Responding to a fan question about the historic problem of comic series with non-American white male leads selling poorly, Marvel's Tom Brevoort wrote

I don't know that it's any one thing, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that it's all part of the same phenomenon that makes it more difficult to sell series with female leads, or African-American leads, or leads of any other particular cultural bent. Because we're an American company whose primary distribution is centered around America, the great majority of our existing audience seems to be white American males. So while within that demographic you'll find people who are interested in a wide assortment of characters of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds, whenever your leads are white American males, you've got a better chance of reaching more people overall.

With fans on other websites disputing Brevoort's take, Boom! Studios editor-in-chief Mark Waid backed him up at Comic Book Resources:

Tom's syntax following that is a little blunt...man, I wish it were wrong, but it's not. Every comics publisher ever, including BOOM!, can tell you maddening tales of retailers who, even now, in the 21st century, are hesitant to order books with non-white, non-American leads because their community won't support them. It's absurd, it's crazy-making, I don't know what it's going to take to change that other than time...but like it or not, it is an unfortunate truth of the time in which we live.

Of course, now that Marvel will have the backing of Disney, who have had success with non-American, non-white and non-male leads (as well as recent accusations of racism all of their own), that might be about to change... if the audience will let it.

Readers Questions 2 [Marvel.com]

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The Unknown feels similar to television shows like Warehouse 13 or Fringe - Rational people investigating the irrational. Did you have this mild semi-X-Files-revival zeitgeist in mind when coming up with the idea behind the series?

Nope. The Unknown was created largely in one night, in one telephone call with my friend Christine Boylan, a stage and TV writer whose talent far eclipses mine. I was venting to Christine that I knew I wanted to do another detective/impossible crime series LIKE Ruse, but other than switching up the master/apprentice genders, I didn't see anything that would make it even remotely new or intriguing. "A female Sherlock Holmes" isn't the most original pitch in the world if that's all there is to it. But Christine wisely pushed me on the question of, "Okay, what kind of crimes would she be solving?" and I shot back with "If I'm gonna throw a new detective in the mix, the only mystery I want to write about is the biggest, most unsolveable mystery of all, which is what happens when we die. HEY, WAIT A MINUTE." A few seconds later, my lead character's motivation—that she has only six months to live—fell into place, and the next morning, I had my new series to pitch to BOOM! publisher Ross Richie: "WHATEVER REMAINS" — as in the Arthur Conan Doyle quote.

Ross loved the concept, hated the name. I think it was editor Matt Gagnon who pitched out "The Unknown," and this is a good example of the reasons we have for keeping that guy in his job. Another is that Matt's the one who found our spectacular artist, Minck Oosterveer, about whom I cannot say enough complimentary things.

Just so we'd all have a good, mutual understanding of my vision, I typed out a quick one-sheet, and at the top, I wrote "Doc Savage by way of David Lynch" as a yardstick for tone—fast-paced pulp adventure with a genuinely unsettling air to it and without the familiarity of the traditional pulp-adventure structure that's so ingrained in all of us who read or write comics.

I'm amused and unsurprised at the Doc Savage reference, because the "Science Detective" subtitle that Doc's magazine had has been one I've used when talking about Catherine before. She really seems like a descendant to both Holmes and Savage, and Doyle serves as a Watson/Johnny sidekick. Was that an intentional nod to the familiar pulp detective set-up, or was it just easier and more fun to write exposition as conversation, instead of monologue or narration?

I write good conversation, so that just makes it more fun to script. Dialogue is one of the easiest ways to get character conflict across immediately in comics. Plus, having written hundreds of comics stories using first-person narration and having read ten thousand more, I'm bored to tears by the device and haven't seen it used well, uniquely, or suprisingly in years and years. It's very much become the tool of the Lazy Writer because it's so easy to fortify the page with giant, tedious blocks of first-person text in the voice of someone I haven't learned enough about yet to give a rat's ass about. ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz.
On the surface of it, The Unknown can be taken as a science vs. faith story - Catherine Allingham seeking to categorically define what is (should be?) a personal, spiritual experience. It's more complicated than that (Doyle's "You sound like you WANT it to be true," in the second issue seeming like the core of the story, at least for me), but do you have a particular horse in this race? Where do you fall on the science/faith scale, or is working that out that point (for you) of the book, beyond telling a good story?

