So what's the overall story of Genesis?
John Byrne: Well, the basic premise is building on the domino that I knocked over in back in Action #600 where it was established that when the Godworld blew up and created Apokolips and New Genesis, it sort of spewed out this bubble of energy that rushed out into the universe in all directions; it actually impregnated every planet that it touched with a divine seed. This is what caused all the gods of the universe to come into existence. We have to sidestep around the Big Kahuna. Then building from that, Paul Kupperberg [editor on Wonder Woman] and I came up with the notion that once the Godworld's shockwave reached the maximum expansion, which is about the size of the universe, it started to collapse. And on this second pass through the universe it again seeded all the planets, and this is what made superheroes possible. These superheroes are essentially demigods.
Not just the overtly magical heroes, but all the others, too?
Yes. It created the force the Oans tapped into, for example, which made the Green Lanterns possible. It created mutations, the superhero gene -- whatever you call it in DC, the Meta-gene, I guess. It basically sets all this in motion. This is all roughly five or six thousand years ago, depending upon which number I happen to have thrown out in any given issue; I try to be as vague as possible.
Now, that's when the wave passed the Earth?
That is when the wave passed over the Earth... some superheroes are older than that, and some superheroes are younger than that. The Earth is not at the center of the universe. The bottom line for Genesis is that various bad guys, including Darkseid, have realized that this is what has happened and have realized that the Godwave, on its second pass, is almost back to the center.
And it's very concentrated at this point...
Yes, and so if I was there, I'd get all this power, wouldn't I!
But there's more than one person who's trying to contend to be there at that moment?
Right, there's all kinds of people who want to be there, including our heroes who want to stop any bad guys from being there. But our heroes are confronted with a problem, which is that all the effects that this compression is having on The Source, which is the center of the universe. Things are going haywire, so their powers are functioning differently... not working.
Oh, so that's why Superman looks weird now.
They are actually going to tie that in, in some way. I'm not sure what they're going to pull off, but it's allowing me to do some characters in Wonder Woman and New Gods, and it's basically allowing everybody who wants to play, as it were, to fiddle around with their characters. What it basically comes down to is: some are going to die, some are going to change, some are going to get powers, some will lose powers, and hopefully, it will be a huge and cosmic crossover that will actually be worth the effort for a change.
So what parts are you writing besides the overall plot and bible-type stuff?
I'm writing the four part weekly series, entitled Genesis, which everything else ties into. And, of course, I'm doing [writing and drawing] the Fourth World and Wonder Woman chapters, which are Fourth World #8 and Wonder Woman #126.
And that will be handled in a similar way to Final Night, in that it will go into one monthly issue of everybody's comic?
Well, I didn't read Final Night, so I'm not sure on how that worked, but basically people are tying in at different points and pretty much doing whatever they want to. Then, of course, there will be a big hoo-ha conclusion that will go across everything and end in the last issue of Genesis.
The reason I hate crossovers--I really don't get to go anywhere. Nobody gets to go anywhere because the real going of anywhere is going on in Genesis. So we don't get to tie up or conclude anything; we have to work twice as hard to figure out things that will make it seem to the readers like they've read a story that is actually worth reading, when it was actually only a tiny chapter of a greater whole.
Is it any different now that you are actually doing the greater whole or is it still...
Well, certainly it makes it easier for me to link my stuff to the greater whole. I don't have anyone coming in and saying, "By the way John, the Beyonder has to appear here." I am the one who's telling me where the McGuffin has to appear, which makes life easier. It was kind of funny, with somebody else drawing and somebody else inking, I have to start writing it months before; I am working on the 4th issue of Genesis today, where as I'm only now about 8 pages into the chapter of Fourth World that ties into the third part of Genesis. I suddenly found myself in the situation where I was writing months ahead and then trying to catch up to myself. I remember calling Paul Kupperberg in a panic and saying, "You know, this character who's like a major player in Genesis three, I just realized -- he's dead!" RE-write! RE-write!
