Robert Venditti's Book of Death Pits Eternal Warrior Against the Valiant Universe In July

Beginning in July, the Eternal Warrior will square off against the rest of the Valiant Universe in writer Robert Venditti's The Book of Death, which sees the world's superheroes and -villains convinced that the new Geomancer -- carried here from the future at the end of The Valiant -- is at fault for a number of catastrophes happening around the world.

The project has been shrouded in secrecy since it was announced in April, with a release yesterday providing some of the very first concrete information:

The Valiant heroes. X-O Manowar. Bloodshot. Ninjak. The Harbinger Renegades. Unity. This is how they lived. This is how they died.

Now we know. The Book of the Geomancer has recorded it all. But only a young girl – the last in a line of the enigmatic mystics who protect the Earth known as Geomancers – has seen this future come to pass, from the coming cataclysm to the dawn of the 41st century. Alone with her sworn protector, the Eternal Warrior – a soldier battle-forged across five thousand years of combat – the duo must defy their allies to stop the Dark Age that now threatens to eclipse our world.

Together, they are the number one target of every hero and villain on Earth. Either the Eternal Warrior hands her over…or they take him down. But can even he single-handedly protect one child when the entire Valiant Universe wages war against him?

Venditti joined ComicBook.com to discuss the project -- the latest in a series of ever-more-ambitious Valiant projects from the writer.

Below the interview, check out our exclusive gallery of art and design sketches from the miniseries.

The synopsis for the project promises a series of natural disasters and the like. Are they in any way connected to the death of the Geomancer at the end of The Valiant?

Well, I think what we found out in The Valiant was that every time The Immortal Enemy kills a Geomancer, the world descends into a dark age. And The Valiant did end with the death of a Geomancer, Kay McHenry, killed by The Immortal Enemy.

So I think the impression that our heroes might take away from that, given the circumstances, is that they're entering into some sort of dark age. But Gilad and the new Geomancer that he has sworn to protect -- the young girl named Tama -- they know that this is something much, much different. So that's kind of what puts The Eternal Warrior and the rest of the Valiant Universe at odds.

They have very different impressions of what's taking place, and Gilad is looking at it from the very long view. 10,000 years of history and having seen plenty of dark ages, he knows what they're supposed to look like. The rest of the Valiant Universe, living normal mortal lives, they have no reference for what's taking place and so they're just sort of labeling it as this thing that they've drawn the conclusion that it is, when it's actually something quite different.

I think one of the most interesting elements of it to me is that when the teasers started to come out, it was easy to be cynical about the whole "death of..." angle. But clearly it's more interesting than it first seemed. How much of the story will deal with the idea that knowing the future inherently alters the condition that brought that future to pass?

No, I mean, for Gilad and Tama, reading from the Book of Geomancers, they know what the future is going to be and that's why Tama has been sent back from the future, to try and keep this terrible, terrible future from happening. That's very much their mission statement.

Now the "death of..." tie-in issues that you were talking about before, they show the deaths of these characters as recorded in the Book of the Geomancer. Whatever Gilad and Tama's resolution ends up being, that doesn't mean that those deaths are going to change.

I think that some things about the future may change, others may not. That's up for us to discover as readers, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that some of the things we see that are recorded in the Book of the Geomancer are absolutely going to come to pass.

Obviously, X-O is the flagship character and his crossover stories have been getting bigger and bigger. But now you're directing big picture stuff for almost every character in the universe. Does that change your perspective or your responsibilities at all?

Yeah. I mean, this is a much different animal than something like Armor Hunters. Armor Hunters was a four-issue event series that had four different series tying into it over the course of the months. So it was a much bigger, interlocked sort of storyline.

This is far different. We've got the main series and we've got the four sort of "Death of..." tie-in stories that are set at a point in time that's beyond what the main Book of Death series is set in, so they don't really relate to themselves in the same way as Armor Hunters, where everything is moving in the same space.