Working that out IS part of the point of the book. If you come into any creative project without questions, you're gonna bore yourself and it'll show on the page. While it may not show on the page, I probably did more research on this series than on anything I've handled since, well, Ruse, my last "weird, impossible crimes" book (and my favorite fiction subgenre to read). And, like Catherine, I have a very irrational, almost romantic need for there to be some form of afterlife, because the idea that we're all just sophisticated electrochemical batteries who'll eventually run down is too horrible for me to accept. So, like Catherine, I want it to be true that there's something beyond this. But also like Catherine, I'm one of the least spiritual human beings you'll ever come across; the phrase "faith in a higher power" is like nails on a blackboard to me, partly because my life and my interests are defined by science and hard knowledge, and partly (I'm sure) because as a kid growing up in the Bible Belt, I had a lot of first-hand experience with seeing how often "faith in a higher power" becomes an excuse to not take responsibility for your own decisions. (That's a generalization, and I know that, but we're talking about the programming I received as a kid, which is hard to shake.)

I do believe that any sort of electromagnetic energy that can be measured beyond the moment of death is, by the definition of energy, eternal. But I cop to the fact that calling it a "soul" and presuming it sustains our consciousness in any form is, to put it kindly, a leap. I need to be shown something irrefutable; I confess that my eagerness to WANT to be shown something irrefutable is as much an act of faith as is attending the church down the street—except that, ultimately, as science marches on where faith never does, we get closer all the time to proving (or disproving) something.

Or, Graeme, to put it all way more succinctly than that—on a personal level, I have little if any use for faith. Therefore, so does Catherine. Unlike Catherine, however, I'm far less judgmental of those who use faith as their engine to get through the day.

When writing a story like this, do you have to keep your personal beliefs in check, then? If the writing of the story is in some way you exercising and exploring your personal struggle between fact and faith, and you have an inclination away from the faith part of that argument, do you find yourself fighting a tendency to end the story with a variation on "No soul for you, ha ha ha"?

Not in any thunderbolt moment of epiphany, but what I write very often helps me refocus my own attitudes and arguments—and, in doing so, sometimes shows me more clearly the fallacies I've been suffering under.

How much does real science (or real scientific curiosity, at least) feed into this series? There may not be a scale as sensitive as the Faderbauers', but not for want of trying, after all. On a series like The Unknown - versus something like Irredeemable, or The Flash - do you feel constrained by the world as we know it (even if you do extrapolate slightly)?

"Constrained," is, to me, the exact antonym of the descriptor I'd use. Real science is the greatest, most exciting springboard I have available to me as a writer, and I don't feel the least bit constrained by it. When Catherine gives her big speech in issue two about the history of assigning weight to souls, that's all fact, every word. So is the conceit that the only thing holding modern science back from building a Faderbauer apparatus is financing. The Catholic Church gets in the way, it's said—I've read report after report that funding for afterlife research is (shall we say) "interfered with" by religious officials who claim it to be a "waste of money." (Feel free to substitute the words "danger to our fundaments" for "waste of money." I do.)

Anyway, even with Flash or Irredeemable, I try to stay somewhere in the general ballpark of recognizable science (outside of the standard superhero "gimmes" that a guy can run at near-lightspeed or sink the island of Singapore). It just gives the work a verisimilitude that's integral to helping readers connect with the story.

Do you keep up with science news? Is there part of your day that's spent reading New Scientist's website and thinking "Man, I could tell a GREAT story about THAT"?

Always. Constantly. It's part of the morning routine, surfing the science sites and bookmarking interesting phenomena for later use. In fact, I probably spend more time reading that sort of material as a hobby than I do anything and everything else put together.

There's a follow-up series, The Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh, already solicited for later this year. Without spoiling the end of the first series, is The Unknown an open-ended concept for you? As a reader, I'm happy to know that there's more coming, but also kind of worried that this means that there's either going to be no climax to the first series or else a deus ex machina ending that'll see Catherine's illness suddenly healed or magically in remission (Assuming, of course, that Catherine survives the first series).

Trust me, when Ross said he wanted to do a follow-up series, I thought the same thing: "What now? Do I say she has FIVE months to live? And, oh, yeah, didn't I promise myself and the readers that she'd find an ANSWER to the mystery of the afterlife, seeing as how any orangutan with a keyboard can write a detective story in which the detective DOESN'T solve the case?" I can't say much of anything without spoiling the last issue, but the solution to all those problems came in a giant, sudden, totally unexpected bolt of inspiration that, in one second, turned what was a nice little four-issue story into the potential foundation for a whole mythology—which was never the plan, BUT I'LL TAKE IT. I will say this, though—there are no cheats in issue four, no deus ex machina cures, no magic wands. Nor in Series Two, Issue One—the first words of which are, "One Year Later."

