Captain America: Cold War

Gatecrashers: For Sentinel of Liberty, was Carmen and Nolan always the first choice? Same for Symbol of Truth, was it always RB Silva and Jesus Aburtov? How did the art teams come together?

Jackson Lanzing: Absolutely. Carmen was the only name on all of our lists. Truthfully, Alanna wrote us an email that was like, “Hey guys, who do you want to work with?” and there was like a break and in the middle of that break I think we both were like “It’d be really cool if we work with Carmen Carnero,” because we have worked with Carmen on Gotham City Garage back in the day. We’d fallen in love with her work. We knew how good she was, and we also knew that she had just moved to Marvel and had been doing a lot of really amazing stuff at Marvel. So she was very much on our radar. She was doing Hellions, which was my favorite X-book. I was like, “She was very, very much on our radar,” and so I was reading the email and I was like, “Oh, well, it’s going to be Carmen.” Then the next line was Alanna saying “Cause I’m thinking Carmen Carnero,” and I was like, “Great. We’re good!” And then Carmen, I think, brought Nolan to the table. I don’t recall how Nolan came in, but there weren’t auditions for colors. Everybody was like, “We loved Nolan’s work on Daredevil,” and we all knew that he would nail the tone of what we were all going for here, and so he came in right away. The team happened very quickly and then became the team and then, you know, to Carmen’s enormous credit, she was like, “I don’t want anyone else to ever draw this book. So I want to draw every single issue.” And she did, you know, with the exception obviously in the Cold War crossovers because we were trying to give her the time to blow up #750 and finale.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Yeah, I mean with Symbol, I imagine a lot of the conversations were above me and by the time they would get to me it would pretty much be Alanna emailing me like, “Hey, what do you think of this guy?” and every single time it was like, “Yeah, no, that’s literally it. That’s it.” Eventually we settled on RB Silva, and it’s funny because every time I would get pages from him I would turn into the human embodiment of the drooling emoji. Not even the heart eyes emoji. I was past that. I was drooling every single time I would get pages from him. It was wonderful having him, particularly in the beginning, because I think he really set the tone visually for the book and nailed exactly what we were all going for. It’s sort of like having Martin Scorsese direct the pilot of Boardwalk Empire, like that is exactly the metaphor that comes to mind. And so R.B. Silva was with us for the vast majority of the book, Ig Guara came in, and Ze Carlos as well, and every single one of them knocked it out the park and we had Jesus on colors like it was a literal dream team. It’s funny too because I would write these scripts and I would get pages before we would get to the lettering draft and I’d be going through these pages and I’d say to myself, “What do you all even need me for? Like, we don’t even have dialogue bubbles in here, and the entire story is told. Like (laughs) what am I even doing here?”

Collin Kelly: Aren’t those the most incredible moments as a writer, when you just look at the art and you’re like, “I’m not needed. I’m not needed.” That’s what happened to us with Sentinel of Liberty #6. The issue with the fight between Steve and Bucky. There was dialogue throughout that entire script. They were arguing with each other and chatting and making some real damn good points as they threw fists at each other and we got to the point where we’re looking at the art and we’re like, “Screw all of this.”

Tochi Onyebuchi: It’s funny because I remember there was a moment where I went all the way in the opposite direction. Symbol of Truth #11 is the massive throwdown between Sam and Hunter in Mohannda. Originally I wrote no dialogue for that whole fight because I had R.B.’s images in my head, and I was like, “This is like (waves hands)”. I have a very extensive background in anime and so things like the Kakashi and Obito fight in Naruto Shippuden where they don’t say a word to each other, but their entire relationship plays out over the course of this fight, that’s the type of shit I like, that’s my diet to this day. So I wrote this and it got to the point where Alanna was like, “You know, they should probably say something to each other. Sure, they might not be chatterboxes, but they should say something to each other.” And so we made our way to a happy minimum, which I think was even better than what would have happened if we were in either extreme. But yeah, like there were so many moments where I was just like, “The art tells the whole story.”

Gatecrashers: Going from here to Cold War, how did you guys end up working with Alina Erofeeva, since all her work is mainly for Bubble comics, and Sentinel of Liberty was her first work in American comics?

