2012 Prophecy Comes Alive at Dynamite With Ron Marz

Veteran writer Ron Marz, the co-creator of characters like Kyle Rayner for DC and Shinku, a […]

September 6, 2017, 11:59pm

Veteran writer Ron Marz, the co-creator of characters like Kyle Rayner for DC and Shinku, a currently-running creator-owned book at Image with collaborator Lee Moder, recently left a remarkable run on Witchblade for Top Cow and found himself working less for mainstream publishers than he had in years.With DC’s Voodoo off his plate after only six issues and Magdalena plagued by delays, Marz was working only on Shinku and Artifacts by the time the first issue of his new Dynamite Entertainment crossover series, Prophecy, hit stores last week. Marz joined us to talk about the series.Prophecy is one of those books I’ve only seen a limited amount of press for. Can you give the basic premise for the fans reading? It’s Dynamite’s public domain heroes and licensed coming together in a wild orgy of a team-up, right?It’s kind of a motley crew, in terms of the characters involved. For me one of the things that made it really attractive was, “Okay, this is the collection of characters I’ve got. Can I find a way to put all of these into a story and have the thing make sense?” The diversity of the characters was actually an attraction for me; sometimes these things creatively are like putting together a puzzle and that’s something that–look, I’ve done enough of these things where it could become a very sort of rote exercise but with this diversity of characters I don’t think that’s a problem, here.

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Day of Judgment Green Lantern Well, and if I had to pick a name out of a hat I would have guessed Grant Morrison would be the guy doing a big 2012 crossover this year. The fact that Dynamite got there first and is the only major publisher working on a 2012 book, which of course has a huge amount of cultural cache outside of comics, is a bit surprising.

For those who haven’t yet read the press, can you give us a nutshell of the series? Marvel Team-Up

And you talk about the idea that not all of these characters are inherently heroes. That element of it dovetails nicely into what you’ve already been doing in Artifacts. A lot of characters who are working at odds end up working together for a common goal.

When you were approached for this, what were the boundaries of this? There are a lot of licensed properties at Dynamite and while many of them appear to be on the board for this, some of them don’t seem to be. Is that kind of new for you? There aren’t very many stories in mainstream comics where that’s such a concern, and especially having so many property owners involved has to be a bit daunting. Is there any particular character who stands out to you, having done the first bit of the story, as being particularly fun to write? How tricky is it to come up with a take on some of these characters that’s true to everyone’s expectations without them just being an archetype rather than a character? Red Sonja