Brian David-Marshall is the President and Publisher of InterPop, and has a long history in trading card games. What you might not know is before all that, Brian’s roots began in independent comics. He was an editor, writer, and publisher back at the start of the black & white explosion in the 1980s. It’s only natural that he’d return to comics writing at the company he helped found, but instead of writing established Emergents, he’s taken the alternate reality hammer to them. Along with long-time creative partner Steve Ellis, they developed the Divergents. Learn how these tales of twisted reality took shape in the pages of Emergents Presents #11, out now!
InterPop: How did this special issue of Emergents Presents come about?
Brian: I have known Steve Ellis forever, going all the way back to when I was working as the Editor-in-Chief for Crusade Comics, and we hired him to work on a new title called Atomic Angels. Later, when I was first populating the Emergents Universe, Steve was the person who drew the vast majority of the characters for the first time. But that was not the same thing as working on a story together — something we have wanted to do for a long time. We are close in age and influences and have talked about roughly a million different projects we want to collaborate on.
InterPop: Tell me about your thought process creating alternate versions of several fan-favorite Emergents.
Brian: This issue really came about because we started talking about working on a Chronarchivist story together. I loved the idea that she had clippings of all these now-apocryphal timelines in her headquarters and getting a look at those worlds through her eyes. The very first of those stories that got stuck in my head was Tops and Tales, a prohibition-era story about the end of the world. Cryotechnique was a character Steve and I had toyed with as a concept previously and I was excited to come up with an origin and back story for her. The Mad Machinist was the last of the characters to get created for this issue but he is someone I have really come to love and I look forward to seeing what happens to him from here. I am really thrilled with how it has all turned out. Rachel Gluckstern and Rylen Sigman have done an amazing job of editing this and every aspect of the book — art, lettering, coloring — has been breathtaking to behold.
InterPop: You’ve known Steve Ellis a long time. How does it feel working on a comic with him for the first time?
Brian: I have worked with Steve quite a bit over the years, but never as a collaborator. We share a lot of comic book DNA in terms of our influences and I have always appreciated Steve’s skills as a fantasy artist — he has done some great work on Dungeons & Dragons magazines and as a Magic card illustrator. He brings so much to the drawing table and it was great to have all those resources available when telling stories in so many different worlds and timelines. I am looking forward to working with him again on something very soon.
InterPop: Out of all the Divergents, who would you most like to see escape into the main Emergents reality?
Brian: This is a very hard question to answer because I love them all, but I would have to say that Cryotechnique is a character that — I don’t know what she is going to do if she gets out into the “real” world. She went way darker than I was expecting when we started working on the story and I question how she will fit into a world populated by other super-powered entities.
InterPop: Let’s say the Divergents are a new reader’s gateway into the Emergents Universe. What should they check out next?
Brian: If you love Steve Ellis’s work — and of course you do — you should read Season 1 of The Nine, which he drew all six issues of. All of the titles we are putting out are comics I look forward to reading each week though. #ZoeMG is a great coming of age superhero story; The Abyss explores the dark side of the superhero game, and The Rejects is a new team book in the tradition of titles that I loved when I first started reading comics like Uncanny X-Men and New Teen Titans. But if you are really looking to explore the universe you should go back and read the 10 previous issues of Emergents Presents, which showcase a ton of characters and creative teams.