Jackson Lanzing: That was entirely an Alanna Smith thing. We knew Carmen was going to take a couple of issues off to prepare for the heavy lift of #750 and the finale and take a little rest. Carmen runs herself really hard. She’s very fast and she’s incredible, so it’s really important to schedule her breaks in. So that was a chance for her to take a short break, clear her mind and get ready to really deliver the goods. We were really worried about anyone else coming in on the book, frankly, because Carmen makes us look so much better than we are. (laughs) No, like Carmen just she nails every single emotion and the book lives so much on subtle emotion. So much of Sentinel is just about expressions and how those expressions come across and Carmen’s so, so, so good at that. We needed somebody who could do that but could also bring about the weird fantasy aspects that we were asking for in Dimension Z, so that is not an easy task. Basically, Aleena was on Alanna’s radar and she just sent us sample pages and was like, “Yes?” and it was a big exhale for us. It was like, “Yes.” Like, very different European comic style, but still incredibly emotional, still incredibly specific, and then it had really inventive fantasy stuff, so it would really hit at all levels. It also kept the book with a female artist the entire time, which was also something that we were really insistent on once Carmen was there because we learned that there was no other Captain America run that had an entirely female art team ever. That felt like a place where we could step in and say, “Okay, this book has a different kind of viewing lens.” That’s one of the reasons that it works, so we really just leaned hard into that and obviously I think the results speak for themselves, I just think those issues turned out so wonderfully. 

I also learned a ton about the political situation in Ukraine from her because she’s Ukrainian and she’s in the shit right now. So I sort of started following her on Twitter to talk about comics, and suddenly I’m just learning a lot about Ukraine, which was also very cool. Like, that was just what a weird thing for her to be on the Cold War book. But you know, there you go.

Gatecrashers: Was this always intended to be a 6 issue Captains America thing or were there supposed to be like other characters involved? Was it planned to be something more?

Tochi Onyebuchi: One of the first things that I latched onto with Symbol was the fact that Sam’s tenure as Captain America up until that point had been so relatively brief that there was all this unexplored territory with regards to his interactions with other people in the Marvel Universe. It was such fertile terrain that I told myself I’m going to try to throw as many people into this book as I can. In the first arc, there’s a Deadpool cameo, Doctor Doom shows up and I wanted to do that because in a way, it’s establishing Sam’s canon, which is on the one hand an incredible responsibility, but on the other hand is just absolutely thrilling because it’s essentially carte blanche to do whatever I want. We’ve never seen Sam interact with X character or Y character. What is that first interaction? What are they going to feel about each other? So, taking that impetus and bringing it back to my fascination with people’s political contexts, I wanted to put Sam in what I thought would be maybe one of the most fascinating but also contentious political situations that he could be in, in the spirit of the book, which is, how is an African American would he feel about Africans on this continent who managed to escape the, in many ways, the original sin of a lot of the Western world with regards to colonialism and chattel slavery? How is he going to feel about that? I can’t put him in that position and not have T’Challa make an appearance. Like (laughs) It would have been absolutely criminal of me not to have a confrontation between Sam and T’Challa, if that was a question that I was going to be exploring. So part of how Hunter ended up as Sam’s main antagonist was that I just couldn’t let go of him after Black Panther: Legends. Like, (laughs) “No, I’m gonna run this character into the ground like I’m gonna use him for all he is worth.” The more I thought about it too, and the more I wrote, the more perfect a foil Hunter was for Sam. You know, they’re both sort of coming up in the shadow of more popular, more revered figures. Both trying to find their own place both in one sense or the other, outsiders in the world that they grew up in, and yet they took completely divergent paths. One of them aspires eternally to be the hero he feels he needs to be, and the other is so twisted by his feelings of exclusion and his almost omnidirectional anger and malice that he tries to literally blow up the country that raised him. Like, he tries to engineer a biological terrorist attack on the country that raised him, that gave him a home, that infused in him a sense of worth and all these things. The trauma of Hunter’s rejection from Wakanda was so great for him, the psychic wound was so great for him that the only thing he could think of to give himself purpose was to destroy his homeland and not just his homeland, but the very idea of racial reconciliation. The beginning of Pax Mohannda, that second arc, we see the new Prime Minister of Mohannda, giving a speech at the United Nations about her program of reparations and racial reconciliation for her country and Hunter’s very first move in that arc is to literally take that idea off the board. And so for him, Sam represents the attempt at that ideal and so it would make absolute sense in the world for me that that would be the thing that Hunter tries more than anything else to destroy.

