Broken Frontier

After making a splash with its debut series Dead@17, Viper Comics has slowly but surely been climbing the ranks of independent publishers by sticking to the same “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” recipe: only release a project when you know it’s going to be good. With books like Daisy Kutter, Random Encounter and The Middleman, who can blame them?

The latest miniseries to debut from Viper is Villains, which launches in April. Writer Adam Cogan, who co-created the book with artist Ryan Cody, explains the premise of the book: “Villains is about a young guy named Nick Corrigan who discovers that his upstairs neighbor is actually Charles Cobb, a famous retired supervillain known as “Hardliner”. Instead of reporting the ex-criminal to the authorities, the kid decides to blackmail him in exchange for “supervillain lessons”.

“Everything goes smoothly at first, but Nick soon realizes he’s got a tiger by the tail, and has lots of trouble controlling the older and more experienced Cobb. As the book progresses and as Nick starts to strike out on his own, he discovers that the life of a supervillain is very different from what he had imagined.”

Because of these lessons he’s getting, Nick finds himself in a very twisted master-and-apprentice relationship with Charlie, so much so that throughout the series, it becomes clear that we’re dealing with two criminals instead of one.

“To a large extent, [the mini tells] Nick’s origin story as an emerging new villain and everything is told through his point of view,” Cogan continues. “But you could argue that Cobb is every bit as important to the story, way more than a simple support character.  So much of the book deals with his past exploits and experiences, some of which come back to bite them both in their villainous backsides.

“Nick, on the other hand, hasn’t achieved much in life. He’s a college dropout who just got fired from his job. He feels like a cornered rat, with no prospects for the future. His rent is looming ever closer, and his girlfriend is probably going to dump his ass once she finds out he won’t be able to pay his share of the rent. These are pretty familiar problems that a lot of guys his age have to deal with. But there’s a side to Nick that is a little different from most of us. We all have a darker side, a little devil that pops up when we least expect it and whispers nasty little suggestions in our ears. But most of us reject the evil impulses and move on. Nick is just more willing to act on his. He’s a bright kid who is willing to go to extremes.

While Nick and Charlie are very much intent on living up to their bad-guy roles, the duo aren’t exactly evil like Magneto or Lex Luthor. According to Cogan, “they have no intention of conquering the world or building weather machines or exacting revenge on arch foes or anything like that. No megalomaniacal ambitions, no mass murdering rampages. I think the villains that fall into that category have motives that are hard for most of us to understand or identify with. But our guys have much more down to earth desires, greed being chief among them. These two guys are really just career thieves with really, really good tools. They want to get rich and then they want to retire and spend their money. Who needs all the other headaches?”

Still, one headache Charlie and Nick can’t run away from is the resident hero of the series, a retro-inspired character that goes by the name of The Flying Ace. “He’s been smacking criminals in the yap (and Nazis too) since World War II, and he’s become kind of an institution,” says about his ace. “He has developed a strange co-dependent relationship with Charlie Cobb over the years, mostly through their many violent clashes. Ace has recently reappeared in Cobb’s life, and he has an ominous agenda with Cobb that we explore throughout the first four issues of volume 1.”

Next to Ace, there are several other characters running around that round out Villains’ cast. One of those is Sam, Nick’s girlfriend and the only bright spot in his otherwise cloudy existence. “He’s a pretty difficult guy to get along with, but Sam is a strong, positive woman who is able to see past all Nick’s thorns, and she apparently finds something there to love. She helps balance his outlook on life. But their relationship is constant placed in jeapardy in both an emotional and a physical sense as Nick walks further and further down the dark tunnel of his criminal alter ego, The Hardliner.

“There is also a mysterious federal agent conducting a murder investigation, and the trail leads him directly to Nick. And that’s all I can say about him right now.

“So, those are the big players for the first series. Ryan and I are kind of character-happy. We ping each other all the time with new character ideas and new wrinkles in the larger story. We’ve been having a great time expanding the Villains universe and populating it with colorful characters. If the first four issues do well enough, I’m sure we’ll get a chance to meet all the other ones.”

