A month from today, Convergence writer Jeff King will launch a new, monthly series centered on Telos, the villain at the center of the story who turned out to be less a true villain and more a pawn of Brainiac, who broke free of his puppet master as the series went along.
ComicBook.com spoke with King shortly after the series was announced at Comic-Con International this summer in San Diego, and asked him for an overview of the series, as well as about those Silver Surfer similarities and the burning question everyone wants to know: Who is Telos?
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He also revealed to us a rather surprising and potentially very dangerous guest star coming to the series, straight from the final pages of Convergence itself…!
You can check out our Decoding Convergence interviews with King, which gave a good deal of insight into Telos, Brainiac and other key players from the forthcoming series, here.
I felt like Telos had a really well-defined character arc in Convergence, but there were some people who still said they didn’t get him. Is a new #1 a good place to kind of make things plain for the readers?
It’s going to make things plain but it’s going to leave gaps still unfilled because Telos’ journey is to be reunited with his people and his family, but that isn’t always something that’s easy to achieve. Part of what’s going to happen to him is that he’s going to seek out Brainiac to help him fill in the missing pieces of that mystery.
Brainiac has divested himself of all the memories and all the power that he gained through all the pre-Convergence adventures he’s been on, so when Telos seeks him out, he’s going to send him on a journey — on a mission, basically, because Brainiac no longer has the answers and no longer has the power that Telos does. So Telos’s search for his family is going to take us to Colu, to Brainiac’s home planet, and things have changed since Crisis on Infinite Earths. The history and the lineage of those clones and the sons of Brainiac that we all know and love has all changed since Crisis on Infinite Earths and he’s going to find Colu under the thumb of the Computer Tyrants.
How do you trust Brainiac, to know he’s actually sending you on the journey he says he’s sending you on?
Exactly. Even less than that, Telos has the choice and that’s a part of it: every great villain gives you two terrible choices and forces you to make one. That doesn’t require trust, it requires personal responsibility, and that’s the new Telos. The new Telos is empowered by the events of Convergence and now free to seek his own destiny — but be careful what you wish for because sometimes when you get to the end of that journey, what you find is not what you expect.
And that’s what’s going to happen to Telos. So there’s another chapter to be revealed in the memories that we saw, that he has of his past life. Also, at a certain point, somebody’s going to say to him, “Things change when you’ve been away for a long time. When you come back, the people you’re returning to have also changed. Are you sure what you’re going to find is what you’re looking for?”
It’s a great thing for me: it’s transformation, it’s family, it’s journey.
To longtime comic book readers, this seems like an obvious question: how do you differentiate this book from something like Silver Surfer, which has a very similar high concept?
Absolutely. One of the profound differences is, obviously they’re very different characters. At this point, where Telos is going is where no man has gone before. He’s going to the outer planets, he’s not coming to Earth. They’re very different characters in that way.
And of course at this point, he’s no longer tethered to Brainiac. He’s free to choose, and that was not the case. There’s no Fantastic Four on this planet. What I want to explore is that relationship between Telos and eventually the people that he left from, and specifically his wife, who’s going to become eventually a major player in it — but not before he has a brush with Hal Jordan as Parallax.
When we discover who Telos was, will we recognize that name? Is it somebody who’s existed before in the DC canon?
His true name?
Yes.
Yes.
Telos #1 is due in stores on October 7. It has a Final Order Cutoff date of September 14. You can check out the solicitation text for #1 below.
Written by Jeff King, art by Carlo Pagulayan and Jason Paz, cover by Carlo Pagulayan, variant cover by Stephen Segovia.
The villain of the world-shattering Convergence event stars in his own new series! Set loose from his planetary tether at the end of the best-selling Convergence, Telos finds himself free and able to traverse space and time via a sliver of Brainiac’s powers. As this epic begins, he embarks on an odyssey, journeying across time and space in search of his past.
32 pages