Jackson Lanzing: I think it’s really cool because Sentinel, or because of Captain America in general since the fucking original issues has been a book concerned specifically with white supremacy and with the way that white supremacy operates inside of different societies. Primarily within Captain America, it’s been within European societies and American societies, basically societies that are guilty of that exact colonialism and chattel slavery, that began with the Dutch and all that. It’s that process of telling those stories, with Steve getting to reflect that then by showing how cultures that are not traditionally white deal with those reconciliations and how those stories change when Sam is in the center of that conversation. Ideally, it opens up a whole new century of stories for Captain America, right? I think when you talk about giving him his own Red Skull and having it be Hunter, I don’t think anybody would have thought about that but you, but in retrospect, it’s obvious, right? It’s like, of course, because this is a guy who is fundamentally opposed to the very thing that Sam stands for. But then, fascinatingly enough, so is T’Challa in some ways, right? 

It really gets to be this thing that sits on the other side of that and says, “Well, you know, we just did it the other way and it’s like too late for us. America can’t do it the way Wakanda did. It would be too late for us to do it that way. Stop judging us and start helping us start doing something because we can’t reverse our history. We have to operate inside of our history and we have to look forward and find new ways.” Having Hunter be on the other side of that and be like, “No, I’m just gonna burn all of it down,” omnidirectional  malice, as you put it, like that’s great, totally. I think that’s really interesting because Bucky feels a similar version of that omnidirectional malice towards the Outer Circle. It’s what’s driving him throughout that whole process, which is why he and Hunter, even though they have nothing in common and we really couldn’t have Bucky be like, “I respect you Hunter” because Bucky just can’t say that to a white supremacist. We’re just not gonna do that, but what he can do is say, “I understand you and I need you and I can play you,” which is what he does and the thing that maybe he doesn’t count on entirely is how much that’s gonna turn Hunter’s omnidirectional malice into monstrosity, right? By the end of it, Hunter is a literal white wolf. He’s just going to bite anything that comes his way, including Bucky, including Sam, including all of Dimension Z, including the world. Everything about that is just gonna be a thing that his malice pushes out and ideally then, even though they’re obviously separate books that then collide, what’s cool is hopefully that gives the audience without us putting too fine a point on it because we never have a conversation where these two guys go, “Let’s talk about our omnidirectional malice,” because that really on the nose, but rather the idea that Bucky can look at that guy and be like “Oh, that’s what I could become if I didn’t think about this, if I didn’t actually still have in my heart the Steve Rogers side of me that reminds me of what’s good. I could be this monster. Instead I’m going to put on the monstrous face and the monstrous cowl and the monstrous cloak, effectively, and then when I decloak, I’m still me, I promise. But I had to be this thing for a while to get us where we need to go,” as opposed to Hunter, where it’s not a mask. He’s a monster. That’s him taking off the mask.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Yeah, I have to say too, that “I promise” that Bucky says is very loaded. (Laughs) “It’s me, the good guy. I promise.” Sam’s looking at him like, “I don’t know, fam.”

Jackson Lanzing: (Laughs) I know, exactly! And it had to be. I think that’s the distinction between the two of them. Steve is very willing to give Bucky all the rope in the world because he does not want to believe that Bucky has that dark side in him. He really doesn’t. He still believes that he, with a wave of the cosmic cube, can just make him into a good man, and I think that Bucky knows that underneath that is a man who’s willing to do a lot of stuff other people aren’t.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Meanwhile Sam’s like, “Dawg, he literally just exploded a bomb at our feet.” (Laughs) “Steve, what are you doing?”

