Den of Geek New York Comic Con 2023 Special Edition by Den of Geek

N E W YO R K C O M I C C O N 2 0 2 3 S P E C I A L E D I T I O N

LO KI SE AS O N

THE GOD O F M IS C H IE F R E TU R N S

T HE RISE & FALL OF

The Real Ghostbusters Scott Pilgrim Takes Off The original cast are back for a new anime

ASSASSIN’S CREED

MIRAGE The gaming series goes back to its roots to celebrate 16 years of time-hopping adventures

E XC L U S I V E

B E H I N D T HE SC E N ES O F T HE H U NGE R GAM ES: T HE BALL AD O F SO N GB I RDS AND SNAKES

NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

Complete your collection on eBay, Funko’s official preferred secondary marketplace.

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THE BEST HORROR BOOKS OF 2023

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

A round of scary novels from Catriona Ward, Clay McLeod Chapman and more. PG. 18

MARVEL’S SPIDER-MAN 2

SCOTT PILGRIM

The all-star cast return to voice new anime show Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. We get the latest news. PG. 12

Meet the villains Miles Morales and Peter Parker will face off against in the much anticipated new game. PG. 24

E XC LUSI VE ! THE HUNGER GAMES:

This Hunger Games prequel explores the background of Coriolanus Snow and his early involvement in the games. We get the lowdown with director Francis Lawrence. PG. 38

FALL OF X

It’s carnage for the mutants at the end of the Krakoan era as we know it in Fall of X. Writer Gerry Duggan explains why no one is safe and introduces us to the new big bads of the X-Men universe. PG. 42

THANKSGIVING

LOKI SEASON 2

What’s next for the God of Mischief now that he’s in the middle of a multiversal epic? Co-executive producer Kevin Wright catches us up on the latest adventures. PG. 46 6

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

Acclaimed director Eli Roth is back with his latest slasher, a spinoff from the fake trailer he made for the movie Grindhouse. He tells us about Thanksgiving and rounds up his favorite holiday horror movies. PG. 50

THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS

We go behind the scenes of possibly the greatest cartoon of the ’90s with writers Dennys McCoy and Pamela Hickey. PG. 54

IMAGE CREDITS: MARVEL/ LIONSGATE/ NETFLIX/ UNITED ARCHIVES GMBH / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES

NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

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BY EXPERTS. FOR FANS. On the Cover Hello New York Comic Con! We are overjoyed to be bringing you our very first Den of Geek games cover, celebrating the release of Assassin’s Creed Mirage. We’ve spoken with the team at Ubisoft Bordeaux about the secrets in store for the new game. It’s 16 years since the very first Assassin’s Creed game was released and this latest installment will take us to Bagdad but it’s also going back to basics. Elsewhere in the issue you will find features on Loki season two, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, new anime Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, the wonderful ’90s cartoon The Real Ghostbusters, and for horror fans, we chat to Eli Roth about his latest slasher, Thanksgiving. We hope you enjoy the issue!

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DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

COVER PHOTO CREDIT: UBISOFT

NYCC 2023 SPECIAL ISSUE

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COMIC STORE SPOTLIGHT

URBAN PLANNING AT ITS FINEST Dewey’s Comic City reaps the benefits from its unique location. BY JIM DANDENEAU AND PHOTOGRAPH BY NICK MORGULIS

Dewey’s Comic City owner and comic artist, Anthony Marques.

WHEN YOU THINK about a college town, a whole ecosystem springs immediately to mind revolving around the school: a vibrant social scene for students, stores specializing in the school’s specialty, and people who make their living helping the school community thrive. Dewey’s Comic City in Dover, New Jersey is that ecosystem for one of the biggest names in comics education. Attached to the Kubert School—the world-renowned art school that counts among its alumni Swamp Thing legend Stephen R. Bissette, other Swamp Thing legend (and Vermont 10

Cartoonist Laureate) Rick Veitch, and creator of one of the greatest Supergirl stories ever told, Wednesday Comics’ Amanda Conner—Dewey’s is, in the words of store owner and artist himself, Anthony Marques, “a wonderful opportunity for the students to know what’s going on in the industry, to see who’s doing what, where they measure up to the [professional] artists.” It’s like a cross between a factory store and a career center. Marques is himself a 2011 graduate of the Kubert School and an old head in comics circles, doing everything from writing and drawing big-name

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

books for DC and Dynamite to editing several DC titles. But in 2019, Marques bought the school while owning Dewey’s, and the two entities started to drift together. “Because of Covid, things got a little wild,” he tells us. “We were in our first year here at the Kubert School, being owners, and we realized it might be best if we have everything under the same umbrella.” For the students, the shop functions as a way to connect the technical skills they learn in their classes to the end result—the people reading their stories and the people who help get those stories into print. “I teach second

year business class,” Marques says, “and what I do is bring the students down [to the shop], and I’ll [ask], ‘Hey, what characters do you really like? What books do you like doing?’ I want you to pick up those books and make note of the editors that are working on those titles, so when you reach out to them, you can cite the work that you were just looking at and let them know that you’re interested.” The Kubert School gives the students credentials to be taken seriously in the industry, but Dewey’s gives them promotion that they can use to get their careers started. “We’ve had Ecto One on Halloween Comics

THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE, INTERACTIVE, GAMMAIRRADIATED TOUR OF THE MCU AND BEYOND ANYWHERE!

Join Den of Geek editors Kirsten Howard and Joe George and special guests as they explore the Marvel Universe and break down all the latest MCU and Marvel Comics news.

WE LIKE TO GIVE STUDENTS AN OPPORTUNITY TO SHOWCASE THEIR WORK IN THE STORE. Fest; we’ve had Darryl McDaniels [comic writer and Run-DMC frontman] pop into the shop; Andy Kubert, Lee Weeks, everybody you can think of has made their way through the shop at some point,” says Marques. “But we also like to give students an opportunity to showcase their work. We have an alumni section in the store so they can present their work for Free Comic Book Day. We had over 75 artists set up this year, including instructors, working professionals, and students, because we want to get them learning how to interact with the public.” For Dewey’s patrons, New York Comic Con may feel a little slower than usual—the Kubert School brings all the students to the show to get a taste of con life. But the cultural benefit of having the school and the shop merged is clear: good comics and a strong community. Dewey’s Comic City is located at 37 Myrtle Ave, Dover, New Jersey. If you know a shop that is unique and interesting send them our way on social media, @DenofGeekUS on X.

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NEW RELEASES

SCOTT PILGRIM LEVELS UP

Scott Pilgrim, voiced by Michael Cera, takes on one of the Evil Exes, Matthew Patel, voiced by Satya Bhabha. Below, Scott with Ramona Flowers, voiced by Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

As Netflix launches anime spinoff Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, co-showrunners and producers Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski tell us what makes Scott endure. BY SAM STONE

well-received video game, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game, which had its own distinct take on O’Malley’s original story. For O’Malley, himself a longtime anime fan, he and Grabinski wanted to take full advantage of the anime format and explore a creative freshness to the familiar narrative. “The comic, the movie, and the game were all their own idiosyncratic take on the story,” O’Malley says. “That was our ethos at the start of this: this is

THE ENDURING FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN THE CAST HAS LED US HERE, AND IT’S BEAUTIFUL.” — BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY

an anime, so let’s embrace the anime-ness of it and make this the anime Scott Pilgrim more than anything else. That freed us up to think about it in new ways.” Led by director Abel Góngora and producer Eunyoung Choi, Tokyobased animation studio Science SARU studied the Scott Pilgrim comic books extensively, as well as O’Malley’s separate artwork, including fan art he made. O’Malley and Grabinski visited

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Science SARU’s offices in Japan as production on the series progressed, with the showrunners impressed by how much the studio analyzed O’Malley’s signature art style. “They came back and used iconic images from the book in new contexts. They did all their homework and their due diligence,” O’Malley recalls.

IMAGE CREDIT: NETFLIX

IT’S BEEN 13 YEARS since the popular comic book series Scott Pilgrim, created by Bryan Lee O’Malley, was adapted into cult classic liveaction film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. O’Malley and co-showrunner BenDavid Grabinski are bringing a new vision of Scott Pilgrim to life on Netflix this November with the eagerly anticipated original anime series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, crafting an engagingly fresh take on O’Malley’s action-packed coming-of-age story. The duo aren’t alone, with filmmaker Edgar Wright, who helmed Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, joining the anime production as an executive producer, along with all the fan-favorite cast from the 2010 movie reprising their roles. For the uninitiated, Scott Pilgrim follows the eponymous 20-something as he and his band try to make a name for themselves in their native Toronto. After falling hard for local delivery carrier Ramona Flowers, Scott must prove his worth by fighting her Evil Exes in progressively more intense video game-inspired battles. However, Scott has to ask hard questions about his own sense of self-worth as he endures a whole line of kinetic and stylish showdowns. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off follows not only Wright’s 2010 film but also a

This level of visual fidelity carried over to Science SARU, not only recreating an animation style that matched O’Malley’s but reconciling the artistic sensibilities O’Malley displayed in the earlier volumes of Scott Pilgrim with his visual evolution across the comic book series’ run into a cohesive and instantly recognizable

presentation for the anime. “It was very important to us to not interfere with their visual inspirations; we tried to stick to emotion and humor in the narrative and try to just give feedback,” Grabinski explains. “Instead of being like, ‘It needs to look like this,’ we’d talk about their outfits or props that were related to what we were doing in the storytelling. We always were just hoping they’d come back and surprise us, and they did every time.” One noted consistency between Scott Pilgrim Takes Off and earlier versions of the story is that the anime series still very much takes place in 2000s-era Toronto rather than in the present day. There was early consideration to set the story in 2010 as a nod to the movie, but this was dropped in favor of a more nebulous period in the 2000s to give a sense of “a fantasy of Toronto at that time.” O’Malley likes the ambiguity in time

period instead of being “too on-thenose,” and that a show with a prominent “indie rock milieu” reflects his real life as it was when he was working on the comic book, not how it is now over a decade later. “I like dealing with the memory of your 20s and that emotional time instead of being a direct thing,” Grabinski agrees. “The thing now is that we have the experience of looking back on it, and we’re trying to infuse not just nostalgia but to create something that feels more like a vague concept and what you felt like at that age instead of the specificity that this is today but heightened with magical realism.” One of the biggest strengths behind Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is the presence of the movie cast, from Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim himself, alongside Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Ramona Flowers, to the extensive supporting cast, including Brie Larson, Chris Evans,

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NEW RELEASES

Brie Larson voices Envy Adams, with Brandon Routh who voices Todd Ingram. Below (L to R): Mark Webber as Stephen Stills, Alison Pill as Kim Pine and Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim.

With the series running for eight episodes, O’Malley is clear that no one capped off the number of eps the anime series could have, and he preferred writing bite-sized installments rather than 55-minute episodes. Grabinski feels the eightepisode count is the perfect number to tell the story in the anime series, agreeing, “We got to make exactly the show we wanted to make with people that I respect more than anything.” Grabinski observes that O’Malley is the x-factor in any adaptation of Scott Pilgrim, calling any attempt to make an adaptation without O’Malley’s involvement “the dumbest thing imaginable.” O’Malley is more

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

reluctant to label himself the secret sauce in making an effective adaptation of his work but concedes that his personal and deep connection to the source material is a likely factor in its success and continued relevance. “It does have to be a quirky, weird thing that’s coming out of someone’s head, and, in this case, it’s me and BenDavid,” O’Malley offers. “We’re very 50/50 on everything, but we’re also referring back to the books and so is SARU. I think the work that I did back then gives us a lot to work with now, which is amazing.” Scott Pilgrim Takes Off premieres on Netflix on Nov. 17.

