It's always a tough realization to figure out that our parents are human beings with their own faults and frailties. But what happens when your dad is actually a murderous mad scientist? How do you grapple with the mistakes and decisions of a parent who is a full-on supervillain?
That's the question at the heart of writer Matthew Rosenberg, artists Stefano Landini, Roman Titov, and Jason Wordie, and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou's new Image Comics title We're Taking Everyone Down With Us, which blends James Bond-esque super-spy action with a heartfelt family drama about a daughter who is coming to grips with the knowledge that her father is a villain.
With the first issue of We're Taking Everyone Down With Us arriving on March 26, Newsarama caught up with Rosenberg to dig into the characters and the world of the new title, while also discussing the deeper themes that drive the tale of Annalise and her reckoning with her father.
Newsarama: Matthew, We're Taking Everyone Down With Us has a very cool premise that I don't want to totally spoil, as it unfolds through the issue. But it centers on an unlikely relationship between a father and his daughter. How did you come to this premise?
Matthew Rosenberg: Making comics is a funny thing. You spend a year or more focussing on a specific story or theme, and hopefully you sort of vomit out all your thoughts and feelings on that thing until you've said all you have to say and you can rest. But then you have this piece of work that is a snapshot of who you were at that moment in time and, this is true for me but I bet it's far more universal, when you look at that snapshot you realize it no longer represents you. Or maybe who you are is no longer represented.
That's the pretentious answer I guess. The more grounded one is that I love exploring stories through relationships, and the parent/child relationship is usually our first and one of our longest. So I wanted to tell a story about love, and loss, and regret, and caring about people even when they hurt you, and hurting people even though you care about them. I'm fascinated by the moments when we decide who we want to be in life and how much of those decisions come about because of or in spite of our parents.
Also I thought it would be fun to make a book about a mad scientist's daughter.
It feels clear this title lives in a much larger world than what we're seeing in the first issue. What can you tell us about the setting of WTEDWU?
Yeah. I'm a big fan of building out a world while your characters also explore it. So when we start this book we're with Annalise, her father, and his army of robotic helpers, who all live on a small secluded island. But as Annalise ventures out we not only meet this much bigger cast of superspies, power hungry madmen, and delusional world leaders, but we learn about the world where they wage their secret wars.
It owes a lot to '60s and '70s James Bond, but also kids adventure stories like Tintin and Johnny Quest, as well as a ton of other influences we threw in a blender - Diabolik and Paper Moon, Saga and Love & Rockets. It's a big, weird world of strange and dangerous people that we're going to meet (and sometimes kill) as we go.
When it comes to Annalise, the main character, we know that her larger story will be all about grappling with the man her father truly is. What can you tell us about where she's at as that journey begins?
When we meet Annalise she is a very lonely child. She desperately wants her father's attention, or any kind of attention. But she is stuck playing games with robots who cheat. But in her boredom Annalise has never really questioned her situation, who her father is, or why they live this way.
If it's all you've ever known, any life can feel normal. But deep down, in some hidden part of your brain, you must know something is off. For Annalise that hidden part is about to come out and blow everything up.
The art on WTEDWU by Stefano Landini with Roman Titov and Jason Wordie is so good. What makes them the perfect art team for this title?
Stefano's linework is deceptively simple and elegant. He prioritizes storytelling and character, making his work so instantly readable and relatable. But the clean lines leave a ton of room for a colorist to come in and do something loud.
And that's what Roman and Jason do. They're using big, bold colors and not tying themselves to realism. But they have a great understanding of when to go loud, and when to let the lines do the heavier lifting.
They're working in synchronicity to make something that is the perfect blend of realistic and stylized, loud and subtle.
What were the touchstones you gave them to help develop the look of this series?
For a lot of the initial designs that was Stefano. I just helped point in a few directions. I remember talking with him about the effortless cool of Diabolik, the subtle (retro)futurism of early Bond, the battered innocence of León: The Professional. We also talked about Travis Charest's work on WildC.A.T.S., Miller and Mazzucchelli's Daredevil.
I think we all understood we wanted a world that had a lot of the beauty and grit of our own but blown out. And the same thing for the colors. I think a lot about Kurosawa's Dreams and the way color works in that film and I think Jason and Roman really captured that spirit.
What do you want fans to know going into We're Taking Everyone Down With Us?
They're paying for it so I hope they get whatever they want out of it?
Enjoyment would be good. A big theme in the book is empathy and what happens when we don't have any, so if a few people walk away from this thinking more compassionately about people they don't know, that's a huge win.
But it's a comic about a robot who punches people's heads off, so if they just chuckle a few times I'm good with that also.
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