last thing that we see every day and it’s like “Well. I guess it’s revolution. It’s those things getting torn down and getting rebuilt and that ultimately, no matter how many times you do a revolution, you do seem to always rebuild those other four.” Well, that’s really interesting. That feels like a cycle of history that you could personify. If you start looking at that, then you have a person who’s the ‘money’, and you have a person who’s the ‘power’ and you have a person who’s the ‘love’ or the ‘arts’, which we ended up calling ‘the Love’ because we thought the arts wouldn’t call itself the arts, that’s very unartistic, and the machine, which is technology, and then the revolution. 

Once we landed on those five and realized that then we could start looking at it like game designers. Collin and I are both big game heads. You can see the board games behind me. (He points to a shelf behind him with stacks of board game boxes) We both have developed role-playing games and designed games over a long period of history, so we love games. Then we got to sit there and be like “Alright, let’s design the game they’re all playing with, where the only stakes are which one of them is going to win. None of them can ever really lose. They’re all protected. They’re all effectively immortal. They have more money and power and technology, and they have everything they need. They are fundamentally sequestered from history, and then they can play everything like a game, and it’s just about screwing the other guy over. Elon Musk doesn’t really care what happens to you, but he definitely cares if he fucks over Jeff Bezos.” That became the echo that was like, “Okay, if those guys don’t care about us, Steve Rogers cares about them,” because that’s what Steve is. Steve is the guy who cares about us, and he’s gonna step into that scenario and absolutely mess them up. That makes them good villains and suddenly we understand why the Outer Circle functions. Then it was just a matter of building the 20th Century on the back of that, which was really fun. Not all of that made the book, like the story of World War II from the Outer Circle’s perspective. It’s really interesting, it’s not written anywhere, but we know it and we had to figure that out so that we understood how you could look at the entirety of the 20th century and say, “Oh, that was a move the Power made. Oh, that was the time that the Power and the Money teamed up to screw over the Machine. Oh! There’s where the Machine tried to make a coup!” We could do it all the time. Again, that’s our Elden Ring. I could talk about this for the next like 2 hours because we really had to think all of that through so that we can anchor it because it is effectively a gigantic retcon of the Marvel Universe, and if we do that, we have to be able to support it. You can’t just be like, “Yeah, this has been happening. Don’t worry about it.” It’s like no, now you can look at any historical event in the Marvel Universe and be like, “Were the Outer Circle involved?” And maybe they were.

Collin Kelly: Let’s hesitate on the word retcon. What we are doing is we are inserting secret history into the Marvel Universe right now.

Jackson Lanzing: (Laughing) Pretty sure that’s what retconning is.

Collin Kelly: We do not know the causes of things, but we’re not actually changing anything. We’re additive, sliding it into the DMs. We’re sliding into the DMs of history.

Gatecrashers: From that end, it makes sense why Bucky ends up being the Revolution, but what was interesting to me is when you look back from Devil’s Reign: Winter Soldier, that Bucky could have been any one of the five star points. So what specifically made you want to push Bucky in the direction of Revolution and was there ever someone else that was going to be in any of those positions, or was it always Bucky?

Jackson and Colin: It was always Bucky.

Collin Kelly: We knew from the very start that we wanted him. The secret subtext of a lot of what we were trying to do here was about two best friends because we’re two best friends. We write a lot about being best friends, and there’s no greater tragedy to best friends than when you have a falling out, and not just because someone did a dick move, but because something they have fundamentally chosen is personally offensive to everything you stand for. It’s a true betrayal. Arguably Bucky’s greatest story is Brubaker’s Winter Soldier run, right? That book says everything that you need to know about him in a lot of important ways and makes him so powerful. But also we knew that that contention between him and Steve is where the friction would live of him trying to finally kind of become better than he was, especially when we kind of realized that at the end of that run, the Cosmic Cube is hand waved. It says, “Make me better, please!” and the Cosmic Cube just kind of does it. Bucky doesn’t actually earn that change. It’s injected into him and realizing that, that’s where we came in with the Devil’s Reign: Winter Soldier one shot. It was on that concept of him realizing he hasn’t earned his peace yet. Once we kind of keyed into that idea that Bucky is seeking the truth in a conspiracy just as much as Steve, we started having to ask ourselves, “Well, what is that conspiracy? What is the point of all of this?” Because if Steve was the Outer Circle’s focus, you look back and Bucky has been there at this for as long as well. 

