Blade Writer Bryan Hill Takes the Vampire Hunter Into Uncharted Territory (Exclusive)

Marvel’s premier vampire hunter is back in an all-new mission, and facing a terrifying new threat. The superstar team of Bryan Hill (Killmonger) and Marvel’s Stormbreaker artist Elena Casagrande (Black Widow) are teaming up for a new Blade series that launches in July. Blade recently spent time as a member of the Avengers during Jason Aaron’s multi-year run, with the Daywalker also serving as the Sheriff of Vampire Nation. Fans have also gotten to meet Blade’s daughter, Brielle Brooks, and follow her origin story in the recently-concluded Bloodline: Daughter of Blade miniseries. But what exactly is in store for Blade’s new ongoing title?

ComicBook.com spoke to Blade writer Bryan Hill to find out more details on what he has cooking for the former Avenger and vampire hunter. Hill discussed Blade’s status quo when readers pick up the first issue on July 19th, how he’s focusing more on Blade and less on supporting characters like Bloodline (at least in his opening arc), making the book new-reader-friendly, the evil threat he’s introducing with collaborator Elena Casagrande, and much more. We can also reveal an exclusive page from Blade #1, as well as the solicitation and cover for Blade #3 in September.

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Blade’s Status Quo

ComicBook.com: Your new Blade series comes at an interesting time for the character. He just met and trained his daughter, and he was the sheriff of the Vampire Nation. Where do we pick up Blade when the series begins?

Bryan Hill: Well, I looked at Jason Aaron’s run with the Vampire Nation and it always felt like a period in Blade’s life, but ultimately not what would really satisfy him as a character. And so there’s a digital comic called Blade: First Bite, that’s a Marvel Unlimited exclusive Infinity Comic, which kind of goes into his disquietude and why that wasn’t working for him. And sort of chronicles a lot of the events of his life and kind of leads us up into the story we have, which is more of, I think what people would expect from Blade, more of that nomadic, dark hero thing that I think draws us all into the character.

As far as his daughter goes, she obviously exists in the Marvel universe. I’m not dealing with her very much in the first arc. One of the things that I think is really important for comics as a whole is for the layperson who has a brief understanding of the character and an interest in the character, maybe because they saw a movie or because they just saw this or saw that, to be able to walk into a comic book store and pick up something and have it be familiar to not have to catch up to everything from the beginning.

So with this first arc of Blade, I wanted to give people a down-the-line, fastball-over-the-plate kind of Blade experience so that we can all get on board with these things and then Bloodline and other details will come in as the story progresses. But I really wanted a number one to feel like a number one and not feel like, number one, A dash B, read this to understand what’s happening, C. I wanted it to just kind of hit a bullet. But I’m interested in all those things. And those things are all aspects of the character and certainly want to deal with them.

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New Readers

That actually leads to another question I was about to ask. How do you approach writing a first issue for an established character like Blade? There must be a lot to juggle between making it new-reader-friendly while also setting up your main plot. 

When it comes to Bloodline, I think that it’s important that Bloodline also not be a character that needs Blade in the story to exist. And I just thought it would be more rewarding for the bulk of the readership to be able to come in like this, which is how I would think about this stuff. Because comic book stories are malleable clay passed between writers and artists and everyone leaves their imprint on it and hopefully we’re just going to get the bubbles out more and more and more. So that’s kind of how I approached this one. That’s what was exciting about it for me. It was really because I also adapt comic books. I worked on Titans for five years. I adapt them into screenplays for features and all that.

It just struck me that I can’t really just set down five issues in front of someone and say, “Hey, here’s Blade.” We can do that with Batman, we can do that with Superman, Man of Steel, what have you. But I thought this was an opportunity to get people on board, while also honoring the stuff that’s come before. You’re always balancing continuity with all of it, so I just tell people who want to see those things dealt with, be patient, it’s coming, we’ll get there, we’ll get there. But I really wanted a book where he could stand in his own world for a few issues. 