Which means, as per your parenthetical comment, that you are assuming maybe too much. (God, I hate having to write Previews Catalogue copy four months ahead of time.)

The Unknown #4 is released on Wednesday. A hardcover collection of the first series follows next month, accompanied by the first issue of The Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh. For a chance to read the entire first issue of The Unknown, click here.

The Unknown is the latest series from Mark Waid, better known for his superhero books like Kingdom Come and The Flash, and while it may not feature people in tights doing impossible things, that doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to be any more down to Earth; by the end of the issue, we're already discovering technology that Walter Bishop wishes he could've invented.

But that's one of the problems about this first issue - it almost takes too long to get to the hook. Sure, there are enjoyable and necessary scenes on the way (I particularly like the hallucination/ghost haunting main character Catherine Allingham), setting up the characters and conflicts, but it takes us the entire issue to get to what feels like the point, and that reveal - the very last thing in the issue - suddenly makes everything that has happened before somewhat... less important, perhaps, or less interesting. Sure, it guarantees that you're going to pick up the next issue, but there's also a frustration at not having gotten to that point earlier.

(This also makes it harder to write about, without ruining the story. Suffice to say that the reveal sets up what, according to interviews with Waid, is the real thrust of the series. The last page is worth it, though.)

That said, even with the frustration - which won't feel nearly so acute in the inevitable collected edition - there's a lot to recommend this issue, not least of all Waid's snarky dialogue (Allingham's disdain for those around her convinces you of her intelligence as much as anything else) and wonderfully atmospheric art by Minck Oosterveer. It may not be a perfect beginning, but it's intriguing, and sometimes, that's nearly as good.

The Unknown #1 is available now.

Talking to Boom! editor-in-chief Mark Waid about the series at Newsarama, O'Bannon explained that the new comic series picks up where the television show left off, in terms of both tone and timeline:

I'm personally looking at this as if it were the next season of the series. I would hope that fans will approach the comics as if they are reading scripts from upcoming episodes — except that there is also great art accompanying the words. And the possibility of paper cuts. Other than that, it's very much the same Farscape... The story contained in the first set of four comics focuses on Crichton and Aeryn and their newborn son, as well as those characters who stayed aboard Moya at the end of the Peacekeeper Wars mini-series. Talk about continuing the saga from the television series — the comics pick up immediately after the close of The Peacekeeper Wars. It's that contiguous.

And if you're wondering how O'Bannon finds writing the series as a comic instead of a television show, the answer is somewhat unsurprising:

I'm finding that adapting the Farscape world to this different medium is actually quite freeing — because unlike producing episodes for weekly television, I don't have to limit my imagination at all. Environments, creatures, events that I might have had to tone down or eliminate altogether on an hour TV budget are all readily available to me now.

The series launches in November.

Mark Waid & Rockne S. O'Bannon on Boom's Farscape [Newsarama]

Talking to Newsarama, Waid - who is also the Editor-in-Chief of Boom! - explained that the deal between the publisher and Pixar has been in the works for quite some time:

It's been in development for a couple of years. Of course, the writers strike put a spike in everything for everyone for awhile across all media. But everything is back on track and we were able to make this work... The deal we put together with Disney is Pixar and Muppets. The Pixar end of it gives us reign over creating new properties and new material based on the Pixar movies. So I think our six launches are Incredibles, Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Cars, Wall-E, and Finding Nemo.

If you're wondering what Waid will bring to The Incredibles - besides his experience of writing super-powered families in both Fantastic Four and his recent return to The Flash - he's perfectly happy to share:

When the properties came available, that's the one I seized on immediately. I sort of jumped on that like a junkyard dog and made everyone else get away from it... I can't take my toes completely out of the superhero pool. So yeah, this gives me a chance to work out my superhero jones. And also, it's comedy! I love writing comedy. We've got some great ideas that have been approved by the Pixar organization and Disney. Obviously, they're faithful to the Incredibles property, but they're giving us a little bit of latitude as far as storytelling... We're not limited by strictly what's in the movie. We can hopefully introduce a few new characters and a few new villains and play it out from there.

The first sighting of the new comics is, of course, at San Diego Comic-Con, where Boom! are giving away a special preview comic with excerpts from the comic versions of Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc.. The actual series themselves will launch in Spring of 2009.

Mark Waid Talks New BOOM! Studios/ Disney-Pixar Deal [Newsarama]

When you were young, did any particular science fiction inspire you to get into writing?

