When Valiant announced the return of a brand new Bloodshot comic series from writer Tim Seeley, comic fans knew the publisher meant business. A few issues in, and it was clear the writer had brought more than his personality and flair for action to the nanotech-fueled mercenary–he brought a healthy dose of horror, too. While the series’ second arc was put on hold due to the Coronavirus shutdown, Bloodshot’s next nightmare is just getting warmed up.
Those who read the previous issue of Bloodshot #7 know the stakes have been raised beyond all previous marks, with Bloodshot’s enemies unleashing the worst nightmares imaginable upon the world. Zombie soldiers, blood-sucking beasts, and two towering kaiju, just to name a few. With the follow-up now in sight and set to arrive in comic book shops this September, Screen Rant got to speak with Seeley about the delayed cliffhanger, embracing the horror of this one of a kind hero, the next stage of his adventure, and more. Find the full interview below.
Screen Rant: Everyone’s been waiting for Bloodshot, but even if circumstances were different, I don’t know how much you would be leaving your home right now. How busy are you at the moment?
Tim Seeley: The only thing I was working on that kind of got delayed was Bloodshot. Everything else proceeded apace. Most of my stuff is creator-owned, so I could kind of “heads down and keep going.” And I was doing a lot of OGNs – I was doing two original graphic novels, and I was writing starting them, so those were six issues each worth of content. So, I’m plenty busy.
I was a little worried for the first couple weeks of this, but so far, I’ve been consistently busy. I think I will be until at least when school starts, and I start teaching again. I’m lucky.
The first issue of Bloodshot made a really fun impact. From there, the story went in a way that I didn’t expect. Was that part of your initial plotting for Bloodshot, to make this story something that was not just paramilitary or science fiction but almost horror?
Yeah, I think I’m a horror writer at heart, probably. I certainly have experience with superheroes and science fiction and fantasy stuff as well, but I think my attraction to stories is usually more on the horror side of things. And for me, going back to the guy who read Bloodshot when it first came out and who has followed him throughout a lot of iterations, I think the things that work best with him were tilted towards the horror direction as well.
I was kind of picking up on some things that were there inherently and the body horror aspect of it. The fact that he’s essentially a high-tech Frankenstein’s monster meant that it was easy for me to figure out what’s the high-tech flip of other monsters. So, obviously there’s vampires and there’s ghosts, and there’s all this other stuff like werewolves. But it’s through this filter that Bloodshot exists in this world of biotech weaponry.
Was that pitch received well at Valiant, to find those angles and dig really deep into them?
Yeah, I think they liked that because it was a new angle. And also because I made up a lot of stuff, and I think there’s a lot of value to adding to the mythos of a character who exists. Certainly, I wanted to use things that exist that people have attachments to and that added to his story, but I also wanted to fill it out. I kind of thought that if we’re gonna do this big run that was gonna essentially prepare the world for a movie, that new readers should come into that and see all kinds of new things to explore.
So, yes, everybody was excited about it at Valiant. Brett really had a lot of fun designing from that vantage point; everything should be tinged with a little bit of this body horror aspect. I always kind of pitched the book as G.I. Crow. You know, it’s G.I. Joe plus The Crow. He’s got that sort of Gothic Revenant revenge story, but he’s also got this big, colorful military story. When you put them together, it’s definitely something that I enjoy. I think that’s kind of always been his appeal.
The pitch of what makes him a potential superhero is so energizing, and I think it’s something that the average person can understand and grasp. But from very early on with this series, you dialed in on how you wouldn’t want be this guy. He’s less cool than he is horrifying. Is that a tricky line to walk?
Yeah, definitely. Obviously with Bloodshot, the first thing you see is that he looks cool. That’s a great design. It’s a very attractive superhero design. But I think one of the appeals of a character like this is that he can’t die and he can do all this badass shit, but that’s also an absolute curse as far as the story. There has to be stakes to this; he has to be put in danger, even though we know he can’t die. Obviously, the leads in most comic books don’t.
But the stakes for him is that he’s always used; he’s a weapon and people always turn him against anything he loves. His horror has always got to be that he’s too useful. He’s too dangerous to everybody, and he can’t even run far enough away to escape that. One of the things we talk about later in the story is he probably should lock himself in a cement vault and dump himself into the Marianas Trench. He should; he’s too dangerous. But he doesn’t he wants to make sure that he’s making up for all the bad things that he’s been made to do.
That seems a great segue into issue #7, that was released before the Coronavirus delays. It paired perfectly with that: Bloodshot going from “everything would be better if I disappeared” to suddenly being the only hope that Earth has of not being turned into a total hellscape. How much fun was that tease?
Yeah, no kidding. What I like about the Valiant characters is that there’s this sort of grounded aspect to them that isn’t oppressively boring. It’s basically that at a certain point, you’re going to face the question of, “Why should I let people make decisions? They make bad ones.” For some of these characters, it’s a great superhero question. And obviously, none of the Valiant characters are quite people like Superman. They’re all sort of flawed and often quite angry. So, it’s having that setup where you push them to the end of his patience and his ropes and his powers. And at some point he has to say, “Why do I keep letting them make choices?”
I will have to ask about the choice to end the issue with kaiju – and not just one. What possible chance can even Bloodshot stand against a Godzilla-sized monster?
Well, that’s gonna be the fun part. Because again, he can’t die – or at least not easily. And so he can endure a lot of damage. So, you have to think of it as a scenario like: if it was you against a completely unkillable cockroach, how long would it take that cockroach eventually take you down? That’s kind of the question. i
But we play around with some fun stuff in there. That’s the thing, you have to always up to stakes and threats against him, because he’s so powerful. It seemed like there was no direction for us to go but straight to Godzilla-sized monsters. And the other thing about it is, it’s not even really the most dangerous thing he’s facing. I think they’re really sort of meant to be a distraction to keep him from going after Nix, who’s really much more dangerous.
I understand that there’s going to be some Valiant backup for fans of other Valiant Comics in the next issue?
Yeah, for sure. Maybe not as backup, but you’ll see. I mean, I love the other characters. I’ve always loved X-O Manowar, and I was a big fan of the original series of Valiant characters like Harbinger and Shadow Man, so I was inevitably going to put them in there. But what I like in the Valiant stuff is that, again, they stand for different things. They may all want the same thing eventually, but the way they get there is different. That’ll definitely be a factor in in our little mini-crossover moment.
I want to ask you about Heavy Metal. We’ve been following some of the previews and the stories that are coming with issue #300. And it seems comics can be all kinds of crazy. Is that part of the idea? I guess you want to almost remind people what is needed to shock them both art and story.
I’ve been working on Heavy Metal for about a year and a half now. One of the things that I really wanted to push was that when I was a kid and reading Heavy Metal, the reason I read it so feverishly and excitedly was that it was unpredictable and always felt a little dangerous. And I think part of that was just things being lost in translation. There were these French comics, and they would have metaphors that French creators would make and readers would understand, but they would not land as that metaphor for American readers. But they would still elicit a reaction. It’s sort of off-kilter, which came with the approach to science fiction in a lot of Heavy Metal stuff I grew up with. It was something I really wanted us to lean back into.
Certainly, some of the issues recently had done that, but I really wanted to push it to the forefront. Comics is a medium with no rules at all, and we’re not constrained by budget or an actor’s willingness or ability to pull something off. And we’re not constrained by the good taste of the size of an audience you’d need to sell a film. So, we should be pushing the boundaries for everything all the time. That’s kind of approach we took to #300, and a lot of stuff that we’re looking for going forward will be a little bit of that approach.
Is there anything that you’re pushing against? The comic industry has changed, in terms of accepting more daring ideas. I guess the most palatable ones ended up in major publishers in North America. Is there any resistance to some of the pitches and series that you’ve come up with recently?
Well, I think the biggest thing is that since Heavy Metal debuted, the comics industry has changed in a lot of ways. One of which is that when Heavy Metal debuted, comics were largely focused on young readers and weren’t largely superhero books. Now, obviously, there was other genres and stuff explored, but to a much lesser degree than they are now.
In a lot of ways, the whole comics industry has become Heavy Metal over the 70s and 80s. Everybody’s kind of doing the same thing. And additionally, globalization. When Heavy Metal was putting out stuff in the 70s, 80s and 90s, they were the only ones publishing French creators like Mobius. They were the only ones doing stuff like that, but now everyone is working internationally. A majority of artists working at Marvel and DC right now are from Brazil and Italy, that’s just a fact. Globalization means that you’re getting a lot of these global creators.
My approach has been, and the things I push back on, is that we can’t run a story that I could easily get somewhere else. If this looks too much like [someone else] – and partially that’s because the styles of some of the companies are so well-maintained – if I see something and I say, “This looks like a Top Cow book,” or “This looks like a Zenescope book,” or, “This looks like a Marvel book,” I don’t want to run it. I don’t want us to do things that people can get elsewhere. We have to be the place that you go for the kind of thing you can only get from us.
You said your schedule is basically filled until you get back to school. Is there anything else we haven’t touched on that is revving your engine at the moment?
Well, I’m still working on my book, Money Shot, which comes out from Vault comics. Issue #6 just came out after we had a little shipping delay there because the COVID outbreak, but I’m continuing to work on that. I just turned in issue #10, and we’re going full steam ahead. The book is super successful. When we came back from our break, we actually gained some orders, so that’s really good for us. I think it means word of mouth is spreading.
When I started that book, it was before I was working on Heavy Metal. To me, it was always a very Heavy Metal book, because it’s sort of a parody. It’s satirical, but it’s also a sexy science fiction book and it’s also got a lot of heart. That’s clearly always been a big part of my approach to making comics, so I’m glad people are digging it.
Are you surprised by how much it has been widely praised, especially from some corners that may have dismissed that kind of story in the past?
Yeah, I think part of it is just that there’s a prudishness – not in the readers, but the industry itself. There’s this whole world out there of people who are not offended by sexiness – and in fact, they avidly read [sexy] books. So, when you give them a comic that is unabashedly sexy and funny and sex-positive, you interact with a bunch of readers that people tend to ignore are out there.
We’re consistently in the top Kindle downloads and on Comixology, and partly that’s because we’re interacting with a readership that doesn’t go to comic book stores every Wednesday. I think I’ve made a career out of appealing to people that the mainstream comic industry tends to forget exists. Hack Slash survived because I knew there were lots of horror fans out there; I knew there was a lot of women out there who wanted a badass lady. I’ve survived on doing that, so I’m going to keep doing that.
With Money Shot, Bloodshot, and Nightwing recently, you might be the most sex-positive comics figure in the world right now.
Maybe not in the world, but definitely in the US. Because the rest of world, they’re much more into it than us. But I appreciate that.
Bloodshot #8 returns on September 16th in your local comic book shop.