So, although every hero is involved, who are the big guns that are going to be most involved?
Let me see if I can just call up a Genesis script -- the main players are Green Lantern, Flash, Martian Manhunter, Queen Hippolyta, Mary Marvel, Prysm, Guy Gardner, Steel, Spark, Donna Troy, Saturn Girl, one of the Omega Men, Caliber, Takion, Superman, Artemis, Captain Marvel, Impulse, Max Mercury, The Legion, Superboy and the Ravers, Supergirl, the Ray, Jesse Quick, and a bunch of alien heroes.
Those are the main guys?
Those are the main guys!
You have panels where you say, "put anyone you want in here."
This is the first toss-in-everything-but-the-kitchen-sinkcrossover you've really worked on in this way, isn't it?
On this, at least since I'm writing and able to coordinate a little bit better, I'm hoping against hope that everyone else is jumping in, in the right way, in their own books over which I have no control, thank God. I don't want it!
And in the end result, this is kind of the perfect huge cosmic story. Not to invoke the name of the Anti-christ, but Jim Shooter used to say the best kind of story you could do is the most important and significant thing that has ever happened to the hero, without it changing anything. Basically that is what Genesis is. It's the most important and significant thing that has ever happened to these heroes, but it doesn't really change anything.
Unless you want it to...
You can take that any way you want but it really doesn't change anything that's already done!
I assume the villain list is not quite as long.
The fun part about this is that it says "Jack Kirby created the DC universe." We start out very small, we say Jack Kirby created the Greek Gods, back in Action #600, and we sort of broke from that and said, 'Jack Kirby created everything." What the hell, even if he didn't, he did. Well, except for Batman, he doesn't have any powers.
He only created Batman if he created crime.
No, she's from a universe which I don't believe is there anymore.
The Time Trapper just sort of made her universe out of whole cloth.
"Neither of my sets memories explains this!"
They can sort of feel the passage of the Godwave if they try?
Even though a lot of the overt Christian Mythology in DC is over in Vertigo, what about something like the Spectre who is a Christian mythological superhero, or the Demon?
My whole premise here is that The Source is number one; everything comes from The Source. If it is necessary to your getting through the day that that means The Source is God, that's fine. If it's necessary to your getting through the day that it means The Source created God, that's also fine.
Jack Kirby did have The Wall, which prevented The Source from ever being seen...
So there's a regular story in addition to the thousand character appearances?
Like those old JLA/JSA crossovers, with a lot more teams?
If anybody drops the ball, including me (like I said, I almost had a dead guy walking around), you get a domino effect and it can cause untold damage. We might end up getting to the end of this and saying, "it all worked, it's all great!" Then somebody will say, "well no, over there in New Gods you forgot to mention this...' Then we're doomed.
"We just established that there is no Batman... ooops!"
I think that redoing time has been done to death... it's been done nineteen times, but of course we only know of two of them in this universe.
Well, the grandfather thing is the problem with all time travel, of course...
Genesis at least avoids that kind of stuff. Thank God, it's complex enough. There are still going to be people who come out of Genesis saying, "I don't accept this!" But they always will.
But at least it will all hang together and make sense.
Taking that assertion about the Greek Gods and then running all the way with it?
Of course you can't tell what's happening when you created The Source.
You've got such a track record that I'm fairly confident in the result, even if you were closer to the material before.
Well, that's the risk you run if your story actually makes sense, because it could be communicated wrong. If it doesn't make sense, it doesn't matter who says what. Secret Wars II was meticulously coordinated, but, so what? It's like, they all got the organization part right, but I think they missed the forest for the trees there...
So, it'll be ten years before we see you do this again?
Well, Generations sounds interesting. I really liked the last two pages of Batman/Captain America with Batman and Robin II from Alfred's imaginary stories... I remember those. You took the roman numeral two's off their shirts, which was nice...
So, you're asserting that Superman and Batman really were around in the 1930's and then time passed, which never happens.
