Christopher Priest Explores Black Adam’s Second Chance at Legacy in New DC Limited Series

Black Adam has seen his role in the DC Universe increase over the past few years, with the character joining the Justice League in the comics and heading for the big screen courtesy of The Rock. DC will deliver another version of the storied villain though in a new Black Adam limited series by writer Christopher Priest, artist Rafa Sandoval, and colorist Matt Herms, which seeks to bring the character back to the original concept while also bringing modern themes and new characters to shake up his world in a profound way. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak to Priest all about the first issue, including what compelled Priest to take on the character in the first place, his approach to Black Adam and superhero battles, and his hope that fans will give the book and Malik a chance before they make any assumptions.

It turns out Priest wasn’t initially on board for launching Black Adam into his own series, being a bit reluctant at first. It was Paul Kaminski who helped get him on board, and Priest was surprised that DC was game for what he wanted to do with the character. “I did not want to take on the character for his own series. I got talked into it. I did. I got talked into it by my editor, Paul Kaminski. I had some initial reluctance because I have not been following… I don’t follow anything. I don’t even read my own books, “Priest said. “I was aware, vaguely, that he was in the Justice League, and that there were some crises, or another, or whatever was going on. But I’ve always felt that the C.C. Beck characters… This is the gateway drug for children, and these characters really belong in that universe. They belong in a happy place, and they should be in books that are literally just customized for children.”

“I really wasn’t a fan of these characters running around in the DC Universe. So when Paul called me about the book, we had some initial discussions about it, and I did the stupid thing I always do, is I try to talk myself out of it. It’s like that scene in Casino. You’ve got Robert De Niro, is at this lounge by the pool, and the mob boss comes over and tries to convince him to come in and run the casino. De Niro tries to talk him out of it, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know.’ And then finally he says, ‘Well, if I do it’s got to be my way. I mean it. No interference. I got to do it my way.’ And I just started saying, ‘Well, if I was going to write this character, here’s what I would do with it.’ And I just assumed that he’d hang up on me, and just never darken my door again, and that would be it; I’d get back to the vampires,” Priest said.

“So I was really surprised, not only that Paul loved it, but I’m actually shocked that this book is coming out, because what we’re up to is quite different, and a little subversive,” Priest said. “It really kind of attacks the character in a lot of ways, and challenges the character in ways that he hasn’t been challenged before. And I got to tell you, Matthew, I’m really surprised that DC’s letting me do it.”

One of the things readers will notice early on is the focus on the man behind the power, and he’s not that great to be around to be honest. It’s not that there aren’t redeeming aspects mind you, but Priest wanted to highlight how someone with immortality would really interact with the world and simultaneously reach back to the character’s origins.

“Well as I see it, immortality is this overcoat that you’re wearing, like this heavy coat that you’re wearing, and it becomes burdensome,” Priest said. “And if you don’t take it off every now and then, you’ll go crazy. I am much more interested in writing Theo Teth-Adam, the human man, who continues to walk with a limp because he was injured trying to free the slave boy Aman. We’ll see that when we get to the origin story in Issue Two. So he walks with a limp, which was kind of the original idea of Billy Batson, that Billy Batson had a crutch, and Theo has a cane, and he is in some ways vulnerable, but in touch with his humanity. But I think that Theo Teth-Adam, even powered down, is every bit a threat as the powered-up genie Black Adam. So this is what really interests me, is the human being that is wrapped inside of the sorcery.”

For as powerful as he is, he still needs to interact with the world, so much so that he even takes public transportation despite the fact that he can fly, and little sequences like this throughout the issue tell us a lot about him.

“It’s like I have him walking toward the limo, but then you realize it’s not his limo. I don’t know who that guy’s waiting for. He’s waiting for Mitch McConnell. I don’t know who he’s waiting for. But we will see that throughout the series, he takes public transportation. Now, why would Black Adam take public transportation? Because he needs the human contact. He’s starved for the human contact, and that’s just his way of taking off the overcoat from time to time. He can fly, but he takes the subway,” Priest said.

That leads us to a brand new character named Malik, and within seconds he is one of the most charming and intriguing elements in the issue. Malik is a doctor who we meet as he’s working on a patient that happens to be a white supremacist, and he petty much won me over instantly when he started telling the patient all about the social relevance of Wu-Tang as he helped him. Priest and DC haven’t talked much about Malik on purpose, as Priest didn’t want people to judge the story or the character before they could actually have some context.

“Well, we’ve kind of kept him off of the table, doing much of the marketing, and we didn’t put him on the covers and stuff like that. Simply out of concern that, these days, people jump to conclusions and if they saw like this young Black kid, that’s following Black Adam around, that all of a sudden it’d be like the thumbs go on the phones, and here comes all this negative stuff, where they haven’t read a page of the book and I’m like, ‘I just want to get the book in the store before you attack me. Okay? Please let it get in the store.’ And then I was hoping that people like you in the press and in the fan community, would discover him on your own and hopefully have a positive reaction, and get the energy going with us instead of against us. So I specifically did not want DC to put Malik out there and asked them not to do that, and thankfully they cooperated with me,” Priest said.

“But Malik represents… He represents Black Adam’s second chance, Black Adam’s origin, for those of you who don’t know is that the wizard Shazam chose this slave boy named Aman to receive the Shazam power and to be his champion. And Teth-Adam is Aman’s uncle, and Teth-Adam helped Aman escape slavery. And so Shazam was like, ‘Well, okay, well…’ and Aman decided he wanted to share the power with his uncle. ‘Why don’t we both have the power, and we’ll be like Batman and Robin,’ and Teth-Adam’s like, ‘Okay, cool.’ So Shazam says, ‘Speak my name, and you both shall receive the power’, And at the moment that he spoke the Shazam word, Teth-Adam reached around and snapped the boy’s neck, and killed him, because he wanted to power for himself,” Priest said.

“And so that’s the original sin that Black Adam is running from,” Priest said. “So Malik, spoiler alert, will be revealed to be Black Adam’s descendant, one of many. I’m sure he has thousands of descendants, but he’s descended from Black Adam in some way. And Malik comes to represent that second chance. The power of Black Adam was always meant to be shared between Black Adam and Aman, and Malik represents that second chance at legacy.”

Now, the issue does kick off with a blockbuster-style battle between Black Adam and Darkseid, a battle that has a major implication on the rest of the series, and we mean that literally, as it doesn’t end here.

When asked what he could tease about that battle, Priest said “That the fight goes on for three issues. That we’re not done fighting. We’re not done yet. We have more fun, you know? Basically, we have a couple of plots going, because it’s Christopher Priest, and it wouldn’t be Christopher Priest if it wasn’t the story told backwards, and upside down, and hard to figure out. You’ve got to piece it together. You’ve got to get out a pair of scissors, and cut the pages out, and then put them back together again, like the three Godfather movies and combine them. So we’re seeing flashbacks of this battle in outer space. We don’t know what it means. We don’t know how it started. We don’t know how it ends.”

“So in Issue Number 2, we will see how that fight started. Issue Number 3, we’ll see how that fight ends, what it means, and how it launches into basically our adversaries for the first year of this book. Where we are building our own Pantheon, I should say, mainly because the Egyptian Pantheon has been sort of… The continuity of the Egyptian Pantheon is so complex, that in order for me to dive into, it’s just going to be too much work,” Priest said. “We’ve killed Osiris. We’ve killed off his love interest. There’s so much going on with that, that I said, ‘Look, let me go over here, let me go like a country or two to the East, and pick on those gods and create something new there.’ So we’ve got a whole deal going on here, and it’s tied directly into the action sequence that we launched the book with.”

Jumping into new territory character and mythology-wise also gave Sandoval a large canvas to work from, and while Priest wasn’t initially familiar with his work, he couldn’t have been more thrilled with the final results.

“I had no idea who Rafa was. This is all a Paul Kaminski production, and so to be honest with you and your readers, I was very nervous, because I was unfamiliar with Rafa. And then I saw like some Flash pages and I was like, okay, this is a guy who draws the Flash, draws Justice League. All right, but what can he handle? I had no worries at all that he could handle all the red meat stuff. You know? The big action sequences, and Black Adam going toe-to-toe with bad guys, and all that other stuff. I had a lot of trepidation about if he could handle the stuff with Malik,” Priest said.

“So I was kind of nervous about it until the pages started arriving,” Priest said. “And I’ll be damned, this guy Rafa, he totally, totally nailed it. He totally got him. He totally got Malik’s girlfriend, who is a young Muslim woman, and he totally got all the little comedic bits and so forth. And now Issue 2 is coming in and Issue 2 opens up in like a rough neighborhood in Egypt, in metropolitan Egypt, and there’s all this like Egyptian graffiti. It’s a very specific type of graffiti, and I sent them a bunch of reference on it, and I just cross my fingers with like, ‘Oh please, I hope he gets it. I hope he gets it.’ So he sends in this page and I’m like, ‘Whoa, he can draw Egyptian graffiti. He can draw Egyptian graffiti! This guy is amazing.’ And I’ve got to give a shout-out to Matt Herms, our colorist, because he takes it to a whole other level,” Priest said.

“And I’m really not trying to just be hyperbolic about it. I did not know Rafa. I did not know Matt. Matt’s pages came in, and my jaw just dropped. And I was like, ‘Look at these guys go.’ So hats off to Paul Kaminski. He is my Quincy Jones. He is really producing an amazing comic book, and it’s as much because of him, and his investment, and his fighting for us as anything that I do,” Priest said.

We do get a quick appearance from another big name DC hero, but don’t expect a lot of other heroes to jump into the mix. That said, there is one appearance and conversation that Priest is excited for fans to see.

“Well, not initially, because they’re all dead. Thank you, DC. Dead, dead, So not initially. Right now, what I’d like to do is I would like to find an audience for this character. You know? A lot of times with Black Adam, particularly with Black Adam, and again, I don’t mean to criticize other writers, because these guys get paid way more than I do, and these very talented guys. I really mean no harm in saying this, but they keep wheeling in all these other characters. And now here’s Hawkman, and Atom Smasher, and here’s whoever, and you got this superhero wallpaper. Batman is like, ‘I’m going to get you, Black Adam. I’m going to assemble a team and we’re coming after you.’ And I think that really does… Having written team books, the more people that you have running around, the less focus you have on the main character,” Priest said.

“I really want to evolve this character. Although we are, spoiler alert, we are wheeling in Batman. We see Bruce in Issue 5 for reasons I won’t go into, but they pay each other a visit. Bruce meets with Theo, and that’s a really interesting, fun scene. Bruce basically says to Black Adam… Black Adam makes some veiled threat, some stupid threat or whatever, and Batman basically says something to the effect of, ‘When I come for you, you’ll know it’s me coming for you.’ I think he comes and he accuses Bruce of doing something by subterfuge,” Priest said.

“Because Bruce has been funding the freedom movement in Khandaq, and feels like, ‘Well, if you have something to say to me, you should say it to my face.’ And Bruce is like, ‘Trust me, when I come for you, you’ll know it.’ So Issue 6, Batman comes for him, and don’t miss that one. That’s going to be, and again, no offense to the other writers. If Batman wanted to take on Black Adam, he wouldn’t assemble a team. He’s Batman, you kidding? What team? What? Batman doesn’t need no stinking team. If Batman was going to come after Black Adam, this is how he would do it. Read Issue 6.”

You can read Black Adam #1 when it hits comic stores on June 21st.

Are you excited for the Black Adam series? Let us know in the comments or as always you can talk all things comics and DC with me on Twitter @MattAguilarCB!