DC's Joshua Williamson Talks House of Brainiac and Teases Superman's Team-Up with Lobo in Action Comics #1064

Joshua Williamson and Rafa Sandoval kick off House of Brainiac in style with the anticipated Action Comics #1064, and it is going to shake up Superman’s world in a big way. It’s also going to require a partnership between Superman and his on-and-off again foe Lobo, who finds himself standing on the opposite side of a Czarnian army thanks to Brainiac. ComicBook.com had a chance to speak to Williamson all about the issue and the shift in Brainiac’s approach and methods, as well as what is in store for Superman, Lois Lane, and Lobo as they seek to take on Brainiac’s forces and attempt to disrupt Brainiac’s rise to power.

Videos by ComicBook.com

Even before Williamson was writing Superman, he was consulting on some of the bigger-picture stuff. When the topic of writing Superman would occasionally come up, Williamson would always point to Superman’s villains, and when he eventually got the job of writing Superman, he made it a point to find an inventive approach to each one.

“Really, the biggest thing I would recommend is get all of Superman’s villains in there. That was really the biggest thing because I think for a while Superman hadn’t really been about his villains. There weren’t a lot of Parasite or Brainiac stories. There weren’t really a lot of versus Lex stories, and there were other reasons for that because of the big-picture stuff that we were doing at the time,” Williamson said. “So when I got the job, I sat there and I got this notebook and I wrote down every single Superman villain and I was going through and I was just like, what is something different I can do with every single villain?”

“And so with Lex, that was part of it. ‘Okay, let’s take him in this direction that we’re taking him in where, is he really getting a second chance? Is he really going to try to be good this time? But I look at story reasons for why these things are happening too. It’s like Lex had just gone through all the stuff that had happened with Perpetua, that stuff has still been sort of in his head and that allows me to kind of fuel the character reasons why these are happening,” Williamson said.

“So with Brainiac, I sat down with Brainiac and I started just really thinking about why does Brainiac do what he does? Why is he obsessed with this knowledge? Why does he destroy these planets and why does he take the one city? Why does he try to hoard all this information? Why is he collecting? And then I started thinking about myself as a collector and as a big old nerd who loves to buy stuff and hoard things, I started looking at that and I started being like, ‘Well, why? Why does Brainiac actually do this?’ And I feel like some of it was about his obsession, but you can keep asking why and why and why. It’s like, ‘Oh, he’s obsessed. Why is he obsessed?’ You start getting into it,” Williamson said.

“And I know that Grant had touched on it a little bit during his run, but I was like, I think there’s just more to this story if you actually look at his history.’ And that was really it. I was like, “Well, why does he do this? What would happen if he got it all?” If Brainiac finally had all the knowledge, he feels like he had it all, what would happen next? Would he find there was something missing? Will he find there is a missing piece of his knowledge that he can never fill? And so I started exploring that of what is the thing that he can’t bottle up? What is the thing that you can never bottle? What is the thing that you can never control? And I started looking at those pieces and that’s really where the story started to come together,” Williamson said. “And part of showing him differently in this, because what’s happening with him, you have this character that’s always been about a kind of order, the idea of the collecting and everything being put where it’s going to be and the way he wants things. And it’s like, What if he embraced chaos a little bit?”

It’s not just Brainiac joining in on the fun either, as Superman will have to team up with the Main Man Lobo to find Brainiac and save not just his family but the world. Williamson couldn’t be more thrilled to bring Lobo into the mix and loves how Lobo’s classic ’90s vibe and aesthetic have endured despite his satiric origins.

“I’m a big fan of Keith Giffen’s and I love the mythology around Lobo, And I really, really love the original miniseries of Keith Giffen and Simon Bisley. And Lobo was one of those characters, even as a kid, I would gravitate toward. I always found his mythology and just as a character to be really interesting,” Williamson said. “I think the mythology around his creation, about how Keith Giffen was like, ‘I’m going to show you a ’90s character,’ and was like, ‘I’m going to mock and satirize ’90s characters.’ And he did so well that he became so crazy popular, just as the rest of the ’90s characters did, and I love that. I love that he was going into it with like, ‘No, you’re not supposed to like this,’ which is the most curmudgeonly Keith Giffen story. He’s like, no, you’re not supposed to like him.”

“It’s funny being a kid in the ’90s and working at a comic store in the second half of the ’90s, because I got a job at a comic store when I was a kid. I was only 14, but I got a job at a comic store in 1995. So it was like to see that era of it, which is post.. it’s basically post-implosion, it’s post-Image boom, but it still was pre-Marvel bankruptcy. But what’s funny is DC was still killing it through the whole ’90s, and you had Hitman and Starman and I think the stuff that was going on with Batman where it was like we were still post-Knightfall, but dealing with it,” Williamson said. “And then we were coming up on Grant Morrison’s JLA in 1997, which I really feel is the beginning of… From JLA in ’97 all the way through to 2005, I feel like when you get to Infinite Crisis, I really feel like there was a lot of really cool DC stuff going on in that window. The ’90s were dope. We got a Hitman. We got Preacher.” There’s a lot of really cool stuff in there. There’s a lot of great characters and beats in there, but Lobo is part of that, and I love him.”

Lobo is a key piece to a story that Williamson has been wanting to tell for a while, labeling it the Bottled City of Lobos, and now that story is finally here. “I remember writing down my notebook, Bottled city of Lobo’s. This is part of why the story is the way it is. They were hand in hand. Because I was doing all this research on Brainiac and going through, and then I was just like, ‘You know, if he was collecting all these planets that have died… That’s part of it. He has this collection of planets that have died or have been destroyed. That’s the thing that’s crazy about all those bottles because you don’t even know what some of them are or how long he’s been collecting them for,” Williamson said. “And so I’m going through thinking about this and I’m like, ‘It’s funny. Lobo is the last son of his world too,’ And I was like, ‘Oh man, Brainiac got one of them. He got a city.’ And that’s when I was like, ‘Oh yeah, a bottled city of Lobo’s,’ and then I could see it. Bottled city of Lobo’s. I would go to creators, other creators, and I’d be like, ‘Let’s talk about… Let me pitch this thing,’ and it’d be like Bottled City of Lobo’s, and they’d be like, hh, how did nobody think of this?”

“So I started basically creating my own legend of Czarnia that even Lobo is aware of. He is aware of this legend, and then Lobo finds out the legend was real,” Williamson said. “It was a real thing, and that’s when he finds out about General Chacal and he likes to find out about this city that was stolen. And then what does that say to him?”

“And then Lobo finds out it’s real and then gets to meet this person he idolized, General Chacal. So it’s like there’s all this really fun Czarnia local mythology. One of my things about how some of these characters are, and this is really my approach to Superman, is that you can’t really change Superman. You can make some tweaks here and there and you can do some stuff differently but at the core of who the character is, there’s so much you can do with it. But the most fun thing I find with Superman is putting Superman in situations that he’s not normally in,” Williamson said. “That’s where it starts to get really interesting and you can see how he reacts to it.”

Action Comics #1064 hits comic stores on April 9th, and you can check out the full preview of the issue on the next slide.

Are you excited for House of Brainiac? Let us know in the comments and you can talk all things comics with me on Threads @mattaguilarcb!