Which is three or four generations of normal people.
No, that was the other guy, we all look the same in the mask. So it's going to be an 8 issue story?
In 1999 you will almost have caught up to reality.
Wow!
Right, well you've given me a reason to live for the next 15 months. While I've got you here, let me ask you about Wonder Woman. There is fairly well substantiated rumors that she will get killed, apparently. And, of course, being a mythological character she can die, go to the other world and then come back...
Now, you don't mean the elements of the Wonder Woman mythology?
Well, there's been Zero Hour since then, so I think anything is justified!
She'll be one of the Olympian Gods?
Well, both Artemis and the new Wonder Girl are possibilities, and then, of course I might be completely in left field.
So if Wonder Woman actually becomes a goddess than the JLA will be equivalent to the old Justice League where "we have Superman, so what would they need you for."
You're not supposed to do that sort of thing anymore?
What do you think of the way that Grant Morrison has been doing Justice League so far, not just the eventual stories but how it impinges on what you're doing?
So, you don't have to worry about her turning into a radioactive mutant and not being able to turn her back?
Whats coming up in New Gods?
Really?
So Kirby's possessing you in writing as well as art?
And this works for you?
But in general, the gods are very much affected by Genesis?
Now, what you're doing with the Greek Gods doesn't affect Captain Marvel or anyone over in his regular title?
Well, Cap is stronger than the new Superman because he can't lift anything solid anymore! He can't pick up a penny... well, he could, because a penny is made of metal but...
This is the sort of thing that people have been freaking out about, his new suit, and I thought, "come on, you didn't get this upset when he DIED!!!" I keep telling people to think of it as a year or a two year long red Kryptonite story. That's all. These things never last, but they continue to do this stuff to make sure you continue to pay attention.
It sure worked.
It was weird; as I went along, where I'd realized that I'd gotten to a point in the script where I'd set up a specific thing for Superman to do, and sort of realized that he doesn't do that anymore. He doesn't run down the hall, he flies through the wall! I have little lightning bolts going off all over the place instead of a blue or red blur.
My favorite line in the whole issue has nothing to do with his new powers or any of the superhero stuff. One of the characters is ragging newspaper reporters and Superman just says, "don't be too hard on reporters," then goes off and says something else. I'm saying, I certainly remember who this guy is, kids!
Pretty much. A lot of the panels say things like, 'fit as many as you can comfortably" and the next will say, "a different angle to show the ones you left out of the last panel." Of course the weirdest thing is having to fit in one or two lines of dialogue for everybody per issue, or you just have people standing around doing nothing in the background. So everyone has to say at least five words per issue just to justify their existence!
Pretty much. I was on the ground floor in Acts of Vengeance, which I thought was a weak plot, and I basically went in and said, "what if we do this instead?" I suggested the notion of all the villains trading off to fight heroes that they didn't normally fight. Which of course Marvel turned into a bunch of bad Dr. Doom stories.
But the main reason it doesn't change anything is that it's establishing history rather than building prosperity, as it were. It's saying, "This is the way it's always been, you just didn't know it." So the big significant thing that comes out of Genesis is this revelation that the gods and the heroes were all created by this Godwave.
Exactly, everything that is already there, is already there. Like I used to say when I was doing Man of Steel, "all the stories you read happened, they just didn't happen the way you thought they did."
No, the villain list is considerably shorter, it's just basically Ares messing around the background. I want to turn him into the Dr. Doom for Wonder Woman, so I'm looking for more and more things for him to do. The main players, since this all comes from New Gods, are Darkseid and his cast of jolly characters.
Yes. There are a lot of characters running around who don't have powers, and therefore are not the result of the passes of the Godwave. Plus one little player off to the side is Supergirl, who is not from our universe.
It went squit. She's unaffected by all of the Godwave's weirdness.
Yes. Everybody's powers are falling off, and she seems to work, and they are all running around being confused and Supergirl is even more confused because it's not affecting her. She's going, "well, you guys are having fun but I'm not."