IMAGE CREDIT: NETFLIX

Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza and Jason Schwartzman. The creators felt that if any one actor had declined to return, they would’ve recast the whole show, with Grabinski not wanting a repeat of The Return of Jafar, the 1994 Aladdin sequel that infamously recast the Genie role after Robin Williams’ refusal to reprise the character. “The spell would be broken if any component was missing,” O’Malley says. “I think the special feeling from the show comes from having a lot of the cast return, and that’s all thanks to Edgar and his magic the first time around. The enduring friendship between the cast has led us here, and it’s beautiful.” Wright was instrumental in reassembling the cast for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, with Grabinski complimenting the filmmaker for believing in the production and reaching out to the cast via email to encourage them to reprise their roles. O’Malley noted that Wright’s support and clout helped the production overcome many potential obstacles, making the production “such a smooth process.” And with the original cast back together, the showrunners wanted to be sure to give them new dialogue and fresh jokes. “The stuff that was really hard was writing scenes that already existed in the movie and book and trying to not do the same joke but also do something that still works because the pressure is that you have to do something that’s as good or better,” Grabinski says. “We have a lot of new stuff because it’s just not exciting to me to do a cover band version of it; it’s actually stressful.” Despite these changes, the video game and other pop culture references that have made Scott Pilgrim so endearing to fans worldwide are very much back in full force. This includes weird and personal references that O’Malley and Grabinski have their own connection with, O’Malley citing the NES game Clash at Demonhead from the comic and movie being an obscure gaming reference he personally grew up with.

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FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT…

PAAPA ESSIEDU BY LOUISA MELLOR

Essiedu was born to Ghanaian parents and raised in East London by his mother, a fashion and design teacher. He attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he met Michaela Coel. The two became close friends, and in 2020, Essiedu appeared as Kwame in Coel’s I May Destroy You—a role that earned him BAFTA and Emmy nominations.

He had a place at University College London to study medicine before he took a gap year and decided to pursue acting instead. He says the show Scrubs was an inspiration for starting his career. “I wanted to be the actor playing Turk [Donald Faison] because then I’d literally be doing both things: I’d be being a doctor and on the telly!”

DISCLAIMER: QUOTES COME FROM INTERVIEWS CARRIED OUT BEFORE THE SAG/AFTRA STRIKE. 16

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Essiedu played lovable hellspawn Gaap in 1970s-set Black Mirror episode “Demon 79,” the first Red Mirror horror offshoot from Charlie Brooker’s tech dystopian series. The character was originally imagined as a punk skinhead but ended up styled after Boney M disco king Bobby Farrell in a white fluffy jacket and six-inch silver platform boots.

Aged 25, Essiedu was the first Black actor to play the lead role of Hamlet for the UK’s prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company. He won multiple awards and top reviews for his performance as the graffiti-daubed prince of Denmark.

Movie-wise, he’s soon to star opposite Melissa McCarthy in a Christmas remake of the 1991 fantasy comedy Bernard and the Genie, written by Love Actually’s Richard Curtis. In summer of 2023, Essiedu was among the bookies’ favorites to be cast as the next James Bond, but laughed off the rumors. His dream film role is to play Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, in a biopic.

IMAGE CREDIT: ARTURO HOLMES/MG22/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE MET MUSEUM/VOGUE.

Meet The Lazarus Project star.

READING LIST

THE BEST HORROR BOOKS OF 2023

A queer YA slasher, a Jordan Peele anthology, and all manner of haunted houses. BY NATALIE ZUTTER A HAUNTING ON THE HILL

ELIZABETH HAND (MULHOLLAND BOOKS) The first-ever authorized return to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Hand’s latest replaces the supernatural investigators of Hill House with an emerging playwright and her troupe of actors developing a new play. Holly Sherwin is not the first unfortunate soul to learn that Hill House has a will of its own, as her new summer home invites its visitors into its shadowy corners, revealing what’s haunting each of them.

LOOKING GLASS SOUND

CATRIONA WARD (TOR NIGHTFIRE) This is a metafictional meditation on unreliable memory, filtered through a memoir written by protagonist Wilder Harlow—his way of coping with the summer he and former best friends Nat and Harper stumbled upon the truth behind Whistler Bay’s infamous Dagger Man. But as Wilder returns to this Maine town to exorcise personal demons, events from his book appear out of nowhere. Is his mind failing him, or is it the Dagger Man? 18

THE HANDYMAN METHOD

NICK CUTTER AND ANDREW F. SULLIVAN (GALLERY/SAGA PRESS) This chilling domestic satire explores the darker corners of the home improvement internet. When Trent and his family move into their dream home, they’re shocked to discover it still needs work. But as Trent consults DIY YouTuber Handyman Hank, the supposed expert begins issuing disturbing edicts for Trent alone, slowly invading his family’s space. This is body horror where the body being corrupted is your home.

THE SPITE HOUSE

JOHNNY COMPTON (TOR NIGHTFIRE) Eric Ross moves daughters Dess and Stacy into a “spite house,” a building designed to annoy neighbors, to reset their lives. But it’s not just the Masson House's eccentric design that disturbs its neighbors, it's the property’s supernatural history, which reflects the sins of Degener, Texas. All Eric has to do is record any paranormal activity, but the house may evict the Rosses before they have the chance to put down roots.

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

WHAT KIND OF MOTHER

CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN (QUIRK BOOKS) Madi Price fled her hometown as a teen mom, but she eventually returns to Brandywine, Virginia, her 17-yearold daughter in tow, to read palms at the farmer’s market. What sounds like a cozy Gilmore Girls vibe gets a sinister twist as Madi reads the palm of high-school sweetheart Henry McCabe—and potentially finds a lead on his missing, and supposedly dead, son Skyler. As Madi’s visions become more disturbing, they lead her to answers—just not the ones she expects.

TELL ME I’M WORTHLESS

ALISON RUMFITT (TOR NIGHTFIRE) Transgressive and brutal, Alison Rumfitt’s debut weaves familiar haunted house tropes with the modern horrors of transphobia in Britain. Three years after Albion House took their friend Hannah as its own, former lovers Alice and Ila return for closure. But Alice is a trans woman and Ila is a TERF, and both bear scars and unreliable memories about what each did to the other that night—or rather, what Albion made them believe happened.

BLACK RIVER ORCHARD

CHUCK WENDIG (DEL REY) Wendig will make you think twice about autumnal apple picking in this contemporary fairy tale with a spooky bite. When Calla’s dad Dan plants an unusual orchard in their town of Harrow, it initially bears uniquely delicious fruit that makes everyone’s lives better, brighter, stronger. But the townspeople aren’t just eating apples; they’re inviting madness into their hearts, turning more violent and inhuman, as a dark force waits over a century to reap its own harvest.

CAMP DAMASCUS

CHUCK TINGLE (TOR NIGHTFIRE) Chuck Tingle joins the horrors of gay conversion camps with the suspense of It Follows via Rose, a member of fundamentalist church group The Kingdom of the Pine. God-fearing Rose never questions the Kingdom’s four tenets, until she begins vomiting up flies, and a demonic woman appears every time she thinks about a pretty girl. Rose’s inquiry reveals the secrets behind the titular camp and forces a reckoning with her true desires.

OUT THERE SCREAMING: AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW BLACK HORROR

EDITED BY JORDAN PEELE AND JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS (RANDOM HOUSE) Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions lifts up exciting Black talent both on-screen and on the page: its first-ever horror anthology features beloved SFF names like N.K. Jemisin, Maurice Broaddus, Tochi Onyebuchi, Nalo Hopkinson, Cadwell Turnbull, Rebecca Roanhorse, P. Djèlí Clark, and many, many more. These stories, in which freedom riders face the supernatural and a brave girl confronts a demon at the center of the Earth, will both chill and fulfill you.

YOUR LONELY NIGHTS ARE OVER

ADAM SASS (VIKING BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS) This fiercely funny and dark metafictional slasher novel, which winks at Scream but also Clueless and Heathers, sees gay besties Dearie and Cole framed for the murders of their fellow Queer Club members. Someone at their school is masquerading as the true-crime murderer Mr. Sandman, but this pair will have to find the real killer before they’re the next to be garroted.

OPINION

I WATCH TV AT 1.5X SPEED, AND I’M NOT SORRY TV speed-watching is the future – everyone else just needs to catch up and get with the (sped-up) program. BY LAURA VICKERS-GREEN ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE LEWIS

TIME IS MONEY, PEOPLE! We’ve got busy lives these days and even busier brains, and it’s hard enough to keep up with the new Covid variant, let alone get on top of our evergrowing TV Watch Lists. So, much like 27 percent of people, according to a recent YouGov survey, I watch a lot of TV at a higher playback speed. Netflix, YouTube, Apple TV and BBC iPlayer, all have the option to watch shows at up to 2X the regular speed—so why wouldn’t you? Yes, we’ll all have some off-limits shows that we want to savor in real-time. Mine are Doctor Who, Line of Duty, and something tells me Strictly Come Dancing wouldn’t quite have the same charm if all the contestants were flailing their limbs around in double time. But these are the rare exceptions, the kinds of TV shows we want to thoroughly lose ourselves in. These days, however, TV often seems to be a quantity over quality game, with ever-expanding listings and subscriptions filled with shows 20

that are more at the “yeah, it was pretty good” end of the scale than the “would-skip-my-grandmother’sfuneral-to-watch-the-next-episode” end. (Sorry, Grandma. I just had to find out who the Yellowjackets girls ate.)

THE THREAT OF ARMAGEDDON HAS NEVER BEEN HIGHER SO GET TO THE GOOD STUFF!” And that’s okay—not all TV can be as absorbing as Great British Bake-Off or a Real Housewives reunion—but that means programs are padded out with exposition, moody silences, or shots of documentary interviewees having their mics attached to their sweater before the interview for some reason, and I can’t watch that. It requires patience and complacency which the modern world doesn’t

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

allow for anymore. The threat of nuclear Armageddon has never been higher, people, so get to the good stuff or get off the stage! So, I hit the 1.5X speed button. Otherwise, in the gaps between the slow dialogue and unnecessary artistic shots of local scenery (we get it, you have a drone), I start to think about things like LGBTQ+ hate crimes being on the rise, boatfuls of desperate families dying in the English Channel, and global warming’s recent upgrade to global

RANDOM RANKINGS Disney movies by how much they sound like hair products. BY KIRSTEN HOWARD

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boiling meaning my child might live to see the world become uninhabitable. So I speed the program up. Fewer moody silences = less thinking time. Maybe the creators find this insulting, but at least this way, I’m actually watching their art instead of keeping half an eye on it while doom-scrolling on my phone. Because that’s the real problem: social media has eaten into our free time and swallowed our attention spans whole (besides, did you even watch the show

if you didn’t Tweet about it?), making my generation into neverending, FOMO-obsessed consumers of content. The generation that doesn’t —and can’t—switch off. As fast as we’re consuming the content—be it TV shows, trends, or the ever-accelerating 24-hour news cycle—they’re dishing out new stuff at double the frequency, so is it any surprise we’ve resorted to watching it at double the speed? So yeah, I watch TV at 1.5X speed most of the time. I wish I didn’t have to. I wish my brain and the world in general these days didn’t go at 1.5X speed, either. But—much like the dead air of TV shows—let’s just skip over that, not think about it too much, and keep on watching.

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COMIC PREVIEW

TIME HEIST

When Dan Slott got the chance to write a special Doctor Who comic, he knew it was an opportunity he might never get again— so he decided to cram in everything he could get away with. BY CHRIS FARNELL

comic could be]! So, let’s make it a giant triple-sized comic! We can do it quintuple size!’ Which is why this thing is like 58 pages of content.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Most of those pages concern the Tenth Doctor, as played by David Tennant (who’s back as the Fourteenth Doctor for this year’s 60th anniversary specials), his season three companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) and Slott’s newly created villains, the Pyromeths, vicious aliens who demand their victims tell a continuous, endless story, destroying them if it ever fails to meet their standards. As a writer moving from writing for the Marvel fandom to the Doctor Who fandom, one wonders where he gets his ideas.

I WANTED TO GO ONTO THE TARDIS! SO I USED MY SPIDER-MAN POWERS FOR EVIL AND PERSONAL GAIN.” “You meet these aliens that live off fiction, and the minute you displease them, they will chuck you into the abyss and just get another storyteller,” Slott says. “And it’s like, Oh my god! That’s the fear I go through every single month!” It is also an apt villain for Martha Jones to face, as a kind of indirect prequel to her final regular episode,

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“The Last of the Time Lords.” “At the end of her season, she has to walk the Earth and tell stories, and this is how she got good at it,” Slott tells us. The story Martha tells, meanwhile, is a smash-and-grab tour of all the monsters Slott is dying to write. “So much of this was just everything and the kitchen sink because I thought they were going to wise up and realize letting this American write Doctor Who was a bad move,” Slott says.

