Exclusive: Marvel’s Tom Brevoort On Ultimates2, Uncanny Avengers, And Red Skull’s Reckoning

Marvel NOW! officially kicks off this week, and the world of the Avengers has changed in the wake of Civil War II.

This week, ComicBook.com has been speaking to Marvel executive editor Tom Brevoort about the state of the Avengers as Marvel NOW! begins. We previously spoke about Champions and Avengers, and then about Occupy Avengers and the Avengers line as a whole.

Today, in the final part of our interview, Brevoort focuses in on Ultimates2 and Uncanny Avengers, and hints at the coming final showdown with the Red Skull that has been slowing building in the pages of Uncanny Avengers, Thunderbolts, Captain America: Steve Rogers and Captain America: Sam Wilson.

And be sure to check out the exclusive Travel Foreman preview pages from Ultimates2 #1 in the gallery below.

The philosophy of the the Ultimates, arguably more than any other group in the Marvel Unvierse, most directly resonated with the themes of Civil War II, that of being able to solve big problems proactively. Going into Ultiamtes2, how do the events of Civil War II effect the Ultimates’ mission and how they operate?

TB: Without giving away too much about the end of the first season of Ultimates and the end of Civil War II, by the end of Ultimates season one, there is no Ultimates team. Ultimates2 will begin with a new call to arms, will begin with a situation that causes and requires these characters to reunite in the face of things that are going on and repair their situations with one another and re-dedicate themselves to the underlying philosophies that guided the formation of that team in the first place.

It’s a little tricky to talk about just because there are still issues to come. Of all the various Avengers teams, apart from maybe the All-New, All-Different Avengers, they are the group that’s most directly impacted by the events of Civil War II, as you would expect. They very much were all on the front lines of it, in particular Captain Marvel, obviously. T’Challa had a big role, and Adam had a big role, and even Monica is very well-represented in Civil War II, particularly in the back half of it. Their situation is an outgrowth of all this stuff that’s going on.

Going into the new book, while it picks up on things that were going on in the first season, the new book, Ultimates2, starts in a way that, hopefully, you can pick up and just get into it, even if you have not experienced the stuff that came before, because they are left at such a chaotic state that they don’t actually exist as a group by the end of the first year.

As such a high concept book, Ultimates2 seems like a really fun assignment an artist, particularly more expressive ones. What is Travel Foreman bringing to Ultimates2 that you are excited to see?

TB: A couple things. First off, we were very sad that Kenneth Rocafort is moving on to other things. The things he is moving onto are excellent. He is doing IvX #0 and there’s other stuff on the horizon. It’s not like anybody begrudges that. In a very real way his visual approach to that first series of this new iteration of The Ultimates helped to define it as a book. It’s one thing to write about the characters who travel through to outside of the universe. That sounds nice as words on paper, but it really is the visualization of these ideas that sell them. He was so good at that. I think a lot of what made that book effective came down to the way he put it on the page.

Going into Ultimates2, we needed somebody else who could do, not what Kenneth does, but who could also fully realize the thing. Travel was a big fan of the first run of Ultimates. It was a book, as he talked to people about what’s coming up next for him and what he could be doing, that was on his short list of, “I would really like to do that book.” His work of late has been amazing.

It’s a completely different style of comic, but the Civil War II: Amazing Spider-Man pages he did were outrageously good. He has a certain stylization to what he does, a certain way he puts a page together and the way he handles the character interactions. He felt like the kind of person who could do the same sort of things that Kenneth does in his own way. Based on his earliest pages for Ultimates2, that is absolutely the case. I think he’s going to do great things there.

Like I said, it’s a very different sort of book to be drawing than Civil War II: Spider-Man, which is very much a ground-level Spider-Man sort of book. He is uniquely qualified to do it. I think what he has got going on there is very exciting. He is a really underrated artist right now.

With Uncanny Avengers, and you coming on as editor of Captain America: Steve Rogers, should we expect to see those books begin interacting more frequently and significantly? You touched on this a bit earlier, but both books share a major hero in Captain America and a villain in the Red Skull.

TB: I think it’s safe to say – and not even in the future, pretty much since Avengers: Standoff – the two Captain America books, Captain America: Sam Wilson and Captain America: Steve Rogers, and Thunderbolts and Uncanny Avengers are all operating in a linked state, and that linked state will only become greater and more profound the further in we get. There’s big stuff on the horizon that I am not ready to talk about yet, and all of those books are vectoring directly towards that big thing as the things that are going on with Steve Rogers reach a head and reach a boiling point. Those events will spill out into other titles beyond that. But right this moment, all of those books are telling a piece of that overall journey.

Yes, there is absolutely a lot of connectivity between what’s going on in Uncanny Avengers, whether it’s with Steve, whether it’s with Red Skull coming up, all of that stuff and what’s going on in the Captain America books and what Nick is doing there. That’s not an accident. This is all stuff that was talked about and coordinated during Avengers: Standoff and coming out of Avengers: Standoff. We are now following through on the plan we laid out. It’s getting to the point where people can begin to see it.

Certainly it seems like a lot of people were surprised and maybe even taken aback a little bit by Captain America: Steve Rogers #5, which just dropped, which gave a different viewpoint on a bunch of the events that were going on in Civil War II. It revealed some things that were going on in the shadows that made people take a second look at what they thought was happening there and that is not the only place that things like that are going to be happening.

Yes, Uncanny Avengers, definitely a part of that little almost sub-family of Captain America-centric titles right now and will definitely become more enmeshed and more at the forefront of what’s going on in there, especially as we get to the Red Skull story.

Given that Uncanny Avengers was born from the events of Avengers vs. X-Men, has there been consideration given to the idea that Inhumans vs. X-Men may be the natural, if not poetic, endpoint for the series?

TB: It certainly is possible. We are going to have to see what happens in IvX and what role the Uncanny Avengers play in it. Again, I don’t want to say too much, especially because that’s not a book I am directly even editing. I am involved in a consulting capacity, but I am not doing IvX, so I don’t want to say too much. Yes, certainly characters within the Unity Squad of characters, both the mutants and the Inhumans there, have a very personal stake in what goes on in IvX and will be directly involved in the same sort of way as Ms. Marvel and Cyclops that we talked about earlier.

Generally, what’s the morale like for the Unity Squad as Uncanny Avengers movies into Marvel NOW!, following the events of Civil War II and everything that happened with Captain America? Are they suspicious of Captain America? Where’s the team’s collective head at?

TB: To some degree, and really Captain America disbanded the group, but he disbanded the group in front of Rogue and Cable and Deadpool. So in fact, going into the first story that is coming out of this, there are members of the team that do not realize there is not a team anymore. They will discover that in the course of that storyline because nobody bothered to tell them, and in fact it’s probably more advantageous to the other characters to not say anything just yet because there are things that have to be dealt with.

The morale of the characters, particularly of the characters who know – Rogue and Deadpool and Cable – they describe it as “they are going to go punk.” They are going to do the job they were there to do and if Steve Rogers doesn’t like it, tough. They are going to do the thing. It’s not for him to say whether or not they are going to be that thing. They are going to be that thing regardless. They take a sort of punk attitude towards the whole Avengers experience and that will be an interesting thing to see.

It will give another slightly different flavor to an Avengers book and certainly a different attitude towards it. That will certainly be going on and lasting as we get into IvX and we will see what happens there and we will see what happens thereafter.

Is there anything else you’d like to add before we let you go?

TB: The book does not drop until Wednesday, but I want to thank everybody who has been so supportive of Champions so far. It’s a book I really love and I think is really quick and well right from the get-go. Champions #2 is better than Champions #1, and Champions #1 is pretty cool. I hope people enjoy it and take it into their hearts as I have and the same thing for all the various Avengers books we have coming out.

I think we have a pretty strong lineup of really good, really interesting comics that are coming all down the line. We have a lot of cool stuff that’s coming out right now, be it Jessica Jones, be it CAGE! There’s just a lot of stuff we are doing that looks really good to me and reads really well when you see the final thing on the page. I just hope people dig it and if they don’t, they certainly know where to find me on Twitter and Tumblr and everywhere to let me know thumbs up or thumbs down. I welcome all of that conversation.