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The series, which has already got Hollywood’s eye in spite of almost nobody having read it yet, features a robot created to be a child’s companion, who wakes up one day to discover the world around him has changed radically. While Tim-21 is trying to make sense of what’s happened to his world, the authorities are looking for him, hoping that he might unlock secrets beyond his imagining.
Coming off big event books at DC and Valiant this year, Lemire says he wanted to focus a bit more on creator-owned comics, and Descender was the result.
You can pick Descender up today from your local comic shop or digitally on comiXology.
Lemire joined ComicBook.com to talk about the series, his long-term plans and why it seems unlikely he’ll be particularly involved in the film adaptation.
It just kind of happened.
Working in film and TV is something that doesn’t interest me at all and still doesn’t. What I love is to make comics and that’s all I plan on doing or wanting to do.
Having said that, there was considerable interest with Descender from the moment we announced it. People were instantly interested and Dustin and I discussed it and decided that as long as it wasn’t anything that would interfere with or affect the comic in any way, we would pursue it since we’d be foolish not to.
It’s great. It generates more interest in the comic too but at the end of the day all we care about is making a great comic book and if any of the other stuff happens that’s great.
What’s the elevator pitch for this series?
Descender is a science fiction comic written by me and drawn by Dustin Nguyen; it involves Tim-21, who’s a young boy robot in the far future and it takes place in a universe where all robots have been outlawed and are hunted and destroyed.
This boy, Tim-21, becomes the most important robot in the universe and he’s hunted from planet to planet across the universe.
Descender kind of centers around a central mystery that has to do with Tim’s origins and a certain event that happens in the past with robots. I don’t want to give too much of the first issue away.
I put a lot of work into the book before I ever wrote the first script, doing a lot of worldbuilding and plotting out the whole mythology and mystery of it and making sure that I knew where it was headed. A lot of times people are introducing mysteries before they have any idea of where it’s headed and scrambling later to try and make it all fit; I wanted to make sure that wasn’t a problem I had with this book.
Any information I give in the frist issue is vital for you to understand what’s happening, but there’s a lot more information and more revelations to come.
Besides Tim-21, who are the main characters in the story?
It’s a pretty big ensemble cast. It’s definitely Tim’s story at the end of the day, but we have Dr. Jin Quon, who is a scientist at the vanguard of robotics right before the disaster hits, and then we kind of pick up with him ten years later and he’s fallen on hard times and his life is in shambles. He’s a secondary character and a I think for some readers he will probably serve as a point-of-view character.
We have Captain Telsa, who has been tasked in finding Tim and leading Quon to find Tim. There’s one more really important character, but he won’t come in until a bit later in the series.
Yeah, I’ve always just felt super comfortable writing young characters, whether it be children or teenagers. It’s just something I”ve been good at from the start and something I enjoy. I love a child’s point-of-view, especaily in this world, where you have a sprawling universe that can be a lot for the reader to take in, and then you have this child’s point of view, where everything is mysterious and everything is brand new.
Especially in science fiction. I think my favorite science fiction is stuff that has a mystery and wonder and awe to it, and the unknown, and when you’re looking through a child’s eyes it’s easy to do.
You also have, considering what a kind of dark and high-stakes world it is, a bit of humor in the first issue.
I think humor is very important. This is a book with a lot of really serious sort of dangerous and troubling things going on and it’s important to have that weight to it — but nothing is devoid of humor, so I think you need to have those moments of levity to keep the reader engaged and to keep a bit of balance.
We’ll see a bit more. With the other robots Tim comes across, the bond that he strikes with other robots and the way they interact with one another will be sometimes funy and sometimes heartwarming. I think it’s important to have a balance of things going on and not just be one tone all the time, or it makes it really hard for people to stick with you.
Do you know how long the story will be, or at least what your structure is?
I have the story and the plot pretty tightly planned out at this point. I know exactly where all the major beats are and where the ending is.
If anything, it will get a bit longer than that, but I definitely know the endpoint where everything is headed.
Is it nice to be at a place right now, career-wise, where you can make that kind of plan? Obviously creator-owned comics is full of people who’d love to be able to know they can afford a thirty-issue run.
It’s an incredibly nice place to be. With Sweet Tooth, my expectations for that were basically non-existent. I was just so thankful to have an opportunity to do anything like that. I thought we’d be lucky to get to ten issues.
When you’re going into something with that mindset, I was immediately trying to find ways to end the story after nine or ten issues and have it be somewhat satisfying. IT means you’re kind of going into it always trying to find solutions.
With Descender it’s kind of the opposite. It gives us so much more freedom creatively to go places and try new things.
Dustin’s art. Dustin’s a guy whose work I admired for a long time and he and I were both at DC for a long time, became friendly.
I jumped at a chance to do a creator-owned book with him. He was at DC for thirteen or fourteen years, and I felt like if he had a chance to cut loose and do his own thing, he’d do something really special.
With Descender, he’s really taken another step with his work, he’s paining the whole book, and just the worldbuilding he’s doing is mind-blowing.
