Monkeybrain's Chris Roberson on Edison Rex, Platypus Rex and All The Rest

This week's issue of Edison Rex, the supervillain-gone-straight saga from former Superman writer Chris Roberson and artist Dennis Culver, brings the title's first full arc to a close in a rather unexpected fashion(for the characters, anyway--readers may have expected a bit of it, but I digress): by bringing the Edison Rexes of many worlds together to converge on "our" Edison and demand he join their crusade to make the multiverse a safer place. Confused yet? Just imagine how much more fun that story would be if one of the Edisons was a platypus and the book featured a villain called Don Cthulu who turned people into windmills. Wait, what? Chris Roberson joined us to talk about the issue and where the series goes from here. If you haven't read it yet, what are you waiting for? Grab one and read along with our commentary. I just want to say that I would read--hell, write--an ongoing series based on that Cthulu Don Quixote. That's Don Cthulhu. And he's turning our heroes into WINDMILLS. The character and the scenario is all Dennis, and I think it's GENIUS.

Is it just the color scheme, or was Edison Rex's space suit intended to look a little like it belongs to Buzz Lightyear? Ha! I hadn't noticed that. Now that you mention it, Buzz Lightyear DOES wear supervillain colors, doesn't he? Hmmm… So is it safe to assume that Edison Rex is key to what's going on in the Multiverse simply virtue of the fact that he somehow tapped into the truth of the matter in his fantastical story to Valiant? I hate to answer a perfectly fair question with "Keep reading," but… Keep reading. (Yes, Edison is very much at the center of what's going on across the Multiverse, as we'll eventually discover. To say too much more than that would spoil the fun!) Is the Edison with the goatee from Community's Darkest Timeline? He probably is, at that! I'm a very late convert to Community, having only gotten on board this last summer, but Dennis is a HUGE fan of the show. Have you seen his Dean print, "DEANfinity"? Can we expect to see Tesla Files on the remaining Edisons over time? We get the principal players here, but not Steampunk Edison or the goatee guy and such.

We haven't seen the last of the "variant Rexes," and yeah, we'll probably get some more Tesla Files at some point. I would happily do a whole spin off series of Platypus Rex and Vowliant, if science could perfect cloning and make it possible to have an entire team of Dennis Culvers working on the book at once. Heck, we could get a Dennis clone for each of the variants, and do a series on each of them! You know, I can't help but wonder: If Edison is going to get litigious, will that put him in a good place to also get on the media about referring ot him as a "villain"? Could be. But that would mean that I'd have to write courtroom scenes, and I'm not in any hurry to write a courtroom scene. Is this technically the last chapter of the first story? How many issues will the trade paperback that's coming up collect? Yeah, the first trade will collect the first six issues. And in a lot of ways, these first six represent one complete story. The next issue will be a flashback of sorts, to Edison's earlier days, and we'll get to see some of the backstory that's been hinted at in the REXfiles. And then with issue 8, things start getting crazy.

That's exactly right. Monkeybrain Comics only licenses the digital rights to our titles, and the creators retain all others, including print. So the creators are free to partner with any publisher that they want for print collections. I've had a great working experience with the fine folks at IDW for a few years now, and Dennis and I both thought that they would be a great home for the Edison Rex trade. I thought Platypus Rex was a duck on the cover...the white Edison hair really threw me. It never occurred to me until now that the white hair wasn't age-related. It is and it isn't. Dennis has done a sneaky thing with the art, that I'm not sure any readers have picked up on. Go back and look at the various flashbacks to Edison Rex's previous adventures, and you can put them in context with one another by how much white is in Edison's hair. At the earliest points, his hair is entirely black, and it gradually goes white over time. Is there a reason why the Edison Rex Society have two-colored logos instead of just a solid color on their inverted triangle? A fashion statement, maybe?