A few months ago, Zero had the opportunity to sit down with Jackson Lanzing, Colin Kelly and Tochi Onyebuchi, writers of Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty and Captain America: Symbol of Truth. We dug into a lot here, the craft, the characters, what’s next and some fun stuff not necessarily within the realm of Captain America that could have happened, but didn’t.

Intro

Gatecrashers: Let’s start with an icebreaker question. In your books, we see Steve drinking coffee with Sharon and we also see Sam having a sandwich with Misty. What is Steve’s go to coffee, and what’s Sam’s favorite kind of sandwich?

Jackson Lanzing: I think Steve drinks his coffee black, and he just has coffee. I think he probably makes it with a simple coffee maker, just like a drip thing that he can press a button on.

Collin Kelly: I think Steve is a lot like me. He probably sees coffee as coffee and he buys it in the biggest, most affordable tin he can. It all tastes like brown muck that he’s been drinking for the last 70 years.

Tochi Onyebuchi

Steve Rogers drinks coffee like an immigrant. (laughs)

Jackson Lanzing

(laughs) Yes, exactly.

Collin Kelly

Sharon brings over the Chemex, she tries to show him really nice local blends and Steve’s like, “Hmm, so good, honey!” (Kelly mimics Steve and lifts up his Hylian Shield themed coffee mug with a wide smile before taking a sip)

Jackson Lanzing: Sharon is me, (chuckles) yeah.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Sam’s go to sandwich is a spicy fried chicken sandwich from Kennedy’s Fried Chicken, without cheese, but he likes his extra spicy.

Captain America #0

Gatecrashers: Awesome! Moving ahead, my first question is about Captain America #0, the first issue where the three of you worked together. What does the writing process look like with all three of you?

Tochi Onyebuchi: A lot of fun.

Jackson Lanzing: Yeah, every time. We all wrote three issues together over the course of the run: Captain America #0, Captain America: Cold War Alpha and Captain America: Cold War Omega. 

Collin and I’s process is always collaborative, and so we just extended that process to Tochi. We all just talked, usually over Zoom, about what would we cool both in terms of exterior and editorial. Once we figured out our thoughts, we brought it to editorial, got their feedback and buy-in, and then put together an outline based on what we discussed, before giving effectively a third to each writer. Once we finished writing, we each did a pass-over, so Tochi did a pass-over on our writing, we did a pass-over on Tochi’s and at the end we had an issue written by the three of us, which is just Collin and I’s process usually. 

We’ve talked about expanding the Hivemind before, and we’ve done it a couple of times this year because of Christopher Cantwell on Star Trek, but Tochi, you’re the first person we’ve ever actually done it with and went, “Oh, this works. Cool!”

Tochi Onyebuchi: That’s so funny. I was the experiment. 

Jackson Lanzing: Yeah, you were. You were the third brain to get plugged into the machine.

Tochi Onyebuchi: I could dig it. The thing about Captain America #0, if I remember correctly, is that there’s a portion of the script during the battle where it alternates between Steve and Sam’s perspective. Originally the plan was to have a Steve chunk and a Sam chunk, and then, I forgot who came up with this idea, but it was brilliant to splice the two together so we get this interchange that shows each of the different struggles the two face in regards to holding the shield, but also how those parallel and are both necessary in taking down the threat in front of them.

Jackson Lanzing: Yeah, it’s almost like they were originally written discreetly and then we wove them. I remember that. That was wild. That was a really cool thing to find in the process where just naturally we had two monologues that were talking to each other.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Yes, exactly.

Jackson Lanzing: Great. Like these should be a braid. Let’s go.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Absolutely.

Collin Kelly: It can be a little intimidating to join the Hivemind, right? Even with other people we’re dealing with, it’s always the two of us (me and Jackson) compared to one of you, which can be cornering. A neat thing about the process that I distinctly remember was when I made some changes to your pages at some point, Tochi. I was like “I can plus this,” and I remember you coming back going “No. Revert, please.” For me, it was like “Oh shit, yeah man, okay,” and it’s easy to assume that because there’s two of us that we’re always right, so I love that you were like “Back it up!” which shows a lot of confidence creatively. It was really one of the moments where I was like, “Okay, hell yeah! This is going to work.”

