Broken Frontier

Javier Grillo-Marxuach had the pleasure of launching the first of three Annihilation: Conquest mini-series, Wraith, diving into the aftermath of the Annihilation War. Read on to find out what some of the key moments of the issue are…

The solicitation for the issue reads:

Annihilation: Conquest continues here -- with the introduction of a dark addition to Marvel's galaxy of sci-fi stars! Who is the haunted loner known as Wraith? What are his chilling powers, how did he get them, and what is the tragic quest that drives him? Javier Grillo-Marxuach (TV's Lost and Medium) and Kyle Hotz (ZOMBIE) dare you to ride with Marvel's new gothic gunslinger!

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It may seem like the height of ego to choose the masthead page for commentary -- being as it is the only page in the book with my name on it… but, to me, this is the single most important page of Annihilation: Conquest -- Wraith Issue#1, if only because it marks this brand, spankin’ new character’s debut on the Marvel Cosmic stage…and introducing a new Marvel hero is not something to be taken lightly.

When I first wrote this page, I imagined it as a much more heroic kind of shot -- a from-below, Dirk Squarejaw affair with Wraith looking very impressive on top of his mount (and I have always called it his "mount" as opposed to his "positronic-warp-star-cycle" or some such thing). I was very pleasantly surprised when I first saw the pencils and how Kyle arranged the elements from the script -- rather than an Alan Ladd hero shot, Wraith appears hunched over his mount and is slightly off-center on the page. While he is the focus of the action, the overall impression is very much that of an anti-hero who is not engaging his enemies with a direct line of sight. It’s a hero shot, but the hero wants nothing to do with anything -- and yet that doesn’t keep him from being a dynamic and interesting presence.

This page also sets up a conceit that runs throughout the series (and is really something that Kyle brought to the book in his artistic interpretation) and that is that there is always -- and sometimes quite literally -- a cloud of mystery surrounding Wraith. Wraith’s poncho -- a fashion accessory that could have easily singled us out for mockery -- moves with a very individual dynamic, a kind of stormy darkness that is menacing in its own right…and Kyle carries that aesthetic into the puffs of vapor surrounding Wraith as he stands in the landing bay (a choice that is fantastically supported by Gina Going-Raney’s color). You always get the sense that an infinite darkness surrounds Wraith, and that you never truly know everything about him…but there’s also an almost sensual quality to all of the tumult surrounding Wraith.

Kyle has a way of making all this smoke and darkness into a living, breathing thing, and much of what compels the motion of this book is that sense of complexity. Driving that point home, also, is Wraith’s first line -- in a distinctive speech balloon that is both a tip of the stovepipe hat to ‘the man with no name" as well as another indication that this is a character who brings unfathomable mysteries wherever he goes (at first, I wanted all of Wraith’s dialogue to be in lower case letters without punctuation, but Bill Rosemann wisely kept me off that course, in hindsight, I think that might have come across as a bit more emo than appropriate for a badass from space).

When Bill and I started talking about this project, the first thing upon which we agreed was that no matter what backstory or powers we settled on for the character, Wraith had to be frightening at all times, and I think this page sets the precedent very well.

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Wraith has been nicknamed "Marvel’s Gothic Gunslinger," and that pretty much covers the long and short of the character. Bill Rosemann wanted a horror-based character to give a new dimension to the Annihilation: Conquest franchise, and I wanted to do a western archetype -- "Little Big Man" or "A Man Called Horse" in space -- a fearsome outsider whose alien ways make him impossible to assimilate (in this case quite literally).

Having brought "the gothic" with the previous splash page, this page brings "the gunslinger" in a big way. There’s gonna be a gunfight here, and panel one is all about establishing the familiar geometry of a standoff while carrying through the motif of Wraith and the darkness that surrounds him.

Anyone who has ever seen a western knows what comes next -- and the job here is to establish that rhythm -- starting wide coming closer and closer, eyelines meeting, brows furrowing and eyelids narrowing with purpose…the unyielding opposites coming toward one another and then…the draw.

With that last image, we are telling the audience unequivocally who Wraith is -- a lone rider who is quick on the draw, takes no crap and won’t be pushed around.

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In telling Wraith’s story we took elements of the sci-fi gothic horror and western genres -- but, at the end of the day, Marvel is known for one thing…and that’s superheroes, cosmic or otherwise. Now, the concept of "a young woman set upon by a bad man in a dark alley" is not exactly an innovation in the world of narrative storytelling, but I chose it to tell this part of the story for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, we are already shouldering the burden of summarizing the story of the conquest of a galactic empire in the aftermath of a massive space war, and to then - in addition to that - have to explain the nature of some exotic extra-galactic form of crime in order to present our hero as heroic would probably be a greater burden than our narrative space could bear. By presenting how an anti-hero like Wraith handles a familiar situation, we accomplish several things -- one of the is to embrace the concept that justice is universal, and that heroes do similar things no matter where they go or what part of the universe they are in: good people are preyed upon and caped avengers take care of business.

Also, because the scene is a shorthand for the business of a superhero, it allows me to sneak in a little piece of Wraith’s superheroic backstory -- as you can see in the top three panels, the young girl’s eyes function as a flashback trigger to some traumatic event in Wraith’s part…this serves as a set up for issue two, in which we finally reveal Wraith’s shocking personal history, and it also serves to explain Wraith’s behavior toward the criminal in the pages that follow.

Finally, as the dialogue in the final panel shows, this page allows up to reinforce the idea that Wraith is a character with his own agenda -- the question is open, did he rescue the girl because his morality demanded it, or because he thought the thug would be able to give him information? It’s an interesting ambiguity that plays as an ongoing tension -- is Wraith a hero, or is he a self-involved avenger on a solitary quest.

If you want the answers, of course, you have to read the book!