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Blade’s Past

You’ve previously spoken about exploring Blade’s past. What is it about his unknown history that has you the most excited for fans to discover?

Well, it’s one of those situations where you have a character who’s been in Marvel comics for as long as I’ve been around, basically. And I felt like a character that would have these people from his past, people that we haven’t met yet. And so I kind of thought through some of that stuff and I’m bringing some characters in that we haven’t seen before that are tied to his past. And what I think are interesting ways, and this is going to be a weird analogy, but in some ways, I look at Blade the same way I look at Bond in the sense that Bond goes to Paris and meets with someone and they had some previous adventure you’d never heard of. You’re just sort of like, “Well, that makes sense because he’s Bond and he would know a person like this.” So there is a touch of Ian Fleming in this.

Not much, don’t freak out guys. It’s still a horror-action book. It’s still Blade. But this is a touch of, “This guy has been around, met a lot of people, made some strange bedfellows,” and that’s a really interesting aspect of the character, who he would come across and also the different strata that exists within the Marvel universe when it comes to the occult, when it comes to monsters, when it comes to mercenaries in that world. That’s the stuff that I also explore a little bit here and open up some doors to continue exploring things in the future.

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New Threat

Adana is a new threat you’re introducing in the book. From the first-look images that were recently released, the character looks pretty intimidating. What can you tell us about Adana’s effect on the supernatural corner of the Marvel Universe?

Well, one of my intentions with Blade is to create a seismic shift in the world of monsters and the occult within the Marvel universe as a whole. And so without giving too much away about the Adana, the Adana is something primordial. I wanted to bring in something Byzantine, something older than old really, that has come with a singular goal of ushering in the hidden evils and monsters and atrophy of the universe. Kind of embodying all of that and bringing that character into the Blade book has been really interesting. That she is a primordial force in a lot of ways and will have both a direct and indirect effect on the world.

And we’ll start to see how that evolves as the story goes on. But there are so many influences I have here from what’s been going on in the Blade books as of late, the Wolfman stuff, the films obviously are kind of burned into my subconscious, but I also wanted to bring in some primordial, almost Lovecraftian kind of Clive Barker ideas here. Because Blade ultimately is a character who is both monster and man. And so that character represents the conflict between monster and man. And it seemed wise to have a villain that is peak monstrosity in that way with a singular goal of returning the world to the monsters, basically. And that seemed like a great way to kick this off.

Did you get to have any input on her design or was that something that Elena Casagrande, your collaborator, came up with?

Well, I trust my illustrators a lot, and especially since Elena is so talented, I didn’t want to give her too many things. What I tend to do is give people maybe a couple of physical things. I see aesthetic things, but a lot of the emotional information, see how they interpret it. So for the Adana, that was, again, I was thinking of horror, this kind of classic sort of gothic horror with a nod towards the Byzantine in a way. One of the things that’s always fascinated me from an aesthetic perspective were the Cenobites from Hellraiser, the hell priest, something that looks like it’s suffering but doesn’t seem to suffer or it has such a unique relationship with pain, that pain and pleasure, even in its aesthetic design are the same thing. That kind of sadomasochistic leather-bound, pins in your skull, but you’re not screaming. And that to me was always terrifying because the mind breaks in the face of that. So I wanted that kind of aesthetic strength from the Adana upon her revelation. And I think Elena did a very good job reading that emotionally and illustrating that in a cool way.

ComicBook.com Exclusive

Collaboration With Elena Casagrande

How has the collaboration process with Elena been going? Because I know I was a big fan of her Black Widow series when it came out, and her art just had me coming back, issue after issue, just to check it out.