Tochi Onyebuchi: I think one of the reasons it was such a wonderful collaborative experience was the mutual respect that we all brought to the table, and also the recognition of each other’s incredible strengths. I remember distinctly particularly with Omega, reading through the battle scenes in particular, where I was like “I have no notes. You got this slide.”

Jackson Lanzing: That’s a Collin special. We make the joke often that the way the Hivemind initially started was that I was the character guy and Collin was the action guy, which isn’t true anymore to any degree because we’ve been doing this for like 15 years. But when we started, it was kind of true because I had zero idea how to do action, it really wasn’t how my brain worked. Collin, meanwhile, was just inherently excellent at it. He’d been weaponizing himself towards it for a really long time.

Collin Kelly: I just love explosions. (He shrugs) 

Jackson Lanzing: When we got to Omega, and frankly in Captain America #0, which is basically one big action sequence, it was this really awesome opportunity with both Sam and Steve to let the action do the talking. These are two characters who don’t need to talk to express themselves, they can express themselves through battle and I’m not normally very comfortable with that, I’ll be honest. Still, to this day I read Alpha and Omega and I’m like, “Wow, there’s a lot to this book.” Like, If I was sitting alone in a room, I probably wouldn’t have produced that book because I don’t know how to do that, so I’m really glad it wasn’t me alone. It would never have worked because of the way that this functions, since those characters can express themselves differently. We all come in with different strengths as writers, and I think it lets the book be a little unpredictable and pivot-y, really move into different modes and spaces and ideally use all our strengths. 

It was a blast. What a cool process, and one that we were very nervous about heading into.

Gatecrashers: In that same issue, we get these conversations between Sam and Zola, as well as Steve and Zola, which indicate the directions in which both books would go. How did you guys pitch the book to explore those avenues, and were you three always meant to be working together?

Tochi Onyebuchi: I actually don’t know how y’all got into this, Jackson and Collin, so I’m very curious to hear your answer.

Jackson Lanzing: We’ve told this story a little bit so I’ll be brief. 

Collin and I had just come off Kang the Conqueror. We had a little bit of success at Marvel with that book, and Alanna Smith, who had recently become the editor of the Captain America line. She had said to us in our very first meeting that we would be really good for Steve Rogers, and we just laughed it off, thinking it’ll never happen. Then, lo and behold, she came to us and told us, “Hey, you guys should pitch. We’re going to be doing a new Captain America ongoing. Ta-Nehisi Coates is going to be putting the book down and we’re going to be doing a new #1, so pitch Captain America. Whatever you want, go crazy. You probably won’t get the job because you’re new, but you should pitch because people can then see what you can do.”

It was actually kind of freeing because we thought we wouldn’t get the gig, so we just thought to pitch the craziest thing we could. We had the Outer Circle as a framework, and the idea to interrogate the symbol on the shield, which isn’t the American flag even though everyone thinks it is. It just shares some colors and symbolism. We thought to really interrogate what that symbol could mean, and see if that uncovers something for Steve.

Initially, our book had Sam in a supporting role and we figured it to be a book about Sam, Steve and Bucky. After we pitched it, they came back to us and said “This is really cool, take these 8 pages and expand it to 20. Tell us everything, because we really like this idea and you might get this now. The one big note we have is that you can’t use Sam because Sam’s going to have his own Captain America book.”

We were like “Oh shit, okay, now it’s real. Badass, this is going to be a dual line. We can move Sam out of the framework.” We really didn’t have a lot of plans for Sam until our third year, since we had a long plan. At that point, we started asking “Who’s writing Sam?” over and over again.