Jackson Lanzing: But just to answer the question really quickly, in terms of who was involved with Cold War from the beginning, it was always that cast. There were things about Cold War that shifted because the line got curtailed about halfway through Cold War. We only knew the book was ending after Cold War once we had written Alpha. So we had to reapproach the outline and figure out how we were going to turn this into more of an ending for both books, once we knew that. So that’s really what changed, but no characters got added or removed at any point. I think they were always those characters which was already enough for us to mess with because it wasn’t a Marvel line wide event. That would have been too big for what we were doing. We were trying to do a Captain America event, so we just had to have all of the characters who were in our Captain America wheelhouse.

Gatecrashers: Speaking of Bucky once again, there’s this powerful moment where Bucky talks about the difference between him and Ian and how the difference is Steve sees Ian like a son. If you go back and read old Captain America, sometimes Bucky too is referred to or implied to be Steve’s son. There’s always those different interpretations, similar to Batman and Dick Grayson, where sometimes they’re referred to as father and son or sometimes as brothers. What made you want to finally define who Bucky is to Steve in that manner?

Collin Kelly: Well, keeping in mind also that like the next guys who come along might redefine that relationship once again as comics do. We thought it was really important to let Bucky grow, right? You can’t have a partnership if one side of the partnership is infantilizing the other side, right? That’s a conservatorship, not a partnership. So in the same way that Batman is a great example, right? Dick Grayson is Bruce Wayne’s son, really, until Dick is able to prove himself, and thus Bruce is able to kind of let him go, which is good because Bruce needs to focus on his actual son.

Jackson Lanzing: (Laughs, and then speaks in a mocking tone) “Here are my eight wards and my one son.”

Collin Kelly: Yeah, “my one garbage child.” I think that with Steve in particular, you know, obviously anyone who’s read our Kang the Conqueror run knows that we write about sons and fathers. It’s very much a story that we circle back to thematically a lot in our work and in knowing that, we needed Bucky to grow into truly a mature role where he’s able to actualize as himself and isn’t defining himself by others and at the same time, we knew we needed to cut Steve down. We mentioned earlier about how hard it is to tell stories about good people who are good because there’s not a lot of place to grow. We knew that there was that gaping wound in Steve and Ian, and that was a wound that had never really been healed nor really regarded. You can read a whole bunch of Captain America stories and never actually realize that there’s someone in his life he considers his son because it’s just never really been that big of a plot for him. But there’s only three people in Steve’s life that he genuinely will move heaven and earth for and that’s Sharon, Bucky and Ian. So we’re gonna look at him and look at how he fits as a complete adult human man. We needed him to address the elephant in the room, which was that he’s got a son out there that has been left to wallow right, like he needed to step in.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Just to interject very briefly, not only is Ian Steve Rogers’ son, but he’s also Sam Wilson’s first partner and he got his throat cut on Sam’s watch, and so there are a lot of complicated feelings with regards to Sam and partnership in general because of his relationship with Ian. So I just wanted to also add that to Ian’s importance and why Ian was so essential to this story to bring Steve and Sam together.

Jackson Lanzing: Yeah, I want to kind of echo what Collin said about Bucky and then sort of speak to Ian because in terms of the Bucky aspect of it. I understand that other writers might think this way, but I’ve really never seen Bucky as Steve’s son. I think even when they’re in World War II and there’s a real age differential, it’s still like having that young kid who you’re just friends with. I think if anything, it’s closer to a fun uncle relationship. Bucky gets to be himself around Steve and Steve gets to be more himself around Bucky and the two of them bring out a good thing in each other. It’s not ever really a conservatorship. It really is a partnership and they really are friends, despite the age difference. I think you just see a kid and a man and you go “Oh! Father and son,” but I actually don’t really think that’s what’s going on there.

Collin Kelly: I also don’t think that the age difference is that wild.

Jackson Lanzing: The age difference is, I mean in World War II it’s a few years and then obviously by the time you get to the modern day, they’re effectively the same age so getting them to that perspective felt really important. You don’t want to be reactive to the MCU, but there’s also just an aspect to find the relationship between Bucky and Steve as one of these like “Best Bros” where it’s like a relationship that is like on the (he pinches his fingers), if these two guys weren’t so straight, it would be a romance, right? It’s so specifically like an emotionally vulnerable best friend, masculine relationship, which is something that Collin and I have. It’s literally a write what you know scenario for us. So it’s a chance for us to just embrace and write what we know and make it personal to us. There wasn’t really a lot of conversation about redefining the relationship. It was about embracing the relationship and writing what we knew. 