I'm sort of embarrassed to say... well, I'll just lay all my cards on the table here: Isaac Asimov's stuff. Isaac Asimov's science fiction stuff which was, in retrospect, is juvenile and clunky and has much better ideas than style. But, I didn't care about style then I was 12 years old. The cleverness of the mysteries, they don't hold up very well for me as an adult, but as a kid that's the stuff that sparked my imagination.

Do you have a favorite science fiction book of a film?

I honestly think that, even though this is fairly recent, The Matrix was the greatest science fiction movie I've ever seen, and I've seen them all.

Did you like all three?

The other two made my head hurt. I went in cold not knowing anything, completely cold, and it just blew my mind. Going back, I'm a big fan of Phillip K. Dick. Always have been. I'm a big fan of Alfred Bester, and I know a lot of his stuff is out of print now, which kills me. Those formative guys from the 50s and 60s, and any of those guys that Harlan assembled for Dangerous Visions, J.G. Ballard... all those guys are just phenomenal.

And Alfred Bester wrote for comics too, right? Didn't he write Green Lantern?

That's right, he wrote Green Lantern for awhile. He did some pulp stuff before the comics, but he didn't really become big until the 40s and 50s during his run in comics.

What are you writing these days?

I'm currently writing The Brave and the Bold at DC Comics, where I just finished up a run on The Flash. I'm also doing a lot of work at Boom! Studios where I'm the editor in chief.

That's right, and they're based out here in Los Angeles. What titles have you worked on there?

I wrote a miniseries called Potter's Field which came out last year, and I'm working on some more creator-owned stuff for them next year. In the meantime, that's my night job. My day job is the full-time editorial gig. I started there in July of last year, and I couldn't be happier. It's after 20 years of writing, it's cool to flex different muscles editorially because I'm finding that while I'm teaching new writers to do their stuff, it's forcing me to flex muscles that I hadn't used for awhile. Or to sort of articulate things in a way that I only know instinctively.

So were you a fan of Y: The Last Man?

Absolutely! I've been reading Y since the beginning, ever since Brian was a little kid with a stick and a hoop and a crown hat coming by my house going, "Mr. Waid! Mr. Waid! I want to grow up to be just like you!' No, I've known Brian for 10 years or better, and I've been reading his stuff all along. I couldn't be happier for him.

So you follow his work on Lost?

Definitely, and although I know it's a big room with a big group of writers, I can sometimes see flashes of Brian every now and again with the humor.

Do you think anyone could do a good film or television version of Y: The Last Man?

I think if they took enough time with it they could, if they didn't try to cram it into a 90 minute movie, sure. But we'll see... it doesn't matter whether it's faithful, it just matters if it's good or not.

What upcoming comic book films are you looking the most forward to?

Well, Dark Knight. That's the one that's going to rock the house. That's the one that's going to be amazing. Iron Man looks cool, but I was never a huge Iron Man fan, although it's inspired casting. Perfect casting. But Dark Knight... if they can get under the eclipse of the Heath Ledger story, will do really well for them. What I've seen ahead of time looks phenomenal. I just don't think you can say "Why So Serious?" anymore.

Is there any comic book property that you haven't worked on, but would love to?

From Archie Comics to DC Comics to Marvel Comics, I've written pretty much everything, but the one thing I haven't touched is Captain Marvel, the Shazam! version. Some day, at some point in my future, that's somewhere on the line.

Everybody who gets their hooks into it knows it's a great property, it's just that nobody has found a way to translate it. I don't know that you can write it for 40 year old fanboys, I don't know that there's an audience for it there. But it's the perfect young adult property, and it's just waiting to break out. He doesn't have to come from Krypton, and he doesn't have to train for years and years or become a scientist, he just says a magic word. When I was a kid, that's all I wanted.

Famous names: Mark Waid, Alex Ross

Crunchy goodness: 3

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: In 1999, DC published the out-of-continuity The Kingdom, which forms a prequel and sequel to Kingdom Come, in which a villain named Gog travels through time and kills Superman over and over. The Kingdom introduced the concept of "hypertime," which allowed the DC Universe to have alternate universes again — until every other writer ignored it.

Deja vu: Kingdom Come owes a lot of its sheen to its painted artwork by Alex Ross, who also did the art for Marvels. And it features a central "everyman" character, Norman McCay, just as Marvels had "everyman" photographer Phil Sheldon.

Most painfully dated moment: Not only does Ross' painted art look less special than it did in 1996, but also the whole "superheroes are getting too mean and violent, waah" sermon feels a bit old hat at this point.

Ten Years Later: Reflecting On "KINGDOM COME" With Alex Ross by Jonah Weiland