Although some of the faces that are set to appear in Villains are now a bit more familiar, the question still stands when Cogan came up with the idea for his series. The answer starts right here: “I think the first kernel of an idea for Villains has been with me for a long time, “ Cogan replies. “I love movies and comics, and I’m always enthralled with the bad guys of the story, the scoundrels and never do wells and problem children. I often find myself getting impatient to get back to their part of the story, always wishing they had a little more screen time. I wanted to read a book that gave them their time in the limelight... That’s really where it came from. I wanted to tell a story from the antagonist’s point of view, and even let him win some of the time.”

“I love film noir and hard boiled detective stories, the mood and the start imagery and the language—Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson—I think I may be channelling Thompson some of the time as I write this book. I wanted to weave those elements into the story as well, the unhealthy romances, the grit, the banter.

“And I’m a big fan of caper movies, so I knew I had to stick that in somewhere. I wanted to make the crime itself be a large component of the book, the planning and the execution and the many tangled repercussions.”

Once he had the broad strokes of the story nailed down, Cogan started to work on the script for the first issue and had a pitch ready to go. What he lacked, though, was an artist to bring his concept to life. “That’s kind of the sticky part for writers,” the writer admits. “It’s just so hard to find someone with the right level of talent and storytelling skill who is also willing to essentially work on your pitch without pay. That’s the catch. If you have enough money to burn, you can hire anyone. But most artists who have the level of skill it takes to get publishers interested in your book are usually way, way too busy with paying work to be bothered with some sorry comic book charity case. And you can’t blame them. You just have to keep looking for that extra special artist who suffers from extensive brain trauma, causing him to have absolutely no idea how gifted he really is. Enter Ryan Cody.

“Anyway, I got lucky. I happened to be browsing one of the art forums, and Ryan’s artwork waltzed up and bit me. The work he posted was actually from another pitch for a book he and writer Grant Alter were working on called “Hurricane Kids”. You like how I did that? Anyway, I saw his style and his storytelling skills and I knew he would be a perfect fit for Villains, and I wrote him as fast as I could before someone told him how good he was. Lucky for me, he liked the script and wanted to start in right away. I think it was only a few months before the San Diego Comic-Con, but he still wanted to get a pitch ready to pimp around. I was amazingly impressed with that. All of a sudden we were a team, and he was sending me incredible character designs and layouts and pages. I’ve worked with a lot of artists, but never someone with Ryan’s ability to slam dunk a character design on the first try.”

Now that he had hooked up with an artist, the only thing left for Cogan and Cody to find was a publisher. When San Diego rolled around last year, the budding creators showed their pitch to a multitude of companies, but the one to show the most interest was Viper. “They left a very strong impression with both of us, they were the warmest and friendliest of the publishers we saw during the trip, and it was clear they had some early interest in the book,” Cogan recalls. “The bottom line is that it just felt like a great fit. They already had a strong and eclectic collection of books, and we knew that Viper would give Villains a lot of attention, which was probably the most compelling part of all. We didn’t want to go with a place where our book would get swallowed up and ignored because we were both new creators. Everything fell into place very quickly after the con, and it’s been great ever since. Jessie Garza and the Viper staff have been incredibly supportive. Ryan and I couldn’t be happier with the way things turned out.”

Now that we know how Villains went from idea to pitch to published project, it’s time to find out what kind of tricks Cogan’s got up his sleeve to reel you in. The only problem, Cogan says, is that he doesn’t do tricks, but… illusions. “I can tell you that for those of you who are sick of the whole “decompression” thing, you will be very happy with the pace of this issue, and probably with my writing in general, since I don’t decompress,” he boasts. “I guess I just get bored, I really want my readers to be entertained. And I love action.

“As I said earlier during our conversation, yes, the first issue is kind of an origin story, but it’s pretty action-packed. I promise 70% less talking heads or you get your money back. Whoa, wait a minute, should I say that? I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot here. I mean I don’t do decompression YET. If Marvel ever comes knocking, all bets are off. I will happily decompress for an X-book.” [Laughs]

“Really, if you liked Han Solo or Boba Fett or Darth Vader more than Luke Skywalker and his hokey do-goodin’ ways, then you are not alone, brothers and sisters. If you feel like you’re always getting shafted with only half a story (the boring half), then you will definitely enjoy the darker half ‘twixt the pages of Villains.”

Villains is 32 pages of full color art, illustrated by Ryan Cody with Russ Lowery on colors. Villains #1 will be available in April through Viper Comics, and is available for pre-order in February’s Previews.  Stop by the  official Villains forum over at the Viper Comics website for more information on the series.