Right. Well, I didn’t choose the artist. I never do because I just can’t keep up with all the brilliant illustrators that are out there. So I defer to Marvel to be able to give me a list of people. And when I saw her work, it immediately spoke to me because I think that Blade needs to be a unique aesthetic experience. I think it needs to have an enduring graphical quality. It’s a book that should be loud and stylish. I think that’s really important. And you can’t separate the aesthetics from the storytelling, especially in comics, but especially this comic. The aesthetics are the storytelling. And what I love about Elena’s work is every panel could be its own T-shirt, right? Every panel feels like some kind of cool display you would want to put on your wall.

And to me, that’s exactly what I needed from this because this is a brutal book. This is likely the most violent thing I’ve written in comics. Certainly, the most violent thing I’ve written in Big 2 comics. And in order for that to be an enjoyable experience, I think it has to be filtered through the prism of style. Otherwise, you’re just brutalizing an audience with horror. But we still want this to be cool and to look cool and to feel cool and to be a fun tour through this monstrous violence rather than something that’s just kind of ugly. Elena’s so charismatic in her line work and her compositional work that she can make the most horrifying images also strangely beautiful, which is a visual representation of the dichotomy that exists within the story itself. Again, going back to this idea of monstrosity and humanity living inside the same thing against something that is not turned towards evil, but that may just be sentient evil itself. And so all those things are adding up to create the experience.

Looking to the Future

Going forward, as Blade the series continues, what can fans look forward to as far as the action, the characters, as it progresses?

I think for me the essential Blade experience is a combination of the kinetic ballistic action that we can immediately relate to, but also supernatural sequences of very unique horror and action and how those two things kind of interrelate. To me, that’s what makes the character really interesting is through the combination of forces so they can expect big action sequences. I mean this is a book of big action sequences because it’s a comic book. So I can be James Cameron. So you give me the James Cameron budget, I’m going to use a James Cameron budget.

So they can expect globetrotting. That was important to me, to carry the character around the world to give this the sense of the epic. You’re going to get big action set pieces for sure. You’re going to be meeting these idiosyncratic, interesting, sometimes terrifying, sometimes charming, sometimes both, characters. And ultimately this book is going to be an exploration of the identity of evil in a philosophical sense and interrogating the potential necessity of evil.

One of the things that I think about often is how brief civilization is in terms of the time of the world. And we think that the world we live in now has some kind of permanence to it. That it’s like civilization emeritus, but it’s not true.

You can make a pretty easy argument that the nature of humanity is brutality and that civilization is just a thumb against the hole in the dam. And the waters of brutality are always there in terms of time immemorial. We are not that far from ancient Rome. We’re not that far from the coliseums, we’re not that far from that stuff. This stuff still lives within us as a culture. Might even be within our DNA. So as much as this is a book about Blade fighting the monsters that are outside and apparent, this is also a story about the monsters that live inside of us all and a villain that’s come to awaken that aspect of us that sees civilization as the great lie and wants to return things to a primordial landscape where evil can once again has its place. The age of sun happened, but sun always falls into night.

And now the Adana believes that this is the age of night and they’re the herald of it. And so that’s sort of the thing that we’re in. So you can expect her villainy. You can also expect the villain that she creates to be an issue. The Adana isn’t something that gets vanquished in five issues. This is an entity, this is something that is there now on the scene as it were, and will have rippling effects I think, throughout the universe. And then you could expect some of my other favorite Marvel characters to show up here and there. I’m not going to give anything away, but Blade’s worked with some people before and it might be interesting to see him work with them again. And I have a certain pension for occult doctors, so we’ll have to see how that works its way in there if it does. But yeah, stuff like that.

Blade #3 Cover

BLADE #3

• BRYAN HILL (W) • ELENA CASAGRANDE (A/C)
• BLADE POSSESSED?!
• In exchange for a weapon that can destroy the Adana, Blade must get his arms-dealing ex-girlfriend out of a bloody situation with some literal headhunters. But no good deed goes unpunished when he finds himself under the control of her captor!
• Meanwhile, the pulse of the Adana’s power ripples across the Marvel Universe  –  drawing a familiar friend of Blade’s into the fray.
• On Sale 9/27