Ian, on the other hand, was all about redefinition. We all came in on Ian and said Ian needs story territory. There’s nowhere for him to go. Ian has run out of stories. Dimension Z became this giant question mark for him where he escaped it as a child. He went back as an adult. He lived as Nomad and tried to be Captain America there. It didn’t do much for him. He came back. He partnered with Sam. He tried to be Sam’s partner. It didn’t really do much for him. He went around the world trying to be Nomad. No book covered it, and he disappeared into the fucking wilderness, and that was the end of Ian Rogers story. Ian just ran out of story territory and it felt like if we were going to be really trying to capstone and milestone all these things in Caps’ lives and especially as we talked about what they have in common: Sam and Steve both had Ian in common. So it was like “Great, we got to give Ian new story territory” and that’s the only reason we all returned to Dimension Z. It was not on any of our minds. I think if you talked to us a year before and then like, “What’s Cold War?” I don’t think any of us would have been like “We’re going back to Dimension Z!” but as we talked about it, it became really clear that for Ian’s sake, if for nothing else, this character had to go back to the place that birthed him, that he’s been running from for so long and had to finally embrace aspects of his destiny that his position as Steve Rogers son had afforded him an escape from. The idea that he was Arnim Zola’s son biologically, that there were parts of that that he could never run away from, that there were parts of that that he had to understand as his own power, even if he could utilize it differently than his biological dad, right? And as somebody who has an adopted father, and I have a biological dad who I do not really relate to, and who if you want to know my relationship about that then obviously read Kang The Conqueror, man. It’s all about our relationship with our dads. But as a person who went through effectively adult adoption and has a lot of really, again, write what you know stuff about that, I thought the idea of taking Ian back to a space where he could look that in the eye and say “I am Ian Rogers and I’m Leopold Zola. I’m both of these things. I can take power from both of these things, and then I can create Ian Zola, right? I can create a version of that that can move forward and be something new.” So that’s where Ian Rogers, King of the Monsters, comes from, right? Like, how do you put that character in a space where he has new story territory where anytime that somebody in the Marvel Universe needs monsters, he’s right there and hopefully gives him space outside of the Captain America books. You know, we’ve talked about him at Marvel summits now. I think he’s one of those characters who can have real life outside of these books, ideally because of what Cold War did in moving him on from the Nomad persona, which always felt like him cosplaying as his adopted dad.

Tochi Onyebuchi: It gave us a sort of perfect instrument for this inevitable clash of captains, right? I think if you’re going to crash together two Captain America books, that means you’re crashing together the two Captains America, right? So there had to be a Cap fight and it’s one of the greatest honors of my career that I got to write a Cap fight. But you can situate a Cap fight as like, “Hey, these are their clashing personal philosophies of what it means to hold the shield.” But that’s a sort of clash of ideas and can be difficult to dramatize if there’s not a literal reason for them to bang shields together. Ian presented the perfect opportunity for that reason. I think also, in bringing not just Ian, but also Steve back to Dimension Z, it’s also an opportunity to get into his PTSD because that wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows for the two of them there, and of course, when Sam and Steve are both in their right heads they’re going to try to find every way not to come to blows about an issue. But if Steve, because of where he is and because of what coming back to this place does to him psychologically, gets this monomaniacal focus at the expense of all the other people around him, it basically takes him out of character because usually Steve is the one who’s like, “Okay, I have to make sure everybody around me is good to go.” All of a sudden we see Steve at this place where everyone just exploded and he’s ready to keep going and leave them behind. All of a sudden that gives us the perfect dramatic foundation for the two of them to literally duke it out over what it means to be Captain America.