Collin Kelly: I also think an interesting caveat to that is we couldn’t just come in and tell another story about Captain America: Worldwide Avenger. Coates’ run is stupendous and so excellent at examining what the role of Captain America is in our country, followed up by Cantwell’s United States of Captain America, where he literally travels around the country and sees how he has been influencing people in America. So, what we had coming into it were two amazing runs about Steve Rogers interfacing internationally and domestically with an eye towards race relations and socioeconomic balance, and all these things were essayed wonderfully. Hence, what we could do specifically was tell a story about Steve Rogers as the individual, so that was kind of the core. Once we realized that, we were like “Fuck yeah, this is cooking with gas, but this only works if the other book is about being Captain America and seizing those opportunities and being that eye to the world. I hope whoever takes over the book has a similar instinct for whatever the Sam book might be.”

Tochi Onyebuchi: I think it was 2021. I did a limited series about the origin of Black Panther geared towards middle grade readers and had a ton of fun with that. Coming off of that, some months later, maybe into the new year, I got a somewhat cryptic email from Alanna Smith asking if I’d be down to write about Sam, with little to no detail about what it might mean. I was a political science nerd in college and heavily into international affairs, so political thrillers in particular are my jam. I knew immediately that I wanted Sam to be putting stamps in his passport for whatever story I was going to tell. 

You know you can’t escape the fact of Sam Wilson’s blackness, so what I wanted to see explored was the interaction of that on an international level. We’ve seen the examination of race in a Captain America book within the context of America’s borders, but what would that look like when Sam Wilson is the face of America abroad? Even getting into the conspiratorial aspect of political thrillers, how does he look as an arm of the State Department of America’s foreign interest? How does he interact with that role, how does he bristle against that? That’s where a lot of the animating impulse for Symbol of Truth came alone, and I knew I wanted Sam to have his own Red Skull. Since I had just told this story about T’Challa’s childhood with his adopted brother Hunter, I had this character in my head that was ripe for exploration, and I cannot tell you my shock when I first wrote Hunter, discovered him in my research and realized his history and everything. I was like, “Why isn’t this character everywhere (chuckles)?” This guy had one of the most compelling backstories that I’d come across in the entire Marvel Universe and part of me was like, “Wait, he’s all mine?”

Jackson Lanzing: Christopher Priest knew, right? He’s such an incredible writer and a lot of what we’re all building in the Marvel Universe over on Sentinel of Liberty is even, I mean, much more direct and simple, but also very inspired by Chris Priest. He was one of the people to come into the Marvel Universe and ask, “What if you couldn’t trust the systems of power? What if SHIELD was not a paragon of virtue? What if you couldn’t look at these levers of power and money and culture and technology, and assume that they were magnanimous? What if you had to see them from the other direction?” which I think comes from the fact that he was also one of the first black writers at Marvel in any position of power, so he could speak from a much more truthful place about how these things were exploitative in ways that were probably blind to a lot of the other writers. It’s been really awesome to get to resurface some of that stuff across the line because I just have an enormous amount of respect for Chris Priest. So I remember when you came in, you were like “I wanna use Hunter,” I went, “YES! YES!” 

(Tochi laughs at the statement, nodding his head in agreement.)

Yeah, he’s such a great character, and he’s been left on the court for so long. He’s not even in the Black Panther movie, right? 

Tochi Onyebuchi: Yeah.

Jackson Lanzing: So the idea of having this character there and having something that you can really uncover there is just badass. It was really exciting to see and it really did mean that suddenly, we had two books that weren’t cannibalizing each other, which is always the problem with these dual lines, where it’s like, “How do you do two X-Men books that feel really distinct?” We’re doing this on Star Trek, right? How do you do two Star Trek books that feel really distinct? With Captain America, it was so cool, because Captain America is not very hard to feel distinct. Tochi had such an immediate take and we had such an immediate take, and they really did sit on completely different levels. I remember when we first had this conversation and the blood rushed out of my face for a second. I thought it might be a problem, but it worked out. We were both doing conspiracy thrillers, unlike what you would normally do in this line, where one of them’s a soap opera and one of them’s a comedy or whatever. They’re both global, worldwide conspiracy thrillers but they have really different tones and they have really different objectives and the conspiracies, while they are tied, ultimately by Cold War, are distinct and about what the characters are going through rather than what the world is going through. So they really got to be a book about Sam and a book about Steve.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Absolutely.