Yeah! I'm trying to find a place to fit in a quick reference to Barbara Minerva, who, in Wonder Woman, is Cheetah. I have recently established that she sold her soul to Neron, so she's sort of running around affected in a different way because she doesn't have a soul. That is part of one of the things I've neglected to mention here -- the effect of Genesis on the population as a whole, for non-superhero power types, is that pretty much everyone in the universe is suffering the crisis of fear.
Yes, they can tell that something bad is happening at the center of existence, since The Source is it as far as divinity goes. The fact that The Source is affected, and is hurting pretty bad, is obvious; everybody is kind of going, 'Gee, everything seems so pointless!'
The Spectre makes an appearance. Of course, as I like to point out to people who ask me how The Source is affected by Jehovah, because the Spectre works for Jehovah, my answer is, "I don't think that John Byrne is writing the fifth Gospel." If the Christian God appears in a comic book, he becomes a fictional character; we're not dealing with the real, real God.
Which Chris Claremont objectified as an actual, solid object which we've been playing with in Fourth World. In fact, the Source Wall gets blown up real good in Genesis, and the Promethian giants are released. It's a wild story.
Oh yeah. This isn't a series of meaningless events that ends with everything blowing up. We're trying to actually build something up as closely approximating a story within Genesis as is humanly possible.
Yes. You could kind of think of it in the way they used to do the old JLA, where there is a menace and the heroes get together into little groups and fight bits of it, and they all get together at the end to fight the whole thing; this is pretty much what happens here. The little bits are the bits that happen in the other books. And the main thread is in this four parter, this weekly thing.
Darn, heck! At least nobody's origin is changing because of this, which would have been painful.
Yeah, of course we probably shouldn't be aware of any of them because time was redone. That's one of my great arguments, that the Crisis was a self-canceling event. The fact that it happened means that it didn't.
Exactly. In fact, I'm doing a little Jay Garrick story now, and it's a time travel story and it has a paradox in it... if we went back in time and gave Henry Ford the plans for the Model T, who invented the Model T? Would Jay Garrick knowing something because his older self told him, but his older self only knew it because he remembered it from his younger self being told... Oh... head... hurting!
God, I hope so. Given that it is something that has been literally ten years in the making, if better. It dates back to Action#600. I've had it cooking around in my head in one form or another for that long.
Yeah, I really don't have much excuse for it not working. At least on my end, I can't control the other books, I just have to create The Source every day.
Like that line that God answers all prayers, and sometimes the answer is no!
Well, I'm fairly confident here, but like I said, whenever you launch something this big... I always used to say if you have four or five people working on a single comic that's four or five chances to screw it up, and in a case of something like Genesis, where you've got... oh gosh, a hundred people working on it, that is a hundred chances to screw it up, and I'm like five or six chances of those myself.
Exactly. It would have been nice if it were something that were worth bothering with.
Oh yeah, in fact, my big project for next year is this Superman/ Batman Elseworlds mini-series called Generations. Increasingly I'm looking at stuff like that and going, "I like this Elseworlds thing. There no way to screw up an Elseworlds." So I think maybe I'll become Mr. Elseworlds Guy once I get the chance.
Yes, well he didn't need the II because he was able to have the big yellow circle. Generations is going to be spinning out of that. No Captain America, of course, but there will be a reference.
But they do at the end of the 30's, and my story finishes in 2009, so I cover 8 decades.
And it is done in decade jumps -- in each one, ten years have happened, so there will be a lot of this, 'hey, remember when we fought so-and-so"
Yeah, exactly. It's going to be four prestige format volumes with two chapters each. So 1939-49 will be in the first one and 1959-69 will be in the second one, and my hope is to evoke, without actually imitating, the sort of style, or the feel, of comics as they were in those particular decades. My most graphic example of how this is going to work is that the 1959 chapter will feature Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite... probably involve Superman turning into a giant red ant because he's been exposed to red kryptonite, that kind of goofy stuff. But then by 1969 it will be relevant, and there will be drug stories. Then we get grim and gritty in 1989.