THE ART OF TIME TRAVEL

As well as writing all these monsters, Slott got to see the book’s artists bring them to life. Once Upon A Time Lord has three artists. Those artists include Mike Collins, who storyboards for Doctor Who on TV and has been doing so since the days of Ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston. “I met him for the first time on the set of the TARDIS,” Slott boasts. But what was Slott actually doing on the TARDIS? Slott beams and says, “I wanted to go onto the TARDIS! So I used my

IMAGE CREDIT: TITAN COMICS

PRETTY MUCH THE first thing Dan Slott says in our interview is, “I got to write Doctor Who fanfic and got paid for it!” It’s a feeling that permeates not only this interview but also the book Slott is here to talk about, a whopping 66-page special for Titan Comics called Doctor Who: Once Upon A Time Lord. Slott seems like a kid who has been locked in the candy store by mistake and intends to scarf down as much candy as he can before someone notices. But there has been no mistake— Slott is one of the most respected and prolific comic writers working right now, with runs on the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer, and, most famously, Spider-Man behind him. Indeed, Slott’s runs include the epic “SpiderVerse” comic event that inspired the wildly successful ongoing movie trilogy. In fact, Slott’s ties to the web-slinger were perhaps his biggest obstacle to boarding the TARDIS. “Whenever I was in town, the guys from Titan Comics would take me out to dinner and say, ‘How’d you like to write some Doctor Who for us? We hear you’re a big fan!’” Slott recounts. “And I’d have to grit my teeth and say, ‘I’m exclusive to Marvel comics, I can’t!’” This continued until Slott had a contract negotiation with Marvel, where he had enough leverage to get them to agree to one exception to the exclusivity clause—for Doctor Who. “The second they cracked, I called Titan Comics and said, ‘I can do one comic!’” Slott says, then gleefully adds, “‘But they didn’t say how long [the

DOCTOR WHO: ONCE UPON A TIME LORD

Author: Dan Slott Illustrators: Christopher Jones, Matthew Dow Smith and Mike Collins

Spider-Man powers for evil and personal gain.” Collins is accompanied by Matthew Dow Smith and Christopher Jones. “Christopher Jones is such a Whovian,” Slott says. “He got every single detail right, and it made me so unbelievably happy.” This combination of artists is also needed because Slott isn’t just telling a Doctor Who story; he’s telling a Doctor Who story that can only be told in comics. “It’s very much a story about a storyteller and the story they are telling, and when you put that into comics, it gives you the option of having two artists,” Slott says. The comic’s three artists are divided between the three perspectives.

Christopher Jones is drawing what’s “really” happening, Matthew Dow Smith draws the story being told, and Mike Collins draws an additional tale of the Ninth Doctor, Rose Tyler (as played by Billie Piper), the sorely underutilized villains the Terileptils, and an extremely comic book friendly plot device. “You need word balloons for that,” Slott says. “It wouldn’t work as a Big Finish or a TV episode; it’s very much a Doctor Who comic.” But while it is a unique comic book story, there are elements of the TV show Slott is keen to hold onto. “If you look at the creatures from ‘Nightmare of Eden’—you can see the

zippers on the rubber suits, and my take has always been ‘Let’s see that in the comics!’” he says. That said, the opening pages of Once Upon A Time Lord feature a scene you could never see in the TV show. “It feels fair, although you knew they could never film it,” Slott says, mysteriously, and once again, he sounds like he’s getting away with something. “I like dancing on that tightrope, doing stuff they couldn’t do in the show, but I’ve got my own personal limits.” Doctor Who: Once Upon A Time Lord is released on Nov. 7.

NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

NEW RELEASES

A ROGUES’ GALLERY

Exploring the many villains of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. BY MATTHEW BYRD MR. NEGATIVE

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 hits PlayStation 5 on Oct. 20.

VENOM

Venom may be one of Spider-Man’s most famous foes, but much about the symbiote’s presence in Spider-Man 2 remains a mystery. Where did it come from? How will it influence Peter? With no Eddie Brock in sight, who will serve as its host? What we do know is that Spider-Man 2’s version of Venom is one of the most intimidating incarnations of the character that we’ve seen in years. Voiced by Tony Todd, Spider-Man 2’s Venom is as imposing and unnerving as the greatest horror movie baddies. His otherworldly physical strength is matched only by his ability to poison minds.

IMAGE CREDIT: SONY INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT

IN MARVEL’S SPIDER-MAN 2, players control both Peter Parker and Miles Morales. Two heroes may be too much for NYC’s crooks, but the pair will face more than muggers in this sequel. You know these villains’ names, but Insomniac Games’ unique version of the Spider-Man multiverse ensures you’ve never seen them quite like this.

At a young age, Martin Li was injected with an experimental serum that granted him superhuman powers. Unable to control his new ability to generate negative electric energy, Li accidentally murdered his parents. After learning that the serum was approved and administered by Oscorp, Li swore vengeance on Norman Osborn. But his quest for revenge cost many innocent lives, including Miles Morales’ father, Jefferson Davis. While Mr. Negative was defeated at the end of Marvel’s Spider-Man, Li managed to escape and remains at large in the sequel. Though he’s as dangerous as ever, Li’s mere presence is a threat to young Miles Morales. How can he become the hero he dreams of being when he still seeks vengeance?

KRAVEN THE HUNTER

Though absent during the events of the previous games, Kraven has been keeping an eye on NYC. Believing it to be his next great hunting ground, he arrives in the city with an army of mercenaries in search of an opponent worthy of being considered his equal. Described by Spider-Man 2 narrative director Jon Paquette as the “catalyst” for the sequel’s events, Kraven’s undeniable hunting abilities will certainly push Peter and Miles to their physical limits. Yet, it’s Kraven’s relentless nature that may just break the pair as they also deal with their quickly unraveling personal lives.

LIZARD

When we last saw Dr. Curt Connors, he was helping Norman find a cure for Harry’s disease. Said cure involved a mysterious substance that Connors warned may be too dangerous to unleash on the world. But his pleas were ignored, and Connors was forced to release Harry. Since then, the doctor has reverted to his animalistic alter-ego: The Lizard. Though Marvel’s Spider-Man hinted that Peter helped Connors find an antidote for Connors’ transformative disease, The Lizard is somehow not only back but larger and more aggressive than ever. This puts Peter in a painful position. While The Lizard must be stopped, Connors must survive in order to help Harry.

WRAITH

Though police chief Yuriko Watanabe was one of Peter’s allies in Marvel’s Spider-Man, she had a darker side that fuelled her crusade against the NYC underworld. That dark side took over when Watanabe’s team was slain by the villainous Hammerhead. After murdering one of Hammerhead’s goons, Watanabe informs Parker that she desires to find her own justice. Now, with reports of mysterious murders occurring across NYC, all signs point to Wraith, Watanabe’s vigilante alter ego. Though Wraith, Peter, and Miles share enemies, their differing crime-fighting methods often leave them at odds. In a city full of villains, there is no telling how far Wraith will go.

NORMAN OSBORN

By the end of Marvel’s Spider-Man, Norman Osborn is a broken man. Having tried (and failed) to turn the city against the webslinger, Norman was forced to resign as mayor of NYC. His retreat from the public eye leads him to an underground laboratory where his son, Harry, is undergoing radical treatment for a deadly neurological disorder. But what began as fatherly love has spiraled into a dangerous obsession that could cost more than Oscorp’s plummeting stock price. What depths will Norman explore following his fall from grace? Will he continue to pull the strings from the shadows, or will he finally emerge as the legendary Green Goblin?

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THE BEST OF GEEK

“If something breaks down in Antarctica, there is no FedEx to help you out. You have to be completely self-sufficient.”

SAY WHAT?

Quotes of the month from Den of Geek exclusive interviews.

— Animals Up Close host

Bertie Gregory on the perils of wildlife photography.

— Katya Echazarreta on becoming the first Mexican woman to go to space.

PHOTOGRAPHED AT SDCC 2023

“I DID SEND [KIT HARRINGTON] A TEXT SAYING, ‘BETTER CALL DAVOS.’ I HAVEN’T HEARD ANYTHING BACK... [BUT] IF THE CHECK IS BIG ENOUGH, I MIGHT EVEN SHOW UP AGAIN!” — Liam Cunningham on the Jon Snow-centric Game of Thrones spinoff.

“Most of all, in my experiences with these studios, they just want you to surprise them.” — Director Marc Jobst on working for big studios like Marvel (Daredevil) and Netflix (One Piece).

“People in a modern world understand that father doesn’t know best, mother doesn’t know best, scientists know best!” — Jamie Lee Curtis ahead of the launch of her graphic novel Mother Nature.

— Robert Kirkman, on writing Invincible season 2.

“IT’S AWESOME—I GOT TO BE PART OF HISTORY: MEETING SPOCK FOR THE FIRST TIME, MEETING UHURA FOR THE FIRST TIME. THESE ARE MOMENTS THAT WILL GO DOWN IN STAR TREK CANON, AND I LOVE IT.” — Curtis Paul Wesley on playing James T. Kirk on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

V I S I T D E N O F G E E K . C O M F O R T H E L AT E S T I N T E R V I E W S , R E V I E W S , N E W S , A N D F E AT U R E S . 26

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IMAGE CREDITS: NICK MORGULIS (ECHAZARRETA, CURTIS), PARMOUNT+ (WESLEY), GETTY (GREGORY)

A lot of people think when you’re going to be out in space, you’re gonna see bright stars. You see no stars. You see deep, deep black. Then you’re able to see the planet, you’re able to see that blue thin layer, which forms a part of our atmosphere, and you realize how fragile everything is.”

“With The Walking Dead, I was driving through that show with reckless abandon. I was like, ‘Kill this guy, let’s move this guy over here, I’m happy to change anything.’ I’ve learned my lesson. There are parts of the comic book that fans would like to see and that I’d like to see come to life.”

EVENT SPOTLIGHT

PHOTO BOOTH

Call it the Summer of Geek. Check out some of the recent highlights of our eventful festival and convention slate. A W E S O M E C O N PHOTOGRAPHY BY NICK MORGULIS

2 1: Sean Astin, Elijah Wood, and Andy Serkis took the main stage at Awesome Con in Washington D.C. 2: Killer Five Nights at Freddy’s cosplay at Awesome Con.

L O N D O N A C T I O N F E S T I V A L PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX LUBETKIN

3: Den of Geek returned to The London Action Festival as media partner and toured The Incredible World of Spy-Fi, which featured a collection of props, costumes, original gadgetry, and memorabilia from some of the top action franchises of all time. The exhibit was curated by Danny Biederman, an internationally recognized expert on pop spy fiction. 4: Kit Harrington made a surprise guest appearance at the London Action Festival. 28

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SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHELSEA LAUREN & SHUTTERSTOCK, NICK MORGULIS, JESSICA KOYNOCK

6 5: The Den of Geek staff enjoy the red carpet at National Geographic’s annual Comic-Con Lounge. 6: Jeff Jenkins (Never Say Never) and Bertie Gregory (Animals Up Close) celebrate the launch of their new shows during National Geographic’s Comic-Con Lounge in partnership with Den of Geek. 7: K-Pop star AleXa at the Tabletop Rooftop event hosted by Den of Geek and Funko Games during San Diego Comic-Con. 8: Comic book and collectibles legend Todd McFarlane showed off figures in the Den of Geek studio at San Diego Comic-Con. 9: Michael McCarty of Gala Games is interviewed by Sam Stone during Comic-Con. 10: Actress Lakshmi Manchu and guests on the red carpet at the Den of Geek Comic-Con opening night party in partnership with the Indian sci-fi epic Project K (since retitled Kalki 2898 AD).

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TO THE

To celebrate 16 years of the blockbuster video game franchise, the talented developers at Ubisoft Bordeaux transport players to 9th-century Baghdad for Assassin’s Creed Mirage. BY JOHN SAAVEDRA

Left: Assassin Basim Ibn Ishaq returns as the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Below: Ubisoft spent years researching 9th-century Baghdad to craft an authentic depiction of the city.

on a video call with the team at Ubisoft Bordeaux, Mirage narrative director Sarah Beaulieu doesn’t mince words about the biggest challenge to telling a new story in this universe: “When you actually approach this kind of lore, it’s 16 years of Assassin’s Creed, so it’s huge. Let’s put a word on it: it’s a mess. You have to choose what you can do and what you can’t do. You don’t want to make any mistakes with the lore because we have a responsibility.”