Collin Kelly: The fact that because they were in alignment as conspiracy theories, it wasn’t like we had to slam two disparate books together in some kind of strange melange. Both books were it. Once we knew Cold War was on the horizon, it was easy for us to tune our narratives to naturally climax in this kind of conspiracy mode. So I think that is also a reason why the two really sang together well. But you nailed on the head, double conspiracy theory thrillers.

Gatecrashers: Speaking of the two different books, how did you come up with the titles for the different books? Symbol of Truth is new to Captain America, but Sentinel of Liberty is also the name of a Captain America run from the 90s. 

Jackson Lanzing: That was a Marvel editorial decision that came down from up high.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Yep, same.

Jackson Lanzing: We all got an email that said “These are the names of the books,” because from pretty early on it was ‘Captain America: Steve’ and ‘Captain America: Sam’ and we were like, “What are these books? We don’t really know what the titles are going to be. They’re both called Captain America, that’s all that matters.” Reviving Sentinel of Liberty ended up being really fortuitous for us, not only because our book echoes the Mark Waid run in certain ways, especially with its focus on Sharon and its focus on how the Sharon-Steve relationship functions despite their like relative moralities, but also some of the conspiracy thriller aspects of it, some of the Steve finding community aspects of it. A lot of that was echoing Sentinel, so it ended up kind of being a no brainer, but Symbol was brand new.

Tochi Onyebuchi: Yeah. Well, I mean again that decision was above me, but it worked and it definitely worked as well on the level of Sam being the face of America and America’s complexities and contradictions abroad. It’s funny, there was a running joke between the three of us. Whenever there would be emails abbreviating our titles and I would see Captain America: SOL, like, I don’t think that’s (everyone laughs) “Captain America: Shit Out of Luck”.

Collin Kelly: Yeah, I mean that was the fun thing too, similarly, Sentinel of Liberty is kind of the story that Steve is going through. He’s trying to figure out how to stand for not just the American way, but the idea of the very concepts of truth, which is also true for Sam. But then yeah, Captain America: SOL. And we’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s the fucking title of this book. Things are bad for Steve. He is shit out of luck. This makes sense now.”

Tochi Onyebuchi: “I see what you did there Marvel!”

Gatecrashers: Was Cold War something that you all decided to be two arcs in naturally, or was that editorial coming in and telling you to crossover?

Jackson Lanzing: It was sort of 50% of one 50% of the other. I think there’s a sort of natural instinct when you come in on a dual line that you want to crash them together. (He shrugs.) That’s just natural. Why have these two things if you’re not going to utilize both of them to tell a wider story? It’s a tool that almost no other medium has you know, so embrace it, have fun with it. It’s what makes the medium great. I think the name came from editorial well before we had a plot. That happens sometimes right, like that old Secret Wars story of “Kids like secrets and kids like wars, so we’re calling this Secret Wars.” There was a lot of tension coming up with Russia, there was a lot of stuff happening and we got a sort of notice being like, “Hey, think about this title. You don’t need to use it, but if you want, we think Captain America: Cold War could be a cool title,” and so some of Cold War ended up getting backwards engineered to make sure that “cold” was there, but really all that did was inspire Alaska as a setting. I remember, in the very first issue, Captain America #0, in our first break, we had like 2 pages left in the outline and Tochi was like, “For two pages, could we just have the villains vibing? Could they just be like anime villains and just like hanging out and being like mutual respect, vibes,” and we couldn’t really make it work because they couldn’t be aware of each other yet for where we wanted to go. So we always knew that Cold War was going to be the place where the villains got to vibe. Like great, we can look forward to that.

Collin Kelly: We knew that we wanted that crossover event, and we always kind of knew that the crossover was gonna be happening at about that place. That’s when the good juice happens and then Cold War just became a setting. A title and a setting but similarly because it was two conspiracy theories, we always knew those conspiracies would slam together. It could have been called Beach War and we would have set it in the Maldives, right? Like, setting didn’t matter. Cold War is a pitch and title 100% and thematically it ended up working with both of our stories.