Eric Heisserer Unleashes Valiant’s Secret Weapons

At Valiant Summit 2017 in Los Angeles, Valiant Entertainment laid out their plans for the next year worth of Valiant universe comics.

Eric Heisserer, the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of Arrival, has been hard at work bringing Valiant’s biggest superheroes to the big screen. It was that work that led him to fall in love with the Psiot character Livewire, and it was that love that brought him to the Valiant Comics universe.

Heisserer is now set to unveil Valiant’s Secret Weapons, a four-issue miniseries featuring art by Raul Allen. The series stars Livewire and a group of castaway Psiots discarded by Toyo Harada.

ComicBook.com spoke to Heisserer at Valiant Summit 2017 about the new series, it’s classic Valiant villain, and what his Valiant future. And don’t miss out on a sneak preview of Secret Weapons #1 included in the gallery below.

When you started working with Valiant on their upcoming movies, did you have any idea at the time that it might lead you towards writing comics?

Eric Heisserer: It definitely emerged naturally from the work I was doing. My first thought when I got officially hired for it was just, “Man, I hope I don’t screw this up.”

What can you say about the character who make up the Secret Weapons?

EH: I can say that they’re a group of misfits who have been through an emotional rollercoaster. I mean at some point in time they were brought in by Harada or Harada’s team and got the hard pitch of, “We know you’re special. We know there’s something inside you and we’re going to awaken it and if you’ve been thinking you’ve been different from other people this whole time, now you get to embrace that and then you can join me on my god-like team, the Eggbreakers, and go and help save the world.”

After that rigorous surgical procedure, then Harada comes back in and says, “Actually, your power is kind of embarrassing to me. I don’t like. I put too much money into you to kill you off, so I’m just going to banish you to some place in Oklahoma City.”

That’s got to be just completely, emotionally devastating to these poor kids, so it’s about how does Amanda, how does Livewire come in and help salvage that team, the surrogate family and how can she undo some of the damage that Harada had done.

Did you have a bad experience in Oklahoma City that made you think, “If I was going to banish someone somewhere, this would be it?”

EH: Well I grew up a half hour south of Oklahoma City, so part of why I put it there was that I don’t see, really, comics set there and I knew it fairly well. Then, yeah, I thought, “What’s the worst place you could be put?”

You became attached to Livewire while working on Valiant’s movies. What is it about her that attracts you to the character?

EH: It’s two things. The first really is just power based. I feel like she has one of the most interesting and potentially under-utilized abilities in the universe and I kept coming up with more and more weird interpretations of her power.

The second is she has so much empathy and she has an admirable moral compass. I really look up to her and realize that I need a role model like her in my life and would love to see more of her in books, in comics and just have more of a presence, more of a presentation because she’s someone who had been brought in under the wing of this very dynamic, charismatic man and given a set of principles, a set of disciplines of like, “This is how you behave, this is what you should do with the world.” She adhered to them, she was a very loyal lieutenant.

In so many iterations of the storyline where the master goes dark that I have seen, the disciple then goes dark with them or becomes a complete wreck and questions reality because suddenly everything just feels untethered. She never lost her moral center. She still knows right from wrong and she still has so much empathy and compassion for people that she’s now trying to be the leader that Harada failed to be.

Where do you think Livewire and the Secret Warriors fit in on the spectrum of other Psiot factions that exist in the Valiant universe, like the Renegades or Generation Zero or what’s left of the Harada Foundation?

EH: You know, I think they’re all different flavors of the same thing. These are all kids or teens that at some point in time fractured from the larger Psiot group or they found themselves never quite fitting in with somebody. I think the reason why that’s such a recurring theme in the Valiant universe is the way that people come into their powers and the way that people are approached. There’s not a one-size-fits-all to this. Quite often people in power try to make it work like that. I would say the difference here with Secret Weapons is it’s a little bit more urban fable-ish in my approach and hopefully, that executes right. I think Raul does a better job of it than I do sometimes.

I think Raul Allen has a style of art that is employed often by big comic book publishers for a very particular kind of story. How doe sthat influence the style and the tone of Secret Weapons?

EH: I think he has a visual flair. He just embraces the weirdness to the title and to the characters. I feel like any artist who could do justice to a Neil Gaiman story is good for me on the Secret Weapons, and that’s definitely Raul.

Valiant prides itself on all of its series being approachable by new readers. How would you describe or pitch this story to someone who has no previous knowledge of who Livewire is or even what a Psiot is?

EH: I would say the idea is still pretty elegant and clean and a good inroad for new readers because you have a group of kids that are basically an Island of Misfit Toys. You have a woman who’s coming in to try and put all these broken pieces together and make a whole out of them. Then you have a fairly scary iconic Terminator-like villain that is bent on killing them off.

What more can you tell me about that villain?

EH: It’s Rexo. There is a slight nod to the last time he was seen because he hasn’t been seen in the new iteration of Valiant. I can tell you that he had an interesting backstory and that you don’t need to know any of that going in now, you just need to know that he’s been appropriated by someone in this new iteration and that he is part of a program to compete with somebody else’s fairly popular program. I wish I could reveal more right now. I feel like I’m being intentionally vague.

How has your experience writing for the Valiant Comics universe compare to your experience writing for Valiant’s movies?

EH: I’d say it’s simultaneously more freeing and more terrifying because I have a lot of latitude to explore with these new characters and I have a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that the I get the existing characters right and that they are in the voice of the same type of writing that they’ve been characterized in beforehand.

I feel like when I do an adaptation, in the film we have a little more elbow-room because you’re going to be casting with a live person and how they interpret that character is a little bit different. You can expand it a little bit. When you’re in the same medium then you’ve got to make sure that you’re not veering too far from what the readers already know them as.

Secret Weapons is billed as a limited series, but we’ve seen series like Faith become ongoing series, and we’ve seen Divinity and Britannia get sequels. Do you have hopes to continue the Secret Weapons story past this first series?

EH: I would write a hundred issues if they’d let me, so yes.

Any last teases or hints you want to leave fans with?

EH: Oh man, just trying to think what I might be able to get in trouble for and what I might be able to say…

Go with the trouble.

EH: I have some pretty big plans for Livewire that might have to extend past Secret Weapons if they let me…

Secret Weapons #1 goes on sales June 28. Check out a preview below.

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