David Walker Talks DC Comics' Cyborg: "I Feel Like I Won The Lottery"

This week will see the release of Cyborg #1 from writer David Walker and artists Ivan Reis, Joe Prado and Adriano Lucas.

The series will put Vic Stone, getting his first ongoing series, against a new threat with its own mythology and ties to the DC Universe while introducing or reintroducing a human supporting cast that runs the gamut from new characters to Vic's family to familiar characters from Vic's pre-Flashpoint days as a Teen Titan and more.

Walker joined ComicBook.com to talk a little bit about the series -- we're presenting the first half of the interview today and the second half in a couple of days when Cyborg gears up to hit the stands.

Both artistically and in terms of voice, the alien stuff and the Earth stuff almost feel like they're two separate books. I'm very impressed by the way the whole thing comes together.

Well, you know, that's all the art team. Ivan [Reis] and Joe [Prado] and Ardriano Lucas. They are, honestly, the best art team you could ever hope to work with. I say that, no hyperbole at all. Ivan as a penciller is so incredible and he's bringing a level fo emotion and drama to this, and action as well, that I look at it and the first thing I think of every time I see his pages is, "Wow, this is so cool. Who wrote this? And then I realize, "Oh, I wrote it."

I feel like I won the lottery, working with them, and there's been some dialogue back and forth between us in terms of, I said, "What do you really want to draw? Is there anything in particular?" And Ivan's response has always been, "I just like the character and I want to do interesting things with the character."

Action is great, but unless you're saving a cat from a tree, action doesn't build character as much. If you're rescuing a drowning kid, it tells a little about your character, but there's so much more to be told, and that's what I really wanted to explore. There's some incredible moments where I look at the art and I'm like, "Okay, he got it. He nailed exactly what I wanted to happen, but I didn't want to have to write it out for the reader." I didn't want to have to write, "Cyborg has a quiet, reflective moment where he's emotionally insecure. Ivan's able to draw that.

Was it you or was it the art team who came up with the looks for the alien stuff? I feel like it actually kind of informs character a bit in that Vic has been so bulky and robotic throughout the New 52, but now he's being slimmed down and humanized a little bit and just then, he's facing these very mechanical, very inhuman-looking things.

Again, that's Ivan taking my initial ideas and not just running but like taking off and flying around the world with them. With both the Tekbreakers and the Technosapiens, the descriptions were like "The Tekbreakers are wearing bulky body armor so that you can't tell if it's a man or a woman under the armor." That was the thing I really wanted to get across. Then with the Technosapiens, I was like, "They're kind of weird-looking monsters that are part cybernetic." And he came up with these designs.

In my own mind, I was picturing creatures that were definitely more humanoid and he went with such a monstrous look that I was like, "Oh, this is awesome." Because it gives the book a twinge of horror as well. So there's the sci-fi element, but there's horror.

So suddenly I was like, "Wow, this can be more evocative of so much more because it gets into the fact that the cybernetic technology can be invasive to all sorts of living creatures."

It reminds me of something from the Mojoverse when Bill Sienkiewicz was drawing New Mutants.

I hadn't even put those two together. I was thinking more like the Cenobites out of Hellraiser, because those things were kind of disturbing-looking creatures.

You're building a lot of new mythology here. Will any of it tie back to famliar DC concepts?

No, some of it is rooted into existing DC lore. We're going to find out a little bit more about them as the story progresses. What I really wanted to do was that I wanted to tell a story that would test Cyborg, that would test Vic Stone, in a way that he hadn't necessarily been tested before.

And it was funny because the early pitches sort of had these generic villains in there and I would throw these questions out: "Is so-and-so available?" "Can I use this character?" And there was always, for whatever reason, every villain that I threw out was tied up somewhere else in the DC Universe and so finally Geoff Johns or someone like that just said, "Look, why don't you just make up your own villains?" It hadn't really occurred to me that you can actually do that! So what I looked at was how I wanted to challenge Vic. How do I want to test him, and the world he's in? And how do I do that? So I sort of reverse-engineered who the threats would be in this story, both in terms of the Tekbreakers and the Technosapiens.

Vic is a character who has gone through the same, or a very similar, character arc over and over again over the course of his years in print. Obviously that struggle between his humanity and the machine is important to him as a character, but how do you create a new spin on that so you don't feel like you're doing the same thing again?

That's a great question. I have been asking myself that from the very beginning. How many times can you have his arm fall off, or something shuts down his power core and he's going to die, or whatever, you know? And so again, you hit the nail on the head, he's faced some of the same threats time and time again, so the big thing is, what do we do with him after the threat? How do we put him through a crisis and where does he go from there?

And that's going to be I think the driving point of this story that's going to separate it from some of the other things that we've seen int he past is that if you look at it with that classic hero's journey arc, he's gone through the same trials and tribulations, like you pointed out. So what I've really been thinking about is, where do we go from here? Let's put him through some paces but let's take him someplace different after this. Let's put him on a journey so that it's not just, "Oh, hey, I got some rust in my armpits and so I can't lift my arms over my head anymore." It's got to be something different and I'm really focusing on him as a person who isn't sure of who he is or what he is, as we all are. There's some days where we're all incredibly confident in what we can do and there's other days when we're totally insecure.

And I'm surrounding him with a cast of characters that some pull him in one direction and others pull him in another direction, in that sort of man-versus-machine, who are the supporting characters who make him feel more like a machine, and who are those that make him feel more like a man?

You can read more from our interview with David Walker on Tuesday, just before the relase of Cyborg #1 from DC Comics. You can pre-order Cyborg #1 here.