Valiant Entertainment continued their high standard for storytelling when they recruited Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer to team up with rising star artist Raúl Allén for Secret Weapons.
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The comic focuses on Livewire recruiting and rescuing the psiots Toyo Harada deemed “useless” because of their powersets, as they are now being hunted by a robotic monster called Rex-O.
Despite the series wrapping up this week with issue #4, Heisserer isn’t finished telling the story of the Harada’s discarded psiots, and Valiant just announced Secret Weapons #0 by the writer and new artist Adam Pollina.
Heisserer opened up about the new issue, which will focus on the girl who talks to birds known as Nikki Finch, in a discussion with the Hollywood Reporter.
“The inspiration for this particular issue format came from the videos I’ve seen on YouTube that capture a few seconds a day for a year in the life of someone,” said Heisserer. “Probably the most emotionally powerful example is one of a little girl who, over the course of the year seen in snippets, winds up as a refugee from a war-torn country. In these videos, the character is always center-punch in the frame while their appearance and backgrounds change. Sometimes they’re in the same pose for several days.
“I don’t know if that idea ports well into comics, but I wanted to try it — as they say, if you’re gonna fail, fail creatively. What this format allowed me is the freedom to jump around all over the place in Nikki’s life and showcase it in new ways.”
Pollina’s art is drastically different from regular series artist Allén, but it adds a different layer in telling Nikki’s story before she met up with Livewire.
“My god, Adam’s work is astounding. Normally an artist for a book will have to go deep on environments and backgrounds for some key pages, maybe a dozen panels or so,” Heisserer said. “What makes issue #0 so ridiculously ambitious is that it requires every damn panel to be rich with environmental art. It’s how we understand where Nikki is and who’s with her. So that means Adam had to spend time crafting more than 80 panels of this monster. And he did it with grace and authority. I’m grateful for his patience and his attention to detail.”
The issue will touch on the psiot activation technique used by the Harbinger Foundation, something Heisserer is drawing on from his own script of for the Harbinger film.
“A lot of this has some relationship, tangential or otherwise, to my Harbinger film adaptation. I’m a process fetishist, I love exploring how something works and following the human experience through it, so getting under the hood of the Harbinger Foundation is what I hope we’ll see in the film,” Heisserer said. “But, beyond that, the relationship various groups have with one another is a huge part of how I want to tell the Harbinger Wars 2 story. That’s, uh, all I can say on that for now.”
Though he has ideas for origin stories for other members of the Secret Weapons, he also wants to focus on Livewire for an ongoing series — but he has to get done with Harbinger Wars 2 with co-write Matt Kindt first.
Secret Weapons #0 will be on sale January 3. The first four issues are now available.
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