IMAGE CREDIT: UBISOFT

HEN THE ORIGINAL ASSASSIN’S CREED first hit store shelves in 2007, it was unlike anything else you could play on consoles that holiday season. Sixteen years later, we take that game’s winning combination of stealth gameplay, melee combat, parkour traversal, and open-world historical setting—all somehow also wrapped up in a compelling sci-fi thriller—for granted. But that’s because so much of the open-world formula the original title helped pioneer has become the standard language of modern gaming. It’s why, in recent years, Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft worked to freshen things up with a trilogy of games that emphasized loot-driven RPG mechanics over the original’s more linear, stealth-focused approach. But while those three installments—Origins, Odyssey, and most recently, Valhalla—were undeniable success stories for the franchise, Ubisoft is now going back to basics to celebrate the 16th anniversary of the long-running series. This month’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage not only returns to a Middle Eastern setting but brings back many of the design elements that made the original game so great. All while following up on plot threads from Valhalla and adding a few new wrinkles to the series’ sprawling story. But that last part is easier said than done. In fact, when Den of Geek sits down

The A s sass in

The word “epic” doesn’t begin to cover this time-hopping saga. The Assassin’s Creed story spans millennia of real (and alternate) historical events, multiple protagonists, and even different realities. It also involves the Isu, a prehistoric advanced species that ruled over Earth like gods before a Great Catastrophe wiped them all out. The games largely follow the Assassins (or Hidden Ones) as they try to recover NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

powerful Isu relics before the power-hungry Templars can use them for world domination. Meanwhile, Assassins in the present day are also fighting to prevent a second Great Catastrophe that will wipe out our civilization. Yes, there’s a lot going on. Fortunately, the team knew exactly where to go next with the story and who to go there with: Basim Ibn Ishaq, a troubled Assassin who was first introduced in Valhalla, which is set in the 870s during the Viking expansion into Britain. In that game, a third-act twist reveals Basim is actually the villainous reincarnation of a manipulative Isu named Loki. But Mirage takes place almost 20 years earlier in 9th-century Baghdad—before Basim becomes a Hidden One or learns that he’s actually a reborn Isu. “When we started working on Mirage, we were looking for a character that we could really tell the coming-ofage story with,” says creative director Stéphane Boudon. 32

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

“There’s so much to tell and so much to untie [with Basim].” Basim was not only a great choice because of the mystery surrounding his past, but he also lived during the time period the studio wanted to explore—the Golden Age of Baghdad, when the city was the center of culture, science, and invention. As Beaulieu says, “All the stars aligned.” But were they ever worried players wouldn’t sympathize with the coming-of-age story of an Assassin we all know will one day become a major villain? “We didn’t see him as the bad guy [in Valhalla]. We saw him as a guy with a lot of flaws and a huge blank page that we wanted to fill,” Beaulieu says. “So the first thing we wanted to do is just think about what happened; why did he become the guy you met in Valhalla?” At the start of Mirage, Basim is surviving as a street thief before he is recruited by the Brotherhood. It’s a somewhat common origin story for Assassin’s Creed, but remember,

Basim isn’t your ordinary Assassin. “He’s tortured by visions, and he has this trauma that he can’t deal with because he doesn’t know where it comes from,” explains Beaulieu. “He has something to resolve first before becoming a Hidden One.” Finding the hero of the story was only one piece of the much larger puzzle, though. Ubisoft Bordeaux would also need to build a city from scratch, a completely different kind of undertaking.

Th e Lo st C itY

IMAGE CREDIT: UBISOFT

“The Middle East was a must-have for us from the get-go,” Boudon says. “When we were doing our research on the Middle East, Baghdad was so powerful, like a lighthouse in the dark, it was obvious for us.” Mirage features an approximation of what 9th-century Baghdad might have been like during the Anarchy at Samarra, a time of great upheaval in the city and the whole of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Islamic empire that ruled much of the region at the time. Through years of research and consultations with historians, Ubisoft Bordeaux aimed to craft as authentic a depiction of the city as possible. But that was easier said than done, especially as they learned how much of the real 9th-century city had been lost to time. “The city itself, there’s nothing remaining now,” Beaulieu laments. “We don’t have anything, not one single stone from the 9th century. It’s not the same thing as in Greece or Rome.” This was the biggest obstacle for Mirage art director Jean-Luc Sala, whose job it was to visualize the four districts of the game version of Baghdad—the wealthy Round City, the cultural hub of Abbasiyah, the industrial Harbiyah, and the markets of Karkh—despite being unable to visit any historical sites from the time period for reference. “Medieval Baghdad is a ‘lost city’ that was destroyed by the Mongols during their conquest of the Middle East. Bringing it to life with the few existing historical sources was a fantastic challenge for the team,” says Sala, who used the writings and maps of 19th-century British scholar Guy Le Strange as the foundation for his designs. Le Strange himself referenced the works of Arabic and

Persian medieval sources, such as historians Serapion the Elder and al-Ya‘qūbī, “to create a map that is still the reference today,” according to Sala. The mission wasn’t just to recreate the aesthetic and geography of the ancient city. According to the team’s historian, Raphaël Weyland, the task also involved digging into what life was really like in Baghdad at that time. “Recreating a city for an AC game is an immense challenge,” Weyland says. “It requires a deep understanding of multiple aspects of the life of that city, many of which historians don’t always think of—political events and life of the court, of course, but also the general layering of the city and how it affected transportation; what elite as well as less fortunate people looked and sounded like; what people ate, how they relaxed, what they considered beautiful or ugly.” Weyland turned to many sources to study the culture: “For music and the life of famous singers we used the Kitab al-aghani (Book of Songs) by Abu al-Faraj, while for table manners used the Kitab al-bukhala (Book of Misers) by Al-Jahiz.” Ubisoft also collaborated with museums, which provided artifacts from the era. The team studied “everything from uniforms and weapons to floor tiles and astronomical instruments” for inspiration. “Some aspects are inspired by modern Iraqi craftspeople who still build boats and tools that look almost identical to the ones Basim would have seen 1,200 years ago,” Weyland adds. But for every historical source and relic studied, there were locations in 9th-century Baghdad for which virtually no archaeological evidence exists today. Case in point: the House of Wisdom, which was one of the largest libraries in the world until the Mongols destroyed it in 1258. “We didn’t really know where it was exactly or even the shape of it,” Boudon says. “[We] took inspiration from other cities and writings.” Players can visit the House of Wisdom in the Abbasiyah district, a location tied to Basim’s own childhood. Sala also turned to his own memories of growing up “on the other side of the Tigris River’’ to capture what he calls

Clockwise from left: Master Assassin Roshan is Basim’s mentor; Ali ibn Muhammad is a real historical figures you’ll meet; Hadya is one of Basim’s associates in the game. Right: Basim has many weapons at his disposal to take on his enemies.

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the “Spirit of Baghdad.” For Sala and many others on the team, recreating this lost city was about more than just providing a playground for Assassin’s Creed fans to parkour around. It was about highlighting a time period that is so often overlooked in history books, classrooms, and even pop culture. “We wanted to do justice to the Abbasid period because in movies and popular culture, it is a rare subject and most of the time given the ‘Arabian nights cliché’ treatment,” Sala explains. “It was the most advanced place in the world during the Abbasid Golden Age. At the same time, Europe was living in its ‘Dark Ages.’ So, showing this amazing world at the peak of its glory felt important for us.” Years of crafting the game’s story, which includes the many real historical figures Basim meets along his quest, have also led Beaulieu to ask an uncomfortable question about which parts of history get to live on and which are left by the wayside. “You learn about Rome, you learn about Greece, but not 9th-century Baghdad. Why?” Beaulieu says. “The more we [researched], the more we discovered different characters like the Banū Mūsā brothers who were inventors, and they were very famous back in the day and invented all this stuff… That’s a bit like Da Vinci. Everyone knows about Da Vinci, but most people don’t know about the Banū Mūsā.” Past Assassin’s Creed games have featured plenty of famous historical figures, from Da Vinci and Socrates to George Washington and Cleopatra. Mirage is an opportunity to put the movers and shakers of the Golden Age of Baghdad on the same pedestal. Basim does indeed work with the Banū Mūsā in Mirage, but Ubisoft Bordeaux’s efforts to bring authenticity to their version of 9th-century Baghdad go beyond the game’s plot. Mirage not only lets you play the entire game in Arabic, it accurately depicts the Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer. Mirage also features an in-game Codex with a “History of Baghdad” section that 34

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

Clockwise from above: Ubisoft studied many artifacts that were provided by museums, including this compass; At first just a thief, Basim is recruited into the Assassin Order; Basim can use smoke bombs and many other tools to evade enemies; Mirage brings back the Assassin fortress of Alamut.

provides context for the different places Basim visits, the historical figures he meets, and items he finds. The database includes articles as well as art and photographs curated by museums around the world. The hope is that this feature will be a valuable resource for both history lovers and those who haven’t encountered 9th-century Baghdad in the classroom before. “Assassin’s Creed games are not meant to replace teachers or university classes, but they can serve as a great entry point into a culture,” Weyland says. “If in five years someone

IMAGE CREDIT: UBISOFT

chooses a class about medieval Middle Eastern history because of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, it would be wonderful!”

1 6 Ye a rs Later

Mirage doesn’t just look back at real-world history; it also dissects the franchise’s own past. From the beginning, Ubisoft Bordeaux’s goal was “to go back to the roots of the franchise,” according to Boudon. That’s why Mirage is a more linear experience set in an urban landscape like the

earliest games and emphasizes stealth, parkour, and a more nuanced approach to assassinations. But that wasn’t as simple as doing whatever the first game did. “We didn’t want to just copy past eras,” Boudon explains. “We had creative liberty to change things. For instance, stealth was a big part of the rework. We crafted a new stealth loop [and] we also give you tools that let you play a bit with the AI. We reworked AI detection as well. That’s why we brought back the vision cone for AI and the ‘Last Known Position.’” Last Known Position, a visual marker that pinpoints where enemies last spotted the player during tense chase sequences, goes hand in hand with the welcome return of the Notoriety system, which makes enemies more aggressive towards the player as they commit more crimes. The higher Basim’s Notoriety, the faster city guards will attack him, making taking down targets more difficult. Of course, Basim has plenty of tools he can use to evade enemies, including smoke bombs, noisemakers, blowdarts, and even poison traps for a more lethal solution. Assassinations have received a bit of an overhaul as well. Whereas most assassinations in Valhalla felt a bit on-rails—access the general area where the kill will take place and then follow the map marker to your target— Mirage asks players to do some investigating to track down targets, which may mean snooping on conversations, pickpocketing, or bribing someone for intel. Mirage also NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

encourages players to explore different ways to get the kill, whether it’s sneaking, sabotage, or a more direct approach. A new ability called Assassin Focus also allows Basim to slow down time and take down several enemies at once, a nifty trick if you happen to find yourself in an area full of guards. As for the all-important parkour element, Mirage brings a more fluid traversal experience, with plenty of ways to move around the city without breaking the momentum. According to Sala, “the flat rooftops and the intricate and chaotic urbanism of the Abbasid architecture also helped a lot to bring back the parkour comfort and the nostalgia of the first AC game.” Nostalgia was a key consideration, of course. That’s why the team included plenty of Easter eggs and blasts from the past, such as the Assassin fortress of Alamut, which players can visit to learn more about BASIM IS the Brotherhood. But TO RTU R E D BY it wasn’t all about fan VISIONS. HE service. This game is HA S TR AU MA H E the culmination of a C AN’T DEAL WITH long, emotional journey, B EC AUSE H E both for the studio as a whole and for the DOESN’T KNOW individual creators we WH ERE IT COM ES spoke to for this piece. FROM. HE HAS Mirage marks Ubisoft SOMETHING Bordeaux’s first release T O R E S O LV E as the lead studio of a FIRST BEFORE project this size, having previously worked in BECOM I NG A more of a supporting role, HIDDEN ONE. including on Ubisoft Montreal’s Valhalla, since its founding in 2017. Sala describes it as a “growing up” of the team. Meanwhile, Beaulieu feels a mix of emotions as they reach the finish line. She points out that “everybody [on the team] put something very intimate at some point somewhere” in this game. For Boudon, the fact that the Bordeaux studio has hit this milestone with an Assassin’s Creed game makes it all that much sweeter. Although he was working with a completely different Ubisoft studio in France in 2007, Boudon loved the original Assassin’s Creed game so much that he tried to get himself transferred to the AC team in Montreal. It didn’t work out back then, but 16 years later, things have come full circle for him. “Now I can work on an Assassin’s Creed and make a tribute to that original game. It’s an honor for me to be a part of that storyline,” Boudon says. “It’s incredible.”