Yes, because it's going to overlap, 1998 and 1999 so that I can hit the 60th anniversary of both characters.
That's my contribution to the party.
Let me be kind of cryptic about this because it's sort of coming up fairly fast, but there were some elements of mythology that George Perez chose to leave out. So I'm sort of shoehorning them back in.
I mean elements of mythology in general. The mythology that Wonder Woman builds on. The Greco/Roman stuff. George left out some elements of that, so I'm putting them back in, which requires a little bit of retro-conning in the history, but not a whole lot.
Zero Plus One here, and that result is that Diana is going to become a goddess.
She'll become the Goddess of Truth. She'll be up there hanging out in Olympus and back on Earth, we'll have various other characters running around trying to take up the slack, as it were. There will be a Wonder Woman during that time: that's as much as I'm going to say about that.
Well, I'm hoping it'll be as left-field as possible. I'm hoping that people will go, "huh, who'd have thought it?" We'll see.
Well, Justice League doesn't get to play with her for the six or seven months that she's off on Olympus. This is part of the problem with this massive cross-continuity that DC insists on these days. In the olden days, we would have just proceeded with Justice League with Wonder Woman as is and probably tucked in a little line saying, "this really takes place before Wonder Woman #blah, blah, blah.'
They don't seem to want to, so we've actually had to say, "sorry, you can't have Wonder Woman for six or seven issues."
Well, it doesn't impinge at all. This is one of the little points that I like to make every now and again, when people ask, "are you going to be following what Grant Morrison does with Wonder Woman?' And I say, "no, he has to follow me!' I'm the guy who's doing Wonder Woman's book, therefore it's just like when I was doing the Avengers -- I didn't tell Mark Gruenwald how to write Captain America, he told me. So the bottom line is, I pay passing attention to Justice League, but mostly I don't worry about it because if the rules are being followed, they have to pay attention to the Batman books and the Superman and Wonder Woman books...
Well, he can turn her into anything he wants to, as long as it's over by the end of that story. This is one of the reasons that I personally try to avoid group books, as opposed to team books, because there is so little you can do with a group book unless you've got a fairly large cast of characters who don't have their own books. If you're doing something as I did, like the Avengers where you've got Captain America, Thor, Iron Man and all these guys who've got their own books, there's nothing you can do with them -- you can't have a romance, you can't have any cosmic tragedy you can't have any character development -- that's why I would focus all my attention on the Vision or the Scarlet Witch, who didn't have their own titles. Mr. Morrison is doing the same, he's focusing all his energy on J'onn J'Onzz and the people that he can mess around with.
It's hard for me to tell you because I'm writing it on the fly, so I'm really only a half issue ahead.
Yeah, this is part of the agreement that I got from DC when I said that I would do this book, I got the impression that the way Kirby approached it was to just throw as much stuff at the wall and see what stuck. And I said,"'I'm going to have to do it the same way."
I feel like I'm channeling Kirby quite often... it's weird.
It works so far. It's scary as hell when you're writing on the fly, but Paul Kupperberg will call me up and say, "okay, I need to know what to tell Walt Simonson to draw for the cover for something three issues from now." I don't know! Why don't you make something up right now and I'll make sure that's in the book.
A major character dies, other major characters are elevated, another major character assumes a whole different role within the book, another major character gives up his god powers in order to go off and be mortal... fun stuff like that.
Actually, it does. I talked to Ordway to coordinate this because what I'm going to be doing with the Greek and Roman gods, because most of Cap's gods are Roman, will ultimately affect Captain Marvel in some odd ways. He'll be getting stronger, which will of course, get people again into debating who's stronger, Superman or Cap. But I can't help that!
Well, we all know how long that's going to last.
Yeah, I was using the new Superman for the first time, actually in Wonder Woman #125. It was kind of fun.