Today, IDW Publishing launched a new miniseries from write D.J. Kirkbride and artist Vassillis Gogtzilas, titled The Biggest Bang.
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A sequel to last year’s The Bigger Bang, The Biggest Bang continues to detail the life and times of a godlike cosmic being called Cosmos.
Kirkbride joined us to talk about the series. You can get The Biggest Bang today at your comic shop or on comiXology.
Okay, so we’ve talked before about The Bigger Bang, but this is a sequel. What do you need to know going in?
The premise that kicked off this whole saga is: The Big Bang created all life as we know it. The BIGGER Bang destroyed all that and created one single being… Cosmos! Alone in a now dead, empty universe, he goes through a black hole to another universe to try to do good since his birth caused so much death.
For THE BIGGEST BANG, I wrote a quick, 4 or 5 panel intro that Vassilis ended up drawing into a 6-page intro! That was deemed too much real estate for what is basically a recap of the previous series, so it became a single page image with a bunch of captions for the finished comic.
If this were a movie, it’d be a more casual Flash Gordon / Star Wars- style opening crawl. Opinions vary, as some people need more detail than others, but the goal was for that to be enough to let new readers dive into the story. Wise folks with great taste in comics who read THE BIGGER BANG will know more details, but THE BIGGEST BANG should stand on its own in the same way that I got into X-MEN 227 as a kid though I had very little to no knowledge of what the heck happened in the previous 226 issues.
For THE BIGGER / BIGGEST BANGs, even if you know the whole story, there is a weird dreamy quality to it that means there is a lot open to interpretation. If readers are willing to go along with it, they’ll have a good time.
What made you decide to include a short prose piece in the first issue?
There was a whole different version of this series called THE COSMIC CHURCH OF THE HALF-GOD: THE BIGGER BANG II. That was my dream title, and then we’d save THE BIGGEST BANG for the third and final part of a trilogy that now exists only in my mind… or maybe a parallel universe where I have a goatee.
In that version of the series, there was a lot more plot. Maybe too much plot for a 4-issue mini-series. A big part that got cut was Wyan’s backstory and a storyline on her home planet. She’s still the co-lead in the version that’s seeing print, but we didn’t have space to delve into her birth and what lead her to Thulu’s army before she met Cosmos or any of the politics of her people.
Our supportive and taste-making editor, Justin Eisinger, wanted prose back ups again for this series, though, so I thought that’d be a good way to get some of the story we had to cut. We might only have room for this first issue and one in issue 3, but they give you a little more insight into Wyan, who is a very important and dynamic character.
There are a lot of tall, skinny panels in this series, which I don’t notice as much in the work you co-write with Adam P. Knave. Is that a matter of matching your scripts to Vassilis’s style?
The way I write for THE BIGGER / BIGGEST BANGS is totally catered to Vassilis’s style. I’m a fan of a full script. Personally, I like keeping it pretty tight with the knowledge that of course the artist will adjust as needed, hopefully with some warning, but almost always for the betterment of the comic.
Vass is a unique fellow, though, and he prefers more flexibility. To keep him engaged and get the best, most passionate work for the book, I keep it way looser. We don’t totally do a “Marvel Method,” but it’s way looser than I’m used to writing. I basically tell him the story with suggestions for how many pages each scene might take and temp dialog so he knows to leave some room.
It’s a tightrope walk for us, but this way of working is what makes these BANGs, BIGGER and BIGGEST respectively. We’re also lucky to have ace letterer Frank Cvetkovic on the team to tie the words and art together in an easy-to-read, visually appealing way. All that to say, tall skinny panels were all from the bold vision and drawing utensils of Vassilis.
How would you describe the world Cosmos inhabits in the series? There are obviously a lot of very…strange…characters we encounter.
It’s one of a multitude of universes in this infinite multiverse. Cosmos’s birth destroyed our universe (sorry, everyone), so he had to go elsewhere.
There are very few humanoids, the closest being Cosmos and Wyan, actually– and he’s insanely, illogically muscled superhero, and she has green skin and three eyes! This universe could fuel countless stories.
I wish we had more than these eight issues, but I’m also HAPPY we got them.
Okay, so tease a little of what’s coming up in this second miniseries that raises the stakes from the first?
Well, we do go from “er” to “est,” right? It’s not just because it’s a logical next step after a title like THE BIGGER BANG. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I also don’t want readers to think we’re just being willy nilly with this title!
While THE BIGGER BANG dealt a lot with Cosmos feeling guilt he didn’t actually deserve, as he had as little control over his birth as any of us, THE BIGGEST BANG deals with Wyan’s guilt– which is far more deserved, as readers of the pervious series will know, and new readers will catch in glimpses in this series.
I mean, it’s not totally black and white. We delve into reasons and shades of gray and, most importantly, the hope for redemption. We also have the aforementioned Cosmic Church of the Half-God. They have decided to straight up worship Cosmos. What does that mean, though?
And the word “half” seems odd, doesn’t it? So much intrigue and adventure and crazy art and action, cosmic comic fans!