And then there's also Fred's series, Tales of the Geomancer, which takes place all in prehistory and tells the story of the first Geomancer. So it's a corollary, but it's a stretch to say that it ties into the main narrative.

So all the storylines that are sort of a part of what's going on, they're all very independent from Book of Death. So while I do know and I have read the scripts for all of the issues -- and I'll say the Harbinger one is probably the best script I've read in the entire relaunch of Valiant. It was such an impossible task, it seemed to me, what Joshua Dysart was trying to do with such a large cast of characters, and the way he was able to handle it, I'm just in awe of what he was able to accomplish. I'm really looking forward to seeing the finished product of that.

We've all talked in the room. They all know what the main series is and we all know what's going on in our Death of issues but we don't need to rely on that or need to know exactly what we're all doing. We all just want to make sure we're not contradicting each other, as opposed to being confined by each other, if that makes sense.

The Eternal Warrior will have to square off with Unity during this series. Does that indicate that the hero community will go after the Geomancer?

Yes, very much so. There's a bit of a question for them -- is she the cause of it, either voluntarily or involuntarily? And if she isn't the cause of it, is there a way that she can prevent what's going on?

Either one of those questions, the answer is, we need to have our hands on that Geomancer. But Gilad knows from his perspective that she isn't the cause of it and that she also can't really do anything to prevent it. he just has to keep her safe until he can find the answer and has to do it himself.

He's someone who knows what the Geomancer is, is very familiar with that and has been a part of that for thousands of years, as opposed to a group of heroes who are great people in their own right, but this is beyond their experience and beyond their understanding as mortals.

Obviously you're going to be looking more at what makes the Eternal Warrior tick. To me, he's one of the most interesting characters in the Valiant Universe, because of the slow, rolling rock down the hill that his character has been. What do you think is the thing that makes every character say, "You know what? I have a great Gilad story in me."

His first appearance in the new Valiant Universe was actually X-O Manowar #1. It was just a cameo, but he did show up there and take a spear to the chest.

When Valiant first reached out to me about pitching for their characters, there were two that really appealed to me, and it was X-O Manowar and The Eternal Warrior. I just find him a fascinating character and there's things that I've wanted to do with him. He was able to pop up during X-O Manowar for a couple of issues and of course I got to write him during Armor Hunters but there are longer term things I wanted to do with him.

Just look at him as a character -- who this guy is and what it means to have the perspective he does. Just one example of that: he carries around an axe, right? And sometimes that might seem odd for a warrior in the modern day to be carrying around an axe. But that's our modern perspective, right? If you look at the axe, you think of it as an implement and as a tool, and what it has meant throughout the course of human development and history, it's far more useful than a lot of other weapons. You can start a fire with an axe, you can use it as a signal mirror, you can cut down trees with it and build a shelter. You can also fight somebody with it. You can't do that with a gun, right? With a gun, you're going to shoot somebody and that's pretty much all you've got.

It's just that aspect of his nature; seeing this long-term view and all this knowledge he has in his head is like a complete 180 of Aric, who may be from a time long ago, but he just jumped to here and never had that education in the interim. For me, I just find that fascinating, and it's really just endless the amount of things you can do with that.

One of the things that I have to wonder about that is, how does X-O view this? Again, he has a very different relationship with Gilad than many of the heroes.

We're definitely going to tap into that. Eternal Warrior, as we've seen in the X-O Manowar series, was somebody who was sort of Aric's mentor and taught him in a lot of ways how to be a warrior -- not that he was listening to much of anybody since he was such a hothead. But we're definitely going to tap into that in the first issue where Aric, who's usually the first into action in terms of battle, now is almost a bit reluctant about it because this is his old friend, this is his mentor that he's listened to and had counsel from for a very long time, as long as he's been alive, and now there's reason to think this guy's wrong and to go against him. So his gut is telling him that yes, Gilad is wrong, and we need to have that girl, but his heart is telling him something else so there is a bit of a push and pull there with him and we'll definitely be tackling that.