Okay, so it's quite common knowledge I write ahead with a lot of my books to ensure that I a) have content ready to go whenever I need it and b) can plot massive stories and keep dipping into stuff I've written that's not hit the site to feed into future stories. I wrote a lot
Justice League in a blur earlier this year, and I've not written an issue for a couple of months now, what with
Ten Years Later taking priority. I'm written up until November on
Justice League, while I have the December issue of
Green Lantern Corps written but not November (yikes). Then I have loads of plots scrawled in numerous word documents for stories planned into 2017. At twenty-seven, I hope I'm still driven to deliver content, because this is a world I love writing in.
But anyway, I digress. So, I write ahead with a lot of my stories. A few months back, we started discussing
Ten Years Later and a character came up that I hadn't thought about for a while... Superboy. Not the mainstream comics version, but
our version, the one who was last known as being a product of, effectively, incest between Superman and Supergirl. The mad doctor Xa-Du took their DNA and spliced it to create Kon. That was icky and I started thinking about how to make that work in the present day, and I did so in the
Ten Years Later Prologue special (still available!). That was all well and good, but there was a character on the fringe of that story who was mentioned but didn't appear, and hasn't appeared for years on the DC2... and that guy was Xa-Du himself.
Xa-Du. The mad scientist of Krypton. Who performed hideous acts on ancient Krypton and was imprisoned in the Phantom Zone. Who escaped into the present day during Roy Flinchum's run on
Action Comics. David said this when he read his first appearance:
And not long after, that story concluded with Xa-Du missing with no one knowing where... which meant there was this
Kryptonian-- who was
insane... with
medical training-- floating about in
space. So where best to pick him up?
In
Green Lantern Corps, of course. I was wanting to get my characters away from Earth after the events of the last X amount of issues, and sending Guy out into the void made perfect sense. To find a murder scene so horrifying, to start an issue so viscerally, this was an important issue for me. I wanted to write a horror story set in space. I'd been watching
Hannibal and the tableau that are featured in that series of murder scenes are horrifying. I'd watched
Hellraiser around that time too and I just wanted... to be horrifying. To imbue my issues with tangible terror. So Xa-Du is back. He has Guy Gardner in his grasp. And while my intention with Hank Henshaw is to continue breaking him down psychologically... with Guy it's a little bit different...
... with Guy, I want to see him taken apart physically.
Big thank you to Roy Flinchum for next issue's cover.