Jackson Lanzing: He’s been there. He’s been their tool. He’s been a dehumanized individual in the eyes of these five people. So the idea of having him come in and say, “I’m not just taking my own humanity back with this violent act of killing the Revolution and taking his place, but I’m taking his place. I’m going to tear you all down, and the only way for me to tear you down is to have a seat at that table. I can’t continually be an insurrectionist. I can’t constantly be under the table trying to snipe at your knees. I need to be at the table. I need to assemble my own power, and then I need to wipe you off the board.” While it’s a villain turn ostensibly, to me, it’s also Bucky’s greatest hero turn. It’s Bucky saying “I have the power to do this. I have the ability to do this. I have the intelligence to do this. I have been your weapon for so long, but I can think tactically like you. I can outplay you at your own game if I have the opportunity, if I have the privilege to step to that table.” So he takes it, and Steve tries to tell him, “Don’t take that privilege,” and Bucky’s like, “You can’t tell me that. You haven’t been their weapon for your entire existence. I have, and I need to do this for my own sake.” Once he’s there, it means he has to start making some very shady decisions, because now he’s playing the role of a villain to everyone, including Steve, which is obviously where the real tension of Cold War eventually comes from. Bucky has to make some very villainous moves to get everyone into the position. He plays a very, very dangerous game that only has one good outcome and somehow manages to make that outcome happen, but almost at the expense of everyone he loves. And so that was his biggest gambit. Ideally, Bucky gets to come out of this story changed, which is the whole point of story, right? Move these characters forward one step and it felt like this was a great chance for Bucky to come out of this and be like “I’m not a soldier anymore. I am the Revolution. I am the walking embodiment of tearing down these systems that use people like me and not replacing them with new systems, but replacing them with freedom and replacing them with the agency of these individuals.”

Collin Kelly: There was just a really great beat that we kind of discovered as we were digging into this, which is Bucky’s first appearance in costume. He has the Outer Circle star on his belt. Yes, it’s just the American star, and you know, nod nod, wink wink. But the fact that there is actual textual proof that we can look back to and say, “No, he’s been there since the beginning. He has been a cat’s paw of the Outer Circle,” is just one of those magic moments that led us to create that full circle experience. If you want to see where Bucky is going after this emotional growth fans should tune in to Thunderbolts #1 coming down the pipe later this year where we will see Bucky having evolved into a sense of leadership and taking responsibility rather than being reactionary. So yeah, in a lot of ways this is very much a story about Steve, but our eye has always been on Bucky. We find him to be incredibly fascinating and unlike Steve, needs to do a lot of growth. Bucky as a human is damaged and needs to become a better person on a lot of levels. Steve Rogers is pretty damn good. He’s a good man and it’s hard to take a character on an emotional journey when they start at the top.

Jackson Lanzing: Honestly, superheroes as a general concept can be really complicated to write when you’re a politically minded person because they are built on a lot of – and this isn’t like a new observation, Frank Miller’s been observing this for 40 years – but they’re they’re built on a certain amount of inherent violent fascism. It’s just part of what they are. So when you look at how you build superheroes in a modern context for us, a lot of it has been about positioning them as outsiders, positioning them as revolutionaries, positioning them as counter-culturalists, trying to look at superheroes as the thing that stands against the monolith and tries to showcase how the monolith can change, rather than being things that uphold the monolith, which again, I think that’s the brilliance of Symbol of Truth, is that Tochi didn’t get to do that. Tochi had to have him be supportive of the monolith, which is a really hard thing to do for a book that is politically minded, and then ultimately, I think that’s what’s really cool about Sam’s story is that Sam isn’t holding up the monolith. Sam is holding up his own sense of duty and his own sense of justice and his own sense of purpose and trying to inspire the monolith to be better, which is what Captain America is, right? It’s why Sam’s journey is so prevalent. We call it vital to the Captain America mythos.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Absolutely took the words right out of my mouth.

Jackson Lanzing: All that writing together.

Tochi Onyebuchi: The Hivemind.

Jackson Lanzing: Yeah, you’re still rolling around where we assimilated, just a little bit.

Collin Kelly: You got a little Jackson and Collin in your brain Tochi (Everyone laughs). This is what you’ve always wanted, two white dudes hanging around your brain, the perspective you’ve always asked for.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Is this what W.E.B. Du Bois was talking about when he mentioned the double consciousness? I think this is it. Every black person has two white guys secretly hiding in the back of their (laughs)

Collin Kelly: Inside you there are two wolves. They’re both white men, unfortunately. (More laughs) 

Gatecrashers: Seeing Roger come in was a great callback to the 70s Invaders run. What made you want to bring him into the fold, and from the very beginning, where did you always plan to give him that big heroic sacrifice?

Jackson Lanzing: Yes.

Roger was pretty early in our planning. I actually remember when we were first talking about him, like I have a sense memory for that moment. We were on my porch at my old spot and we were hanging out and walking around and talking about comics. More comics got written on that fucking porch, man. We were talking about how we wanted to make sure that there were characters from Steve’s old world still around, who could speak to the century without having skipped a lot of it, like Steve did. That’s where the Radio Company came from. That’s where the idea of having Pam and John and just civilians who he knew right. But there should be somebody in there who’s an old hat, like somebody who was actually on the battlefield with him, and when you look at who’s there, there’s just not that many people available, as we say in Captain America #750, he’s running out of those old friends because they aged when he didn’t, and it’d be really fun to play with a character who went through that. I had personally been a huge fan of the Robert Kirkman Destroyer Mini that was done for Marvel MAX back in the day. I found it really refreshing and really interesting and had sort of liked the idea of a World War II character who had aged in real time, but still had the Super Soldier serum. So he was old. He was an old man who could still punch you like a Mack truck. I was like, “That’s fun. I really like that framework. What if we applied that back to Roger Audrey, a character who has just sort of been left on the vine?” Not Roger specifically, but the Destroyer was Stan Lee’s first superhero at Marvel. So it was a great way for us to bring the whole superhero century together. Roger was, from a canonical perspective, one of the very first canonical gay characters at Marvel. But even in the general context, I think he’s one of the first. Then as we were looking at him, we’re like, “Well, this guy’s at the end of his life. So if we bring him back and we don’t end this, then he’s probably just walking back into obscurity, which is fine, but play the cards you have, right?” So we looked at him and said, “You know, do we want to kill this guy? No. Is it the right thing for the story, for him to step into this role and show Steve what it means to self sacrifice, to show everybody what it means to be at the end of your life and still have something to give? To let Roger finally be reunited with Brian, who had died in the 50s, you know?” This is a man who spent most of his life pining for a man who he lost very young in life. It really felt like it was time and it was right. What surprised us a little bit and what came a little bit more out of the writing of the actual book was his relationship with Sharon and what that would inspire about the Destroyer mantle moving forward.

Collin Kelly: We knew that. We knew that Sharon, and by the way, Sharon hive, rise up on the Internet! We know you love Sharon Carter and we do too. She’s been done dirty by a lot just by making her Captain America’s girlfriend and nothing more. The truth of the matter is that she’s messy, she’s violent, she can be kind of unhinged, and every time Steve is like, “Whoa, honey!” and doesn’t stop it, right? He’s a fucking wife guy at heart. He loves her so much and lets her get away with so much stuff. But we knew that we wanted to help her evolve in the same way that we were letting Bucky kind of take the next step. So we knew that the step there was to, in effect, give her a mantle. We knew that she needed to step into a new role to kind of signify this new step for her, but we didn’t quite know what that meant until there was just that lightning bolt of Destroyer. We knew that we wanted Roger to be able to have his ending. So what to do with that title? When you think about Sharon Carter, she wrecks stuff, like in the best possible way, right? Things need to get destroyed in a lot of ways and she’s not the subtle knife. She’s not your little assassin. You’ve got a Natasha that you’ve got a Bucky for that. What you need sometimes is someone to blow the door open and be loud, and that’s what Sharon Carter’s really always really excelled at, so being able to kind of dovetail those two things together did happen organically out of the writing, bolstered by Carmen Carnero’s incredible new design. Her look for Destroyer just brought the whole character together and we are excited to see where she ends up like Thunderbolts #1 coming later to Marvel.

Jackson Lanzing: Yeah. We just saw the first like reveal spread of her in in Thunderbolts, #1 and I can’t wait for people to see where we’re going with this character. We’re in love with her, We’ll write her forever. She’s great. We, like Steve, are wife guys, so let’s go.