Five Questions About No One Left To Fight With Aubrey Sitterson

This summer, Aubrey Sitterson and Fico Ossio will bring No One Left to Fight to Dark Horse Comics. A tale inspired by long-running manga like Dragon Ball, the title will center on combatants in a heightened fantasy world, and what happens to them after the war is over. Per the official description, “They’ve saved the planet countless times, but what happens after the final battle has been won?” Creators Sitterson and Ossio have set out “to tell a story of regret, resentment, and growing older, one that asks, ”What does a fighter do when there’s no one left to fight?””

And if both the look and feel of the comic is a bit familiar to you, that’s probably good: it will help make the world feel more welcoming. The first issue is an immersive one, providing little in the way of traditional exposition or backstory and dropping the audience into the lives of characters who already have existing, complex relationships. The result is a comic that was already pretty fast-paced, and feels even more so as the audience runs to keep up with everything being thrown at them. Sitterson joined ComicBook.com for a quick chat about the series, which will launch the first week in July. The final order cutoff for No One Left To Fight #1 is coming up, so if you want to be sure you get a copy, contact your local comics retailer soon.

Real basics here — how would you sell this to a fan at a convention, and how did you guys develop the book?

Oh, that’s easy! Honestly, it ain’t too different from how I’ve been selling it to retailers during my marathon phonebanking sessions. And seeing as everyone I talk to is super stoked on selling No One Left to Fight in their stores, I think it’s a pretty good sell! Ahem…

Do you like Dragon Ball? Of course you do! It’s been around for thirty years, spanning comics and cartoons and video games and every type of merch you can imagine! Fico Ossio and I love it too, and we’ve taken absolutely everything we love about the series – the humor, the soap opera drama, and, of course, the explosive, high-energy martial arts fights – and swirled it all together into something new. It’s influenced by manga, but it’s not manga pastiche or parody. It’s all our favorite bits and pieces from Dragon Ball, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, One Punch Man, Street Fighter, and a dozen other influences, but fused together into something new, something that’s a little more easily digestible than three decades of manga: A full-color, five-issue, 20-page, American-style comic book series. It’s THE COMIC YOU ALWAYS WANTED.

As for how we developed the book, it’s interesting, because a lot of folks have been asking what I took to Fico or what I pitched him on, but the process wasn’t like that at all. No One Left to Fight grew out of two things: Fico and I wanting to work together, after years of gazing at each other longingly across the comics dance floor, and us finding out that we’re both big old Dragon Ball nerds. We started with everything we loved about the series – all iterations of it – and then sat down to figure out how to hit those same notes, how to evoke the same feelings from the audience, but in a drastically different format.

Obviously the look of this series is one of the big selling points. How did you guys kind of piece together what you wanted the world to be and look like?

I’m so happy to hear you say that! I imagine that might seem odd to hear a writer say, but I really do see my job as being all about giving Fico amazing stuff to draw, just lobbing softballs over the plate so he can knock ’em out of the park, which he’s totally doing, obviously. Comics is a visual medium, so if your book doesn’t look incredible…what are you even doing? That’s how I feel at least.

Fico has a really unique, distinctive style, especially when it comes to character design, so even when I’d say something like “Vâle & Timór are our Goku & Vegeta,” I always knew that Fico would come back with something totally new and different. I think that approach – taking the stuff we love from Dragon Ball, then filtering it through Fico’s aesthetic – extends not only to the characters, but the world itself. This is where structuring the story as a kind of “road movie” really came in handy, as it presented us with the opportunity to really explore how diverse and beautiful this place is.

The characters in this book are larger-than-life in a big way. Was the idea here to kind of play with the tropes of this kind of storytelling but not to narrow yourselves down to necessarily specific character types?

Absolutely. I mentioned it earlier, but Dragon Ball has been around for thirty years. And the story was originally based on the Chinese novel Journey to the West, which was influenced by the Hindu tale of Hanuman in the Ramayana! So not only does this stuff have serious pop culture saturation, not only is it deeply embedded in the larger cultural zeitgeist, but it even has historical antecedents spanning multiple countries and traditions!

It was our goal to really play with these character tropes, which, in 2019, are every bit as pervasive and readily recognized as Batman or Spider-Man. The idea was that we’d use the similarities to these established characters to evoke certain emotions and feelings from the audience, that we could then either pay off in satisfying ways, or subvert in ways they aren’t expecting. It’s like wrestling gimmicks, or, if you wanna get a little more fancy, commedia dell’arte – we start with these kind of stock characters that a lot of our readership is going to recognize, and bring their own history and baggage to, but by the end of the first issue, you’ll see where we’re deviating and spinning off into new directions.

How early in the game did your creative team come together?

No One Left to Fight is Fico and my baby, so, to extend a metaphor possibly too far, we’ve both been there since conception. And Taylor Esposito came onboard as soon as we had sample pages to start pitching around! We’d worked together previously, and I knew he’d not only get what we were going for, but be able to work within the unique, distinctive aesthetic that Fico’s created for the book. I absolutely hate it when lettering feels like it’s separate from the art, like it’s just sitting on top of it, but that never happens with Taylor, which is a real testament to his ability considering how utterly bananas Fico’s palette is.

What made now the right time for this particular story?

Three decades of Dragon Ball, across multiple iterations and video games. The massive success of not only Dragon Ball Super, but the theatrical release of the Broly movie. The continuing popularity of Dragon Ball FighterZ, which is one of the most popular games in competitive e-sports. The migration of manga & anime from niche interest to an established part of the American pop culture landscape. Dude, I was at the mall last week and I saw Dragon Ball merch – t-shirts, toys, statues, skateboards – in at least a half dozen different stores. No wonder retailers hear about this thing and immediately say, “Oh, I can sell that!”

And from a creative standpoint…Fico and I are ready. We’ve both been making comics for a long time, and have done a ton of work that we’re extremely proud of, but this is something completely new for us, because our amazing editor Brett Israel has given us the freedom to do what we’ve always wanted to do: Tell our story, our way. It’s our first creator-owned series, and we’re getting to do it at the legendary Dark Horse Comics – the publisher of Hellboy and Akira and Sin City and Lone Wolf & Cub and Berserk and Concrete and so many of the titles that made me want to become a comics writer in the first place. The importance of that, the opportunity to join the lineage of not only those series, but newer ones, like Umbrella Academy, Black Hammer, and Death Orb, is something truly special, and it’s not lost on us.

We keep calling No One Left to Fight “The Comic You Always Wanted” because, frankly, it’s the comic that WE always wanted. And we can’t wait for you to read it.