Jackson Lanzing: We talked a lot about how that out of character aspect is really important because it’s a hard thing to do with Steve. He almost never operates out of character. 99% of the time, that character is a symbol. It’s actually what makes him hard to write. He doesn’t have a lot of those flaws as Collin has talked about, it’s hard to do a story about a good person who is good. I think that’s why Remender made Dimension Z in the first place, right? Because Rick Remender is not a person who writes about good people who do good, his characters are dirty and mean and gross and hard, and that’s what makes them good. That’s the point of reading a Rick Remender book. So when we wanted to return there, that’s why he was never on our slate because we’re not doing that with Steve, that’s not what our book’s about. But then when it came to this point and we were like, “Well, we have to put Steve into a really dark place, to get him to these spaces like the only place that’s gonna do that is Dimension Z,” and then it really does feel natural to the character and and ideally we step it in, right. You see, over the course of the first three issues as we get to that portal, he’s like, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go. I know what this is going to do to me.” He’s talking to Sharon, he’s like, “I’m gonna lose myself,” and they get close to the thing and he’s like, “I hear the hum. I know what this place is.” He’s starting to recall memories, like Steve can’t help it. In the same way that you know your trauma and you know when it’s going to show up, he feels it start and as a person who’s very aware of it is like “Oh, this is gonna happen,” and then it happens and he can’t stop it. He’s moving forward and without Sam, it all goes to shit. I remember when we got that script, we were like, “Woof.” It was more brutal than we expected, and Collin and I were like, “Alright, great. The challenge for us now is how do we get these guys to reconcile after?”

Tochi Onyebuchi: Yeah, I did not envy you. I handed you the tallest task (laughing).

Collin Kelly: You did. It was a burn, like a box of burning papers. And you were like, “Your problem now!” You’re like, “Dude, you’re on fire!”

Jackson Lanzing: What was cool about that was we’d actually made a big point out of how Steve was being Steve, how he wasn’t being Captain America and how throughout most of the run the point is we’re looking at Steve as the man, not the mission. And then for once, you got to have Bucky speak to the idea like, “Yeah, when Steve gets into a certain mode, he becomes the mission.” And that really does overwhelm him. But then once he wakes up out of that and goes “Oh, right. My mission isn’t Ian. My mission is this whole unit,” and he’s learned the lesson, he goes back, he gets them all out of that thing. He does the great thing you could do as Steve Rogers where he runs so hard, he causes an avalanche, right? Like, just like big crazy Steve Rogers. 

But then you get to the end of that and we’re like, “Great. So how does Sam and Steve reconcile?” To me, it was like, “I think basically Sam was in the right. He maybe didn’t have to punch Steve quite so hard, but like, by and large, he was in the right. So I think the way to do this is just for Steve to apologize and mean it.” So we just had like 2 panels where he’s like, “I’m sorry and next time, I promise I’ll listen to Captain America.” A substantial apology, not some bullshit apology. An apology that actually means something where he’s promising to do better and intends on doing it. Having Sam be able to look at Steve and be like “I believe you,” and then shakes his hand. We have a beat after where Misty’s like, “Seriously? That’s it? That’s all it takes?” Yeah, but that’s what these guys are. They understand each other at their best, so they can get to their worst and then 8 pages later, they can forgive one another. That’s what that longevity of friendship and partnership gives to those two characters at a point of real darkness.

Collin Kelly: That Misty line is also like a direct quote from one of our wives after an amazing shouting match that Jack and I had. It’s like, look, when you know someone you can absolutely vehemently disagree on something and really kick each other’s ass over it, and then if an apology is genuine, right, you can find that balance and be like “Oh wow, I was in the wrong.” Owning that is the mark of a mature person. Let’s normalize adult male friendships with the capability of forgiveness. Normalize male forgiveness.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Yes, and also too, Sam gets it. A major but supremely understated difference between Marvel (616) Sam and MCU Sam is while MCU Sam has a military background, Marvel Sam’s background is in social work, so he understands trauma and PTSD and trauma responses and people’s psychological defense mechanisms and the ways in which they try to continue living or walking forward in traumatic circumstances and traumatic environments. So he understands what’s happening to Steve and that’s why even throughout that whole fight there’s no malice. There’s no animus. It’s trying to punch Steve through this. With a person without super soldier serum you would talk them through it, but with Steve you kind of have to punch him through it. But it comes from this place of understanding and I think that it goes exactly to Jackson’s point too, which is why their reconciliation is so straight into the point, like it doesn’t have to be drawn out. There’s no sort of lingering like, you know, you did this or you did that like they both get it.