↘AROUND I N 16 YEARS

“

Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is out now on Xbox and PlayStation consoles as well as PC and Amazon Luna. An iOS version of the game is slated for 2024. 36

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

BY JOHN SA AVEDRA

↑ GREECE (431 B.C.–422 B.C.)

Before the time of Assassins vs. Templars, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey takes players to Ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Along the way, you’ll meet Socrates, Plato, King Leonidas, and even a few gods.

IMAGE CREDIT: UBISOFT

“

The history of the world, according to Assassin’s Creed.

THE

↙ MEDIEVAL ENGLAND (872-878)

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla hits the shores of Medieval England but through the eyes of the invading Vikings who spread across much of the British Isles while waging war against King Alfred the Great of Wessex.

mathematicians in history. Assassin’s Creed Mirage explores 9th-century Baghdad, which was the center of so much innovation at the time.

THE HOLY LAND

↑ THE CARIBBEAN (1715-1722)

Ever dreamed of becoming a pirate? Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag dives deep into that fantasy, so that players can finally sail alongside infamous pirates like Blackbeard, Mary Read, Calico Jack, and more.

(1191)

The original Assassin’s Creed takes place during the Third Crusade. Set across the Holy Land, the game sends players to the cities of Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre as the Assassins work to take down a Templar plot.

ITALY (1476-1507)

EGYPT (49 B.C.–44 B.C.)

The origin story of the Hidden Ones (the precursor to the Assassins) is told in Assassin’s Creed Origins. It’s the age of Egyptian pharaohs, specifically Ptolemy XIII and Queen Cleopatra, but you’ll also spend time with Julius Caesar along the way.

BAGHDAD (860s AD)

The Golden Age of Islam produced some of the most important inventors, scientists, and

At the height of the Italian Renaissance, Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood visit Florence, Venice, Rome, and even the Vatican to stop the Templars from acquiring a powerful ancient artifact. Along the way, players meet Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and the Borgias.

CONSTANTINOPLE (1511-1512)

Assassin’s Creed Revelations finally took the series back to the Middle East—this time to the city of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), just decades after the Ottoman Empire took it from the Byzantines.

AMERICA (1752-1783)

Assassin’s Creed Rogue and Assassin’s Creed III are both set in Colonial America, before and during the American Revolution, during the time of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and even the treacherous Benedict Arnold.

VICTORIAN LONDON (1868)

An adventure in Victorian England means that you get to rub elbows with Charles Dickens, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Darwin, and even Queen Victoria. In Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, there’s also the matter of a certain Jack stalking the streets of London….

← FRANCE (1789-1794)

Templars see the French Revolution as the perfect time to stir up trouble. The Storming of the Bastille, the execution of King Louis, and Reign of Terror are depicted in Assassin’s Creed Unity, where you’ll also meet a young Napoleon.

Clockwise from top left: Hunter Schafer, Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Jason Schwartzman, Peter Dinklage, and Josh Andrés Rivera.

CAPITOL Punishment Director Francis Lawrence Returns to the Dark Past of the Arena in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. BY THERESA DELUCCI

IMAGE CREDIT: LIONSGATE/MURRAY CLOSE

ans might have been surprised when author Suzanne Collins announced a new novel in her bestselling Hunger Games series, but director Francis Lawrence was not. Working closely with Collins and producer Nina Jacobson on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 and Part 2, there was always some idea that the dystopian world of Panem still had stories left to tell. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes looks back at one of the most important periods in Hunger Games’ history—the development of the deadly games themselves. Francis Lawrence is talking with Den of Geek about returning to a very different arena with a very different protagonist— a young Coriolanus Snow, not yet president of Panem and more than 60 years away from terrorizing Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen. Returning to the world of the original trilogy through the eyes of that series’ main bad guy comes with challenges, but also provides an opportunity to tell a unique origin story for both the villain and the world that shaped him. “I think people really like watching characters break bad,” Lawrence says. “It’s fun to watch The Joker become The Joker. It’s fun to watch Anakin become Darth Vader.” Far from the distinguished, wealthy statesman portrayed by Donald Sutherland in the 2012 film adaptation, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes introduces the future dictator as an 18-year-old senior attending the Capitol Academy High School. Tom Blyth (best known for Epix’s Billy the Kid) plays Corlyo, as his schoolmates have nicknamed him, at a crossroads. His parents both died during the First Rebel War

against the districts and despite living in a luxurious penthouse with his Grandma’am (Fionnula Flanagan) and cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer), his once prestigious last name is all Corlyo has left to bank on. On the brink of starvation themselves, one more tax hike threatens to put the surviving Snows on the streets. As the 10th Hunger Games approaches, Corlyo, as a newly minted Mentor to the female District 12 tribute, Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), seizes his opportunity to restore his family’s status. Bitter, ambitious, and under pressure, the young Coriolanus Snow soon reveals his own dangerous survival skills. “I think that was the biggest challenge,” Lawrence admits when discussing his approach to Corlyo’s complex character. “We have to get an audience to empathize with him, understand what he’s going through, and sort of feel for him and honestly root for him.” Casting the perfect future symbol of Panem’s fascist cruelty and foil to the resistance heroes was crucial to Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) and Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) enjoy simple times.

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LUCY GRAY IS A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF CHARACTER FROM K ATNISS. SHE’S ABLE TO MANIPULATE. SHE’S A SURVIVOR AND HAS DIFFERENT WAYS OF TRYING TO SURVIVE.

unlocking President Snow’s humanity. Lawrence knew he likely wanted to cast someone lesser known but he wanted an actor with an abundance of charisma that could hint at the leader to come. “When Tom came on board, he obviously had real charisma. There’s a sophistication to Tom and an intelligence and sense of control with Tom that I really liked. And a subtlety. Those kinds of aspects just reminded me of Donald [Sutherland]. Tom holds himself in a very specific and poised way. And I thought that was a great parallel for Donald.” Corlyo’s charisma must also support the charm of Lucy Gray, whose talent as a folk singer makes her a fan favorite in the games. While Katniss Everdeen may be the most famous District 12 tribute, she was not the first, nor was The Girl on Fire even the first female District 12 tribute to leave her mark on President Snow. Acclaimed for her performance as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s recent big screen adaptation of West Side Story, Rachel Zegler sings for Lucy Gray’s new audience… and her life. The chemistry between the lead actors was apparent from the production’s first days, which began in early 2022. “We did this Zoom chemistry read, and we were all in different spots. I had Rachel sing ‘Wildwood Flower,’ this old Carter Family song that I loved, to Tom,” Lawrence says.“I just wanted to watch him listening to her sing and have Rachel sing to him.” You can feel the tension between Lucy Gray and Coriolanus (now with extra hair).

Corlyo and Lucy Gray need each other to overcome their different predicaments. Performance is a big theme throughout The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and the power imbalance between a Capitol mentor and an unwilling tribute nearly assured of an impending violent death isn’t lost on either star-crossed lover. He hides his true, bitter self from his peers to court influence, and Lucy Gray needs to win over her mentor before she can hope to win the games. “Lucy Gray is a very different kind of character from Katniss. She’s able to manipulate. She’s a survivor and has different ways of trying to survive,” says Lawrence. The early Hunger Games were very different from the 74th year that Katniss and her male District 12 counterpart, Peeta Mellark, competed in. The 1oth Hunger Games marks some important debuts, including the arena gifts from Capitol audience sponsors and the odds that may (or may not) be ever in tributes’ favor. The flamboyant Flickerman host is new here, too, though in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, it’s Lucretius “Lucky” Flickerman, played by Jason Schwartzman, a relative of The Hunger Games’ memorably creepy emcee, Caesar (played by Stanley Tucci).

IMAGE CREDIT: LIONSGATE/MURRAY CLOSE

Also absent from the early Hunger Games are the elaborate arenas of Katniss’ time. But fans missing the choreographed tidal waves, poison gas, and clock faces of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire will find no less thrills in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The pyrotechnics are definitely still there, but the playing field itself is more like a Roman gladiator arena. “What I really enjoyed is that [the Hunger Games in post-war Panem] feels much more rooted in reality and feels more authentic and impactful because of that. You can imagine there’s really nowhere to run, nowhere to hide,” Lawrence says. This is also a weaker Capitol than audiences have seen before, fresh from “winning” the first war against the rebellious districts. The Snows weren’t the only wealthy family brought to desperate ends, and the city reflects the postwar turmoil in its design. Lawrence and production designer Uli Hanisch (Cloud Atlas, The Queen’s Gambit) leave rubble on the streets, with spindly cranes building and rebuilding a foreboding Capitol skyline. “We definitely were looking at reconstruction eras, stories post-World War II,” Lawrence explains. “I think that influenced ways of looking at cities not long after big, big battles and heavy loss. Looking at Germany, Year Zero and The Third Man and things like that.” Lawrence is drawn to projects with an emphasis on world-building, and it’s continued to be the biggest appeal of returning to the Hunger Games. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is, after all, a period piece set in a fictional world. Bringing the Capitol’s darker days to visual life allowed Lawrence’s team to create the beginnings of a realistic feel that could be in conversation with the original series’ look. The unforgiving regime of the Capitol is the true evil in the Hunger Games world—every Panem citizen could be punished by those in power. By contrast, District 12 grows wild and green, an Appalachian-inspired analog that is also in keeping with the rebellious nature of its female tributes, Katniss and Lucy Gray. Returning to a world that became a cultural touchstone and was even embraced by real-world political movements felt gratifying to Lawrence, as was getting to reunite with frequent collaborators, including composer James Newton Howard. Ultimately, Lawrence hopes audiences will enjoy the grand scope of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ storytelling and see different facets of a world that is full of hope, corruption, and the morally gray spaces between. The real heart of Collins’ prequel novel casts Coriolanus Snow as a young man who has opportunities to become less self-serving, more admirable, brave, and even romantic, but who is also a natural at navigating The Capitol’s political and social arena. “Snow lands on top” is the Snow family motto, but what Coriolanus has to lose to get there makes him the perfect child to grow into the perfect villain to cast a long shadow over The Hunger Games. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes opens in theaters on Nov. 17.

A VILLAIN’S

VILLAiN

Viola Davis as the demented Dr. Gaul WHILE CORIOLANUS Snow is destined to become the Big Bad of Katniss’ story, as a young man, even he was once afraid of someone. Dr. Volumnia Gaul is a professor at the Capitol’s elite university, the Head Gamemaker of the 10th Hunger Games, and the premiere mad scientist behind the Capitol’s experimental weapons division. She derives her pleasure from inventing new and terrifying animal “muttations” for problematic rebels and tributes to fight. Don’t let her sing-song voice and elaborate wardrobe fool you: Dr. Gaul is the biggest believer in the Capitol’s divine power and the most extreme symbol of its corruption. “Viola and I talked a

lot about Willy Wonka and how he finds joy in the creativity of his job, but that there's this sinister quality underneath it all,” says Lawrence. Even though her job is dark, Dr. Gaul approaches it with love and joy, a flair that’s apparent in an eccentric artist whose medium happens to be poisonous snakes and sophisticated spycraft. She believes the Hunger Games need to exist and that people need to watch them in order to understand her devotion to controlling the chaos of rebellion against the Capitol’s order. And unfortunately for Corlyo, Dr. Gaul takes a keen personal interest in shaping young minds.

NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

Fall of

Krakoa MARVEL SCRIBE GERRY DUGGAN BRINGS US INTO THE ABSOLUTE CHAOS UNFOLDING IN THE WORLD OF X-MEN COMICS. BY J IM DANDENEAU

IMAGE CREDIT: MARVEL

The Krakoan era has been a golden age for Marvel’s mutants, which is very much at odds with how things usually go for the oft-persecuted X-Men in the comics. And this is why writer Gerry Duggan just up and killed a whole bunch of them.“I think my favorite eras of X-Men are when their backs are just completely against the wall,” X-scribe Gerry Duggan tells us over Zoom. The status-quo-shattering comic books that kicked off the Krakoan era, House of X and Powers of X, hit like a bolt of lightning in 2019. Masterminds Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, and RB Silva jumped into a line that, for years, had been conspicuously downplayed by Marvel—the cost of a failure of corporate synergy—and shot it full of new energy, new purpose, and a new mission statement. The mutants—all mutants—were brought together on the living mutant island of Krakoa to form their own nation and project their power as a people out into the rest of the Marvel Universe. Krakoan mutants made drugs that healed humans; they were recognized by governments as a legitimate international entity, trading with (and occasionally smuggling into) other countries, even projecting culture out into the world with mutant fashion, advertising, and an annual gala celebrating the year of mutant achievements: the Hellfire Gala. With HoX/PoX as a launching point, the X-Office, led by Hickman and editor Jordan D. White, assembled a team—a mix of veterans like Duggan, who has been writing X-Men characters for the better part of a decade on books like Uncanny Avengers and Deadpool, and rising stars—and they let these creators cut loose to weave an epic saga across multiple titles that’s still going strong four years later. The newest phase in the Krakoan story—Fall of X —kicked off at this summer’s Hellfire Gala with the mass

slaughter of mutants (and Left: Shadowkat infiltrates a bunch of humans) while an Orchis space station on a mission to find Firestar. paying off story threads Right: Kamala Khan, aka Ms. that were seeded years ago. Marvel, saves a fellow mutant from a bigot. And it might all mean the end of the Krakoan era as we know it. Duggan is now deep into an ongoing story that has been allowed to simmer for about 70 issues, and that slow burn has allowed him to continually add crucial ingredients: most recently, turning Iron Man into an X-book, writing an Avengers title into the X-Men line, and putting some real work into revitalizing mutant villains. “Something wonderful happened [with House/Powers of X],” Duggan says. “But the cost of that was that we were NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

a little poorer of our villains, [who were now] alongside the heroes.” The X-Men have a tendency, as alliances shift and status quo changes, to assimilate, embolden, or make obsolete their mutant villains. To contrast the bad guys who joined up with the X-Men to form a united mutant nation, such as classic villains Magneto and Mr. Sinister, Duggan and crew needed to pit the X-Men against some new heavy hitters—people with resources and skills the mutants didn’t possess and networks that would enable them to do their worst. The most consistent Orchis’ villains of the Krakoan point era have been Orchis, a shadowy agency made up of view of Hydra, SHIELD, and is that AIM scientists working to prevent a mutant takeover Krakoa is of the world. “Orchis’ point an invasive of view is that Krakoa is an invasive species, and the species, mutants are a mistake,” and the Duggan says. Orchis is, like any mutants bureaucracy, sprawling are a and occasionally ridiculous. They have HR mistake. and communications departments. They sell merch, place opinion pieces in major newspapers, publish press releases, and staff research departments with apes with doctorates; all wildly normal functions of a standard think tank or public policy shop. The policy Orchis is researching and advocating for just happens to be the extermination of mutantkind. As one would expect from a group with such an openly genocidal mission statement, Orchis members are truly awful. They’ve got AIM scientists perverting Krakoan technology, as MODOK is doing with the Captain Krakoa suit. They have evil geneticist Dr. Stasis sabotaging Krakoan medicine and turning it deadly for the humans taking it. And we haven’t even touched on the looming threats in the background of the organization: Moira X, the cyborg body housing Moira MacTaggert’s 1,500 hundred-yearold, 10-times-resurrected brain; Nimrod, the deadliest mutant-killing robot in history; and Omega Sentinel, the machine who is trying to change her dark fate after her consciousness was sent back from a bleak future where the machines always lose to the mutants. In fact, the only thing missing from Orchis and the mutant villain enaissance is a booming, monologuing regent with a penchant for referring to himself in the third person. Duggan’s fixing that, though. It’s time for DOOM. Victor Von Doom. “Doom has his own X-Men team, the X-Men of Doom,” Duggan says of the mutant team debuting in 44

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the December issue of X-Men. “In ‘House of Doom,’ we go right back to Xavier announcing Krakoa to the world and see that from Doom’s point of view. I didn’t intend for it to be very funny, but Victor going ‘Oh, hell no’ is great.” And then there’s the newest big-name Orchis villain: Feilong, a posthuman businessman furious that the mutants terraformed Mars before he could conquer it, and who decides to take his anger out on… Stark Industries. “I’m writing a solo Iron Man book that is in my mind, effectively Armor Wars 3,” Duggan explains. “Those first two Armor Wars were really what happens when [Tony’s] enemies get [his armor]. Well, what happens when everyone’s enemy gets your technology?” Feilong manufactures a hostile takeover of Stark Industries, subsumes the company within Orchis, and loads Orchis Sentinels (anti-mutant killer robots) up with Iron Man’s technology, and this makes Tony mad. It also almost fully integrates the main Iron Man series within the X-Men’s narrative. In fact, one of the most amazing parts of the Fall of X books so far is how integrated with the rest of the Marvel Universe the story is. Orchis is explicitly fascist in the context of this story, making them arguably a more dangerous threat to the broader Marvel Universe than your typical symbiote god or astrally projected ex-lover. “Orchis fascism does not give an inch,” Duggan says. “Every fascism has one thing in common, and it’s that it’s uncompromising. So there was nothing that Krakoa could have done to mitigate or negotiate their way to make Orchis happy.” But who better to fight fascists than Captain America? Cap returns to the X-line leading the new Unity Squad—a joint task force of mutants (Psylocke, Penance, Rogue) and Avengers (Cap, Quicksilver, and, uh, Deadpool). This team is brutal, dispatching Orchis troops with lots of carving and blood, but as Duggan tells us, “the aggressor sets the tone for any combat, and it’s kill or be killed” for the mutants. Duggan clearly has plans—the Captain Krakoa story has been bubbling for over a year now, and Orchis has the new mystery CK leading a new Mutant Liberation Front as a false flag operation in Orchis’ PR war. Cap gathers up the Unity Squad to fight all that. Duggan has spent six years setting all these pieces up on the board and working with some of the sharpest creators in the industry to build a complex, dynamic world for the biggest franchise in superhero comics. He’s got Tony Stark as the Black King of the Hellfire Club fighting to claw his technology out of mutant-hunting robots. Captain America is punching fascists again. The X-Men are on the run, living in sewers as they stage hit-and-run attacks on anti-mutant forces. Will everything pay off? And what does a post-Krakoa status quo look like for the X-Men? “When we leave, I hope everyone says, ‘Wow, they never didn’t have it,’” Duggan says. If things keep hitting the way they have been, that probably won’t be an issue. Clockwise from left: A pissed off Shadowkat hunts down Firestar after the events of the Hellfire Gala. Tony Stark plays a big part in Fall of X. Emma Frost meets Kingpin after a mutant massacre.

NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

LO KI IS A M ULTI V ER SA L EP

THAT IS THE KEYS TONE IN AN

EVE N BIG GER MULTIVE RSA L EPIC , BUT IT IS A LS O, M O R E IM

TH E ST O RY O F O N E G UY —L

P O RTA N TLY,

O KI HI M SE LF.

(Left to right) OB (Ke Huy Quan), Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku), Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Mobius (Owen Wilson) prepare for action.

BY C H R IS FA R

N EL L

OK I H AS B E E N ON A J OU RNEY.

From would-be royal assassin and usurper, to attempted Earth conqueror, to redemption, to death, to that death turning out to be fake, to a second redemptive arc, to actual death, all the way back to attempted Earth conqueror again, and then, finally, along one last redemptive arc in season one of the Disney+ series, Loki. But there is always a challenge when a character shifts from villain to antihero to straight-up hero. Part of Loki’s appeal has always been that he is a loveable bastard. So now that Loki has gone full hero, where is there for him to go next? “Loki has clearly changed over the course of that first season, and he knows he’s changed,” says Kevin Wright, co-executive producer on Loki seasons one and two. “He might not be able to tell you exactly what that change is, but something in him is different.” Even when Loki is fighting for the greater good, he is a character that has never fitted well into a black-and-white picture of morality. “We talked a lot about the idea of heroism and villainy in the Marvel universe, which is usually very binary,” Wright says. “The villains have been getting more complicated in the last couple of years, the stories empathize with where they’re coming from, and Loki has never been either/or. Our show has pushed him towards heroism, and we wanted to investigate—if you see yourself as a hero, what if the rest of the universe doesn’t see it that way?” Wright describes himself as “the longest-tenured person working on Loki.” When we speak to him, it is nearly five years to the day since he first pitched the concept of Loki to the studio. “Tom [Hiddleston] and I have been show-running this thing for five years. We’ve been very hands-on from the kernel of an idea to pre-production and through to delivery,” Wright says. While writers, actors, directors, and SFX professionals each come into the production for their part of the process, it is Wright’s job to shepherd the series from beginning to end. “We have to put together the team and get everyone on the same page,” he says. That team includes season one’s head writer, Michael Waldron, its director, Kate Herron, and writers Eric Martin (who takes over head writer duties this season) and Bisha K. Ali (who has gone on to become head writer for Ms. Marvel). “At every stage of production, there is a whole new group of people who need to understand what we’re doing. Marvel usually has one person like me on every production who is there from beginning to end as the team shifts around them,” Wright points out. “They carry forward not just the literal story but all the paths and choices you went down during writing and production. You are a kind of living document.” In season two of Loki, the idea Wright sought to carry through the production was Loki’s more nuanced approach NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

LOKI

WHEN WE DEVELOPED WE WERE TRYING TO BE AS INSULAR AS POSSIBLE. ” to heroism. While he takes great pains to point out this does not happen in Loki season two, Wright poses the question, “Say Loki ran into Thor? Would Thor even believe this new virtuous path that Loki’s been on? Everyone would be skeptical of it. If this Loki drops down and tells the Avengers that war is coming, are they going to trust him?” Wright is excited about how that will unfold in a universe where heroes are typically reinforced and celebrated for their sacrifices. “If you’re Loki and trying to do the right thing, do you still do the right thing if nobody’s looking?” Wright asks. “What happens if the TVA is saying, ‘We need you to be a little mischievous. We need you to lean into that stuff.’ Will he lean into that, or will he start to backslide? How can we challenge Loki’s redemption and see if it will stick?”

A N EW M U LT I V E RSE Loki season two picks up pretty much immediately where season one leaves off, but the show is returning to a very different landscape. Since we saw Kang’s stony visage in the TVA at the end of last season, we have also seen Everything, Everywhere All At Once, The Flash, and of course, Marvel’s own What If...?, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. In a media environment where you can’t throw a stick without hitting a multiverse, how does Loki retain its identity? “The clearest thing I can say from our writers’ room standpoint is that we just need to tell our story,” Wright insists. “Season one set up a bunch of rules for our world of Loki. A bunch of conflicts and dramatic events happen, and we don’t pay attention to other projects doing similar things. We lean into our story and our worldbuilding, and as a sci-fi fan who loves stories and storytelling, the most annoying thing is where you can feel the creators pivoting or changing course because of that outside noise. We have built a nice, deep world, and we’ll continue to pay off those stories and explore them for our characters.” Looking back now, with “multiverse” becoming the watchword for this entire era of the MCU saga, it is easy to see Loki as an opening gambit in a much, much larger story. However, Wright says that none of this was on his or the other writers’ minds when they planned season one. “This maybe sounds false to say now, but I promise you this is true,” Wright says. “When we developed Loki, we were trying to be as insular as possible. We, Mike [Waldron], and Kate [Herron], and everyone involved in season one 48

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wanted to build our own little corner of the MCU. If it was cool and exciting, we figured the rest of the MCU would come to us.” He smiles as he admits, “It did!” But despite the rest of the Marvel universe coming to play in Loki’s sandbox, the plan for season two has remained close to that insular story that Wright and his team originally wanted to tell. There were discussions about whether to do a time jump.

Clockwise, from above: Loki and Mobius concoct a plan; Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) returns; TVA tech expert OB (Ke Huy Quan) is introduced.

Development on season two started early, with conversations taking place during the filming on season one’s Lamentis sets. “We were with Tom on the backlot kicking around how to continue the story for season two,” Wright recalls. The MCU schedule has changed a bit over time and Loki season two was due to precede Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, which would also involve Kang. At that point, Loki season two looked radically different. “In one version, we go full-on multiversal war, but even as we were saying that, it felt completely wrong, jumping to something we haven’t earned yet,” says Wright. Eventually, Wright settled on staying in that unnerving moment that marks season one’s cliffhanger ending. “We want to continue living in the moment where our show ended, with huge character conflict between Loki

IMAGE CREDIT: DISNEY+

and Sylvie. That moment where we see B-15 and Mobius,” Wright says. “They just made a huge decision, so what’s happening at the TVA now? Is everyone in the TVA on board? Probably not for something as radical as this. What happens when the TVA starts finding out they are variants? If Loki can find Mobius, what is he going to tell him? All of this stuff will have bigger consequences for the MCU, but it’s our story, the story we started in season one.”

HE W HO R E M A I N S Of course, the most obvious repercussion Loki’s first season had for the rest of the MCU was its introduction of He Who Remains, otherwise known as Kang the Conqueror. Many were surprised to see him when he appeared in a citadel outside of time at the climax of the series, not least

because many viewers expected him to look like Tom Hiddleston and have a penchant for green. However, Wright says the idea of Kang as He Who Remains was part of the show’s concept from the off. “In development, it was always the idea of He Who Remains, who is not Kang in the comics, but for us, it was always going to be a version of him,” Wright says. In the comics, He Who Remains is a character called Immortus, who shares Kang’s love of the green/purple aesthetic and has a complex personal timeline that depicts him as a future incarnation of the Conqueror. “We just thought [He Who Remains] would be a great title for the last man standing in the multiversal war,” Wright says. The idea of Loki as He Who Remains was considered— briefly. “In the writers’ room, all ideas are on the table, and there were conversations about what if Loki was He Who Remains,” Wright recalls. “Those conversations didn’t get very far; I don’t think it even got to Tom because while there is something fun about that, and there are compelling aspects to it, it makes the universe feel small. So, it was always going to be He Who Remains, always a version of Kang.” Wright is determined to focus on his series’ story and his corner of the multiverse, but the fact remains the MCU has come to where Loki is, which means whatever happens in season two is going to have widespread consequences. Has that affected the story? “Not in a big way,” Wright says. “There is a lot of communication. Just yesterday, I was talking to the What If...? team who are preparing their next plans. A very lovely gentleman, Drew Greenberg, tasked with keeping track of all this stuff. It’s fluid, but there is constant communication, so people aren’t stepping on each other’s toes.” As for Loki’s future, Wright says there is still room for more. “I think there are a lot more stories to be told about Loki, Sylvie, and the TVA. We’re dreaming stuff up. But we wanted to give season two a proper conclusion to the story that we started in season one,” says Wright. “But these are characters and a world that we’d love to continue with if there’s a way to do it organically.” Episodes of Loki season two are available to stream now on Disney+. Episodes drop weekly. NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

A Horror FeasT “ And what if I come up with something that’s more sick, more t wisted, and more crazy? ”

ELI ROTH’S ESSENTIAL HAPPY HOLIDAY SLASHERS

BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)

“Bob Clark started three subgenres. He started the holiday slasher film with Black Christmas; he started the sex comedy with Porky’s; and he started the modern Christmas comedy with A Christmas Story. You can even argue that he started the zombie-vampire hybrid movies with Deathdream. He was such an innovator and such an incredible director. You definitely have to put the original Black Christmas up there. That’s the one that started it all.”

IMAGE CREDIT: TRISTAR PICTURES/ERNESTO RUSCIO/GETTY IMAGES/ UFDC

— Eli Roth

Eli Roth is done treating his Thanksgiving slasher movie like a joke. BY DAVID CROW

s it turns out, what makes a good trailer does not necessarily make a good movie. Or, rather, what makes a hilarious and debauched fake trailer, one sandwiched between Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino at their most gonzo, does not automatically translate to modern horror cinema. This is the realization that allowed Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving slasher movie to transition from a ghoulish gag 16 years ago to the potential holiday horror staple of today, and one that is coming home just in time for Turkey Day. “When Quentin first pitched us Grindhouse and doing these trailers, he said, ‘You guys will own the trailers… [and] if you ever want to turn it into a feature, it’s a great way to test it out,’” Roth says on a sunny morning in September. His memory is in reference to the 2007 double-feature film event, which was designed as a nostalgic return to the type of sleazy exploitation cinema that filmmakers of a certain age and sensibility grew up adoring. For Roth, this meant getting “any movie that was in the horror section that just looked completely inappropriate for 13-year-olds.” Thus, between Tarantino and Rodriguez’s double bill, a handful of genre auteurs crafted their own tonguein-cheek fake trailers with the nastiest in-jokes they could imagine. In Roth’s hands, this became Thanksgiving, a loving satire of the crude and shameless Halloween knockoffs

HALLOWEEN (1978)

“John Carpenter’s Halloween, of course, is the one that [cemented the subgenre]. Black Christmas was a hit, but not a hit on the level of Halloween, which changed independent cinema as we know it.”

he and his childhood best friend Jeff Rendell rented by the half-dozen. “We’d try to budget the whole weekend on how many you could watch,” Roth explains, recalling how they’d squeeze three in on Friday night, four across Saturday, and maybe one more on Sunday. Hence the reason the faux Thanksgiving trailer was such an irresistible opportunity to indulge the ridiculousness: the sizzle reel begins with Rendell dressed as a Pilgrim beheading a Thanksgiving Day parade mascot and ends with the same nameless killer abusing a family’s dinner turkey in the most intimate of ways. If it actually came out in 1980, it’d be a wonder if it didn’t get the X-rating. The making of the faux trailer was the easy part, however, with the pair banging out a script and shooting it in a couple of days for very little money. Roth likens the experience to film school. But, actually turning that into a feature stumped them draft after draft. “We spent a long time thinking about ‘how are we going to turn this into a feature film,’ and we realized that we were just writing filler scenes between the moments in the trailer,” Roth says. “That’s not really a great way to go about writing a scary movie.” For more than a decade, the Grindhouse trailer felt as much like a trap as it did an opportunity. That is until Roth had an idea that opened the movie up: What if the faux Thanksgiving trailer was for a movie that actually existed—and his new film would be the 2020s reboot? “Thanksgiving was a movie that was made in 1980 for

MOTHER’S DAY (1980)

“It’s written by Warren Leight with Charles Kaufman, and it’s this incredible satire. It’s a brutal movie. I mean, the stuff they do in this movie is pretty sick. But I didn’t realize how much Hostel II took from Mother’s Day. Every one of my films in some way takes from Mother’s Day. And it’s a movie that asks you to follow and sympathize with the killers.”

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make a slasher that was still a throwback to the schlock of their youth, but one which wasn’t beholden to replicating what they put together over a weekend in 2006. It could be a 2023 movie with 2023 concerns. It could even have different kills. “When I’m recreating it with a budget, I’m going, ‘Man, we can’t get outdone by the trailer,’” Roth says. “And what if I come up with something that’s more sick, more twisted, and more crazy? [For some kills] if we can’t do it better than the trailer, we’ve got to do

MY BLOODY VALENTINE (1981)

“It’s such a fun movie. What I love about My Bloody Valentine is it’s set in America, and in the end credits, they sing a song where they recap the story of the movie in very thick Canadian accents. But it’s a really good game of guessing who the killer was. That movie was definitely butchered by the studio because I think it was the first horror movie released after the Reagan assassination attempt when [horror] had to pull back.”

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

IMAGE CREDIT: TRISTAR PICTURES/ PARAMOUNT PICTURES

real,” Roth explains while a laugh begins to gather across the corners of his eyes. “It was so violent and offensive that the day it was released, every print was destroyed; they were ordered burned, and every print was confiscated, thrown in a pile, and incinerated because it was the most offensive movie ever made… The scripts were also burned, the director went into hiding and disappeared, never to be heard from again, and the only thing that survived was the trailer.” Suddenly, Roth and Rendell had the freedom to

something different.” The result is something that, intriguingly, hits a little closer to home for its director. In the grander sense, this is because Thanksgiving is homing in on the modern world, commenting on how what once was a holiday for family gatherings and good cheer has been co-opted by commercialism and turned into something ugly: Black Friday, long lines, and consumerism as bloodsport. Yet by setting Thanksgiving around Plymouth, Massachusetts— the final landing site for the Mayflower in 1620 and near where Roth grew up—the filmmakers opened up one of the core elements of a traditional slasher movie; it has a complex mythology and backstory. Traditionally, a classic slasher’s mythos deals with something in the main characters’ immediate past, a crime or traumatic event that happened years ago with secrets that will not stay buried. Michael Myers killed his sister in that house over there! But in Thanksgiving, Roth was able to expand on the idea of a shared history by making it about the holiday itself. In his own youth, before Black Friday was a thing, Roth has fond memories of school plays about the Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing bread during the first Thanksgiving. But when he asked about the

SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (1984)

“We went to see Silent Night, Deadly Night, and it changed our lives... I think we were 12 years old, and we were not supposed to see it. The guy at the ticket booth refused to sell Jeff’s dad the tickets because Jeff’s dad and his younger brother were gonna go into Supergirl, and the guy said you have to accompany these kids. And Jeff’s dad screamed at the ticket guy, ‘These kids see everything anyways, what the hell difference does it make?!’”

smallpox blankets, he was told not to focus on that; they could go to a tourist site called Plymouth Plantation instead. (The name has since been changed.) Says Roth, “So we started looking into these themes of Thanksgiving and what it originally was and why it happened… researching Plymouth and the historical Massachusetts, and the foundations of America, and we learned that the first governor was called John Carver.” The smile returns to the director’s eyes. “He came over on the Mayflower and was the first Governor of New Plymouth Colony. So the mask is him.” As the director concedes, sometimes “history’s handing you a gift.” That’s right: when an ax-wielding masked serial killer starts stalking the residents of Plymouth, he’ll be wearing the visage of one of their most prominent ancestors. It’s an amusingly perverse idea which added to the film’s entire backstory. Explains Roth, “It was the 400-year anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival in 2020, and they would’ve made all these masks [of John Carver]. So there’s a bunch of masks lying around. They can’t give them away. Everyone in town has a John Carver mask, so it’s literally a mask anyone can get.” Which means the killer can be anybody, at least in Plymouth. Roth ruefully imagines that one day, “Some kid will watch this movie and maybe want to write a report on John Carver based on the fact that they love Thanksgiving so much.” In the end, though, Roth hopes he made something that lived up to the original trailer and the idea of creating a slasher movie that is still as timeless as the stab-a-thons he grew up loving. In an ideal world, he’d even like to imagine it existing in the video section of a video store. “Right between Halloween and Silent Night, Deadly Night would be Thanksgiving,” he says. A murderer’s row for the whole season. Thanksgiving opens on Nov. 17, 2023.

APRIL FOOL’S DAY (1986)

“Love April Fool’s Day, [which is directed by] Fred Walton. A lot of people don’t like it because of the ending. They feel like it negates the movie, but I really love it. I think the kills are really creative; they’re really fun. It has that Agatha Christie, 10 Little Indians quality to it of people going out onto this remote island and getting picked off one by one. I remember seeing that movie in the theater, thinking it was really inventive.”

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›››

THE REAL

GHOST

THE ANIMATED SPINOFF TO GHOSTBUSTERS WAS A GEM OF THE ’80S. WRITERS DENNY MCCOY AND PAMELA HICKEY TAKE US BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE COOLEST CARTOON OF ITS GENERATION. BY J A C K B E R E S F O R D

he 1980s was a golden era for TV animation. It was the decade of ThunderCats, Inspector Gadget, Transformers, Care Bears, The Smurfs, and He-Man. Yet arguably, the best of them all was The Real Ghostbusters. The show arrived at a time when studios were eager to translate box office gold into something palatable for younger audiences. It didn’t always quite go to plan, of course, as short-lived and ill-advised animated incarnations of everything from Rambo to The Karate Kid can attest. But The Real Ghostbusters was different, running for 140 episodes across seven seasons. It made changes from the film. For one thing, the title had to be tweaked due to a dispute with Filmation, who was making an animated version of the 1970s series The Ghost Busters at the same time. The Ghostbusters themselves looked a little different, too: Egon Spengler inexplicably sported a blonde pompadour, Ray Stantz was a 54

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little tubbier (and ginger), Winston Zeddemore seemed younger, while Peter Venkman suddenly became very chiseled. They also sounded slightly different. Ernie Hudson was the only original cast member to try out for a voice role on the show, but he lost to Arsenio Hall, which is awkward, to say the least. The series also turned Slimer into a sidekick character rather than an antagonist. Cosmetic changes aside, however, this DIC Enterprises and Columbia Pictures Television production retained much of what made the original movie so special, with episodes blending slapstick comedy with effective supernatural scares and strikingly surreal imagery. A lot of that had to do with executive producers Joe Medjuck and Michael C. Gross. Both had served as executive producers on the original film (Gross is even credited with creating the iconic Ghostbusters logo), and both appeared eager to carry the ethos of the movie through to the cartoon. “The most brilliant thing they did was to not change a thing from the movie,” The Real Ghostbusters writer Dennys McCoy tells Den of Geek. “When you mess with that formula, you inevitably fail. Ghostbusters has a very tight structure of four friends, or five if you count Janine. You have to base everything out of their relationship, no matter what you do.” McCoy’s writing partner and wife, Pamela Hickey, also recalls how much importance was placed on authenticity. “When you wrote for someone like Venkman, for example, he had to say things in a certain way. That was the focus when we were working on it,” she says. “The rule with Slimer was to imagine him as a seven-year-old boy. That was how you wrote for him. They made him their pet, and he’s domesticated now like a feral cat. You had to really track those characters. That faithfulness was crucial to its success.” McCoy and Hickey recall the biggest

IMAGE CREDIT: UNITED ARCHIVES GMBH / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO/IFTN

THE RISE AND FALL OF

BUSTERS

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THE RULE WITH SLIMER WAS TO IMAGINE HIM AS A SEVENYEAR-OLD BOY. THAT’S HOW YOU WROTE FOR HIM.

animated feature: 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. McCoy was working at Saban Productions as supervising producer on a series called Kidd Video when he learned Straczynski was doing The Real Ghostbusters. He immediately called Straczynski up to ask if he and Hickey could pitch for the show. Looking back, McCoy says he later realized Straczynski was “doing me a favor” by saying yes and didn’t necessarily think anything would come of it. That was until Straczynski read the resulting script, which was one of the first to focus on Winston. “Nobody was going to pitch a Winston story. They were all going to pitch stuff around Venkman,” Hickey explains. “But we remembered that amazing scene in the film where Ernie Hudson and Dan Aykroyd are driving across the Brooklyn Bridge.” The scene, in which Winston talks about the Bible and theorizes that the recent spate of spiritual activity could be linked to the potential onset of Judgement Day, proved to be a major inspiration.

IMAGE CREDIT: UNITED ARCHIVES GMBH / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO/ PHOTO BY COLUMBIA PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

compliment ever paid them by Medjuck and Gross was when they said they could pick up one of their scripts, remove all of the character names, and still know exactly which of the Ghostbusters was saying each line. “That was the challenge,” Hickey says. “But that was also how much we all loved these characters. They got stuck in your head.” Hickey and McCoy have enjoyed a prolific writing partnership that includes over 50 different credits. It was their agent who first floated the idea of them writing for animation. As freelance creatives at the time, the idea appealed because, as Hickey puts it, they “needed some money for an air conditioner and changing table for a baby.” Their first script was for the 1980s series Heathcliff, a cartoon based on the comic strip of the same name, which featured the legendary voice of Mel Blanc. McCoy recalls submitting a script that was “sight gag after sight gag.” It went over well, and the pair quickly warmed to the idea of writing for animation. Fast forward a couple of years, and after seeing Ghostbusters at the movie theater, McCoy learned that an old acquaintance, J. Michael Straczynski, had recently been hired as story editor for a cartoon series based on the film. Straczynski would go on to create Babylon 5, write comics for Marvel and DC, and pen scripts for Thor, World War Z, and many more. He had been hired to join original writers Len Janson and Chuck Menville on The Real Ghostbusters after ABC’s initial order of 13 episodes was suddenly bolstered by a further 65 for broadcast syndication. The additional episodes meant the show needed more writers. While Straczynski, Janson, and Menville wrote many themselves, they were joined by a host of talented writers from the world of sci-fi and animation. There was Michael Reaves—who would go on to highly-acclaimed work on Disney’s Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series—as well as future Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine scribe Marc Scott Zicree. John Shirley, a fantasy and horror writer who penned the 1994 movie The Crow, contributed episodes, as did David Gerrold, a writer on the original Star Trek series. Mark Edward Edens, who later developed the iconic X-Men animated series, worked on the show, as did Richard Mueller, Kathryn Drennan, Steve Perry, and Linda Woolverton, to name but a few. Woolverton went on to make history as the first woman to write an

Top: Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson (in the background) and Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, directed by Ivan Reitman. Above: The cartoon versions of Egon Spengler and Peter Venkman from The Real Ghostbusters.

“Winston cracks the case right there,” Hickey says. “We saw that, and right away, there was more to him than meets the eye. He’s a very literate guy.” The result was “Boo-Dunit,” an inventive episode that saw Winston take center stage after the Ghostbusters are called out to the estate of recently deceased crime author Agatha Grisley, where occupants are being terrorized by the ghosts of characters from her final unfinished novel. “We made Winston a big fan of murder mysteries. So there was then this whole thing where he had to solve this mystery involving ghosts in order to stop people getting killed in the real world,” McCoy says. Straczynski loved the script, and Hickey and McCoy went on to produce nine more during the show’s run, making them two of the most prolific writers on the series. “Every time they wanted a weird story, they’d come to us,” McCoy says. “It was a very interesting environment because the syndicated shows were run by [Straczynski] where we had a lot of freedom. But the episodes for ABC, which were run by Len [Janson] and Chuck [Menville], were under network protocols which were very strict.” McCoy describes working on the syndicated episodes as “no holds barred. You could get away with a lot more as long as you stayed faithful to the characters. The sky was the limit.” This environment gave birth to one of the very best episodes of The Real Ghostbusters: “The Devil to Pay.” It sees the gang sign up for a game show in order to win a trip to Tahiti. However, they soon discover it’s being run by the Devil himself, and if they lose, he gets to claim their eternal souls as his prize. “It started with us asking, ‘What would they do if they were on a game show with the Devil?’ And just went from there,” Hickey says. “To be honest, a lot of the writing was us just sitting there for a couple of days trying to crack each other up. ‘What kind of game would you play with the Devil?’ Dennys would ask, and I would be like Wheel of Fortune.’” At the end of the episode, the Ghostbusters are strapped to a giant spinning wheel where they must confess a past misdeed to escape the Devil’s clutches. McCoy ranks it as his personal favorite. Not everyone was quite so enamored with them summoning Satan for a kids’ TV show, though. “What’s scary about it is that we got it broadcast,” McCoy laughs. “Oh my God, we got NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

THERE WAS ALWAYS THIS IDEA THAT KIDS HAVE TO HAVE SOMEONE THEIR OWN AGE IN THEIR CARTOONS. BUT HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN WATCHING BUGS BUNNY?

“I remember this one scene where the Ghostbusters were supposed to be eating a pizza,” McCoy says. “But pizza wasn’t really a big thing in South Korea at the time, so they ended up drawing it looking like a seven-layer cake. It was deep. Anyway, they didn’t want to pay to redo it, so the show just ended up having the weirdest deep-dish pizza you’ve ever seen in your life.” But while the cartoon may have lacked the polish of the film, it did end up having some influence on the movie sequel. “If you notice in Ghostbusters II, they have all these little incidental scenes where Slimer appears,” McCoy says. “Well, the thing is, they did the entire movie without Slimer. It was only when Gross and Medjuck told them that was the most popular character in the cartoon that they put him in.” The influence worked both ways, though, as McCoy explains. “We had a story we wanted to do, and we knew it was good,” McCoy says. “We pitched it to Straczynski for the syndicated shows. He loved it, but when we sent the script through, it was rejected. So we went to Gross and Medjuck for the network. Again, they loved it. We sent the script in, and it was rejected.” It was only when they went to see Ghostbusters II that the truth emerged. “The crux of our story had been that the Statue of Liberty comes to life. So when we saw the film, it suddenly made sense.”

IMAGE CREDIT:UNITED ARCHIVES GMBH / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

so much shit. We had every evangelical right-wing religious nut in the world complaining about it. Even my own brother, who was born again, gave me shit about it.” Hickey and McCoy took inspiration from a variety of sources, both contemporary and otherwise, for their ideas. “I have a background in folklore, so we were also looking into stuff like that we could use,” McCoy says, recalling the episode “Banshee Bake A Cherry Pie?” in which an Irish charttopping singer is revealed to be a Banshee intent on wreaking havoc on the world. Elsewhere, episodes like “The Long, Long, Long etc. Goodbye” served as an ode of sorts to Philip Marlowe stories—not something you would see in many children’s cartoons—while “Don’t Forget The Motor City” saw the guys head to Detroit to deal with some pesky gremlins, where they meet a character who looked a lot like Aretha Franklin, even if she was rather carefully referred to as “the Queen of Soul.” Not that that quite went to plan. “We were supposed to avoid saying Aretha Franklin,” Hickey recalls. “But at the end of the episode, I don’t know how it happened, they had the Ghostbusters singing ‘Respect.’ I don’t know how they got away with it because it was the whole R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” The fact that the series was animated in South Korea to save money also led to similarly bizarre moments.

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

Hickey believes The Real Ghostbusters had the potential to run much longer—but it didn’t. Instead, ABC made the cardinal sin of tinkering a little too much with the original formula. Eager to improve ratings for its Saturday Morning lineup of shows, the network drafted in a consultancy firm called Q5, who, from the third season onwards, began making changes that altered the makeup of the show entirely. There was less satire and less of the subtle, sophisticated verbal humor that had made the cartoon such a fine sparring partner for the film. Janine’s character was also rewritten, moving away from the sharp-edged wisecracker who had more in common with Annie Potts’ version of Janine from the film and becoming, to their way of thinking, warmer and more appealing to young female viewers. It could have been even worse, with the consultants suggesting at one point that Ray Stantz be written out entirely. The likes of Straczynski and Reaves objected to the changes, and McCoy and Hickey felt much the same, highlighting one other noticeable shift in focus that hindered the series: the Junior Ghostbusters, a team of children drafted in to help out the adults on

several episodes. “There was always this idea that children have to have somebody their own age in their cartoons,” McCoy adds. “But how do you explain watching Bugs Bunny? He was obviously a 25-year-old guy.” “It’s a fallacy because if you look at the most successful cartoon in the world today, it’s something like One Piece where there are no children, and yet everyone watches it,” Hickey says. “Kids appreciate a good story as much as anybody, and they don’t care if it comes out of an adult space or a kid’s one.” Had the show continued, the writing duo would have loved to explore other areas of the Ghostbusters universe. “We always wanted to do a spinoff with Louis and Janine,” McCoy says. “They’re Ghostbusters, but they’re not Ghostbusters. It would be interesting to have them as a team.” So, here’s the big question: Would McCoy and Hickey do it all again if they were asked to work on firing up some more animated proton packs for a new set of cartoon adventures for the gang? “If they came to us and said, ‘Can you do an animated series?’ Sure, we would probably say yes,” McCoy says. “We could do that.”

Above: The Real Ghostbusters, with proton packs at the ready. Ray’s a bit bigger and ginger, Egon’s got a fancy hair do, Venkman is all chisled, and Winston does not sound like Winston. Below left: The Ghostbusters look very much like they are crossing the streams.

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The Collector’s Digest powered by

hOLy GrAilS → THe

Of TOY COLlECTinG THE MUST-HAVE TOYS FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD ARE NOW FETCHING SOME SERIOUS PRICE TAGS ON THE SECONDARY MARKET. BY CHRIