No, not really. But in the first portion of our ongoing discussion with Archer & Armstrong writer Fred Van Lente, we discussed the question of why interior artist Clayton Henry didn’t draw the covers for the first issue of the sold-out Valiant series, and Van Lente’s response was too good to pass up.There’s a lot of stuff going on in the first issue of Van Lente’s reimagining of Barry Windsor-Smith’s fan-favorite Archer & Armstrong, and so we wanted to make sure to talk to the writer about as much of it as we could…but we also kind jumped around a bit, so don’t necessarily expect to see us go page-by-page this time!Thanks to Fred for coming aboard! Away we go…The first thing is, the cover is beautiful but why not simply give that job to Clayton?What do you mean? This comic had 17 different covers and one of them was by Clayton! He did the 2nd printing variant cover too, which should be in stores soon enough.I don’t recall–was Mrs. Archer a congresswoman in the original?No. The original Archers were evangelist child rapists who didn’t hesitate to murder their son (Obie) when he discovers their crimes.The only way I could think of making them worse was to make one a member of Congress. (RIMSHOT)
I feel like we got a lot more insight into Armstrong this time around; in the previous version he was mysterious for longer.
On a scale of 1 to 10 how important is that the story takes place on Tuesday?
Honestly it kind of reminds me of Douglas Adams.
Of course you realize some jerk is gonna send you a bunch of annotations saying you picked the wrong martial art for any given move, right?
With the kind of in your face criticism, or exaggerated nature at least, of the park goers are you concerned at all about alienating a certain demographic?
To be this place is mostly terrifying because it seems so plausible in light of some of what we are seeing in the south these days. Was it meant to be somewhat plausible or was it meant to be so preposterous it seems impossible?
Will we learn the origin of that device that Archer used to track down Armstrong
So for a book with so much comic relief, you took the high road for most of the issue…and then there was that projectile-vomit thing. Just testing the waters?
Was it a conscious choice to have Archer’s parents spend so much of the issue disembodied, talking to him and others through the intercom? Voices on a box like Charlie?
And to that point, no physical abuse or overt attempt to kill the son this time out. Or is it just that you used the 1% and their cronies as tools to tell the same story, but bigger?
