Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, Epochalypse, Jonathan Hennessey, legendary

The Coming Of Epochalypse – Jonathan Hennessey's New Sci-Fi Series

There is a new comic series coming out from Legendary called Epochalypse and it has the scope of a huge science fiction world that would translate well into other mediums. It's the brainchild of writer Jonathan Hennessey and I was happy to get a chance to ask him some questions about this ambitious new project.

BLEEDING COOL: Let's start off with what normally would be an easy questions, but having read the first two issues of the series, I'm not sure how easy it will be. What is Epochalypse from a universe point of view? What is this world you are introducing us to?

JONATHAN HENNESSEY: EPOCHALYPSE is a dark and, so far as I have been able to discover, unprecedented twist on the time travel story. Usually in a time travel adventure, you have one individual or a small group of people who jump to one or more destinations in time. Typically, they exercise some control over where they end up. The cast of characters has an adventure. They contemplate some Big Question of history. And then they return home.

EPOCHALYPSE turns that blueprint inside out. Instead, here we have a mysterious event that makes everyone spontaneously time travel. And no one has any control over where they end up. In fact most people don't survive the jump! Plus, no one seems to know how to get back home. So we're left with a world where 600 years of history have collapsed into a single new timeline. Elements from the late 1500s all the way to the 2100s have been smashed together. People, ideas, technologies, languages, and cultures that were never meant to coexist are suddenly — and possibly permanently — side by side.

BC: There is a negative utopia feeling to the series but usually those are based on people giving over control of their lives to the government over time. Here it was a singular vent that put things into motion. What was that event and how did it get to the point that using technology was outlawed?

JH: In the story, the inexplicable force that crunched the timelines together has become known as "The Incongruity." Many have suspicions as to what caused it. And these tend to correspond to where in history any given person hails from. Some take it as a punishment from God. Others believe the Last Judgment has taken place, everyone is actually dead, and The Incongruity has delivered them to Hell or Purgatory. Still more think it was the result of witchcraft. Or a science experiment gone wrong. Or the fallout from some bizarre act of nature — a mini black hole passing through Earth's orbit, perhaps?

Regardless, The Incongruity didn't simply cause people from the past and future to come tumbling into the year 1951. It also displaced animals, landscape, weather systems, light, and heat. In other words, it was so wildly destructive that The Incongruity brought civilization to its knees.

But within a few years, a shadowy but seemingly beneficent group of scientists calling themselves "The Trustees" rose from the ashes. In one relatively undamaged corner of the globe, they were able to turn the lights back on and reintroduce a rough social infrastructure. But above all, The Trustees claim to be at the initial stages of developing a process to set history right again — to bring about the so-called "Readjustment Day" when all the chronological refugees will go back to their home times. The Trustees have walled themselves into an enormous compound. And inside they are carrying out experiments aimed at reversing the time travel — and hopefully not inadvertently setting off another round.

But, The Trustees point out, every person and thing transported from 1952 or later now has an energy that conflicts with their experiments, and is therefore dangerous. "Anachronisms" (artifacts from 1952 on) and "exotemporals" (people from 1952 on) cause varying degrees of turbulence in the space-time continuum. Individuals and objects from 1951 and earlier simply do not. In fact, they're found to exert a stabilizing force on the fragile reality.

So The Trustees constitute a special police force of "Resynchronizers" whose job it is to seek and contain anything dating from, say, the days of Harry S. Truman all the way to an increasingly mysterious and possibly sinister far future.

The mass of civilian survivors, desperate to return to the lives and loved ones they knew, and grateful for the Trustees' leadership, have mostly complied with The Resynchronizers. But not all of them have.

There are still fantastically dangerous devices out there. There are also people from the future living in hiding. The Resynchronizers, who themselves all date from 1951 or earlier, face a difficult and dangerous job. So they are entrusted to employ a limited number of anachronisms (like their "icer guns") in the line of duty, under close supervision. Think of it as fighting fire with fire.

It is the goal of The Trustees and their enforcers, the Resynchronizers, to set history right again.

But here's the thing. Fourteen years have elapsed since The Incongruity. And the survivors are now at a critical point. Should they continue clinging to the lost notions of who they used to be? Or should they move on with their lives? And if Readjustment Day may not ever come, why should they deny themselves the pleasures and conveniences of things from the future like life-saving medicines, computers, and tools and weapons capable of more than they ever dreamed?

So it's getting harder and harder for The Resynchronizers to force compliance of the anachronism laws. Maybe they're even getting close to having mass riots or a Civil War on their hands.

BC: It appears that our hero is Johannes who works for the government's police force. But his history is unique in that he's a boy from the 1640s that is now an enforcer carrying an icer gun and trying to track down the Salesman. What is his motivation and how is the Salesman getting into his head so much?

JH: Yes. Our hero, Johannes Van der Honing, is a talented, true-believer Resynchronizer. He has been trained by The Trustees and posted to the Trans-Berkshire Division, an outlying province of the territory under The Trustees' control.

Johannes, before he was dislocated in time himself, had just arrived in the New World — only to witness his entire family getting trapped and butchered by a band of French mercenaries conspiring with hostile Indians to kick the Dutch out of America.

The Resynchronizers have been told that their reward for service to The Trustees will be the privilege of being allowed to go live in any part of history they desire — or affect small changes in their own "home times."

See, the time travel in the EPOCHALYPSE universe isn't hung up on the question of time travel paradoxes. These paradoxes usually play to human vanity anyway — our inflated sense of our own importance across the yawningly wide swath of geologic time. So say you go back and kill your own grandfather. And what — that trivial circumstance within a few human lives (out of billions!) is supposed to knock the entire cosmos on its ass? No, I don't think so. Only huge manipulations of matter and energy would instigate paradoxes in the time-travel framework of EPOCHALYPSE. It understands the universe to simply be adequately robust to absorb anything short of that.

So Johannes is driven by a desire to restore history so he can go back just moments before his family's massacre and save them all.

He is not bloodthirsty for revenge. In fact, the loss of his family has made him more compassionate than anything else. (I have styled him a bit as an anti-Batman in that sense). Johannes believes that he understands and deeply empathizes with all the other Incongruity survivors, all of whom have lost just about everything they knew. Our hero, if anything, suffers from a little bit of a savior complex. He thinks his good intentions and exhaustive work ethic will be sufficient to free everyone from pain and misery. So our normally patient and sympathizing main character absolutely loses it when someone brazenly stands in his way.

As the series kicks off, that person is The Salesman. The Salesman is an unapologetic black marketer of anachronisms. He rages hamlet to hamlet, town to town, giving the people what they want: contraband future technology. (Even if that technology is something as innocuous as a microwave oven from 1993). Johannes just inherently can't understand why everyone isn't on his side. And it's not only the fact that The Salesman is so shameless that gets under our hero's skin — it's also the fact that The Salesman has eluded capture for more than a year. He has become Johannes's white whale.

BC: So how did you come up with the idea for Epochalypse? Was it always planned as a comic series? And how did it end up at Legendary?

JH: Oddly enough, the shell for the idea of EPOCHALYPSE came to me on a visit to Albany, New York — not known in many circles to be all that inspiring a place. Albany is obviously "The Empire State's" capital. And in the 1950s, its was overdue for a major expansion of its administrative offices. They hired who was then considered to be a visionary architect, Wallace K. Harrison, to design a state capitol complex that would be breathtakingly forward-looking. What Harrison delivered was a kind of monolithic, almost Soviet Bloc-type concrete campus of identical mini-skyscrapers and U.F.O.-looking outbuildings. Standing there, I felt vividly as if I had been transported to a future that had never happened. Harrison's "Empire State Plaza" is a stellar example of what some call "paleo-futurism." And it became the inspiration for The Trustees and their compound.

The historical research I have done for my three nonfiction graphic novels, The U.S. Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation, The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation, and The Comic Book Story of Beer helped me fill in the blanks. True characters, episodes, and themes from history coalesced with the bizarre sense of place that Empire State Plaza imparts. Together with my dilettante command of physics, they resulted in this reinterpretation of how a time travel story could work.

I didn't instantly see EPOCHALYPSE as a comic, necessarily. But what format could serve the story better than one where the reader actually gets to see these people and things from all over history drawn into one chaotic, simultaneous mess? A science fiction novel, for instance, would be at a tremendous disadvantage, having to use words alone to paint these hybrid pictures.

I was extraordinarily lucky to have Legendary's Bob Schreck agree to look at the material. I had tried, like every other half-desperate wanna-be out there, to push EPOCHALYPSE (then called SYNCHRONI-CITY) into the hands of someone like him at conventions. I had failed in San Diego the year Legendary Comics' Holy Terror was being released. But a good friend and collaborator who believed in the project ran Bob down at Emerald City Comic Con and caught the man in a game and forgiving mood. Bob saw something in it and got in touch. Legendary's Thomas Tull gracefully heard me out and, after offering some truly informed and thought-provoking feedback, decided to give it a green light. Now, of course, the hard part — convincing fans it's worth their time too.

BC: You've got Shane Davis on art. I love his comic work especially when it has a science fiction feel to it like his run on Mystery in Space for DC. How did Shane become involved in the project and what made him the right choice for Epochalypse?

JH: Shane had done some great, previous work for Legendary with Shadow Walk. The company, with ambitions to compete with the already-established big names in comics, had recruited some of the best, veteran talent out there. And Shane Davis was a major part of that portfolio. After Shadow Walk, Shane rightfully enjoyed a free hand to pick from a grab-bag of stories that Legendary Comics had under development. And it was my good luck that something in EPOCHALYPSE seemed to speak to him. He can bring it with a vivid, hyperreal style that really suits this universe. At the same time he's sensational with faces. Shane additionally had a slew of interesting ideas about the human profile and the ways that law enforcement, and even a repressive, police state apparatus, uses uniforms and weapons to psychologically convey power and authority.

Readers will note a kind of retro-futuristic look to the Resynchronizers' vehicles, guns, body armor, and so on. This isn't just a cute nod to the slightly antiquated science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s that inspires it. As EPOCHALYPSE develops, a highly plot-specific reason for these things looking the way they do will be revealed. And that moment, if I do my job right, will be a real chiller!

BC: Let's end with a question that may be as difficult as the one we started with. Why should readers pick up Epochalypse and what do you have in store for them over the upcoming issues?

JH: Readers should check out EPOCHALYPSE because it's like no other time travel story they've seen yet. EPOCHALYPSE gave me the chance to conjoin history and science fiction, both of which I'm passionate about, both of which I respect, and both of which I've done my damndest to do well here.

You're going to see in this series an informed vision of the past — and characters from it with truly interesting backstories. But you're also going to see an inspired vision of the future. This will begin to play out as early as Issue #3, as we slowly are exposed to characters and the fallout of events that date from the 2030s all the way to the late 2100s.

Now, almost all of us fanboys have been burned by the high-concept idea that roars out of the gate with a lot of potential but loses its way eventually. It's easy to raise a lot of intriguing questions about a universe. But it's considerably tougher to answer them. Sometimes you realize the writers were winging it all along: they never knew how the dots were going to connect from beginning, to middle, to end. One great side benefit about toiling in obscurity for years is that you get to live a long time with your characters and your narrative, and work out a lot of the kinks. EPOCHALYPSE knows where it's going. It's going to be a dramatic, thought-provoking ride. And all the questions about how history collapsed onto itself — and why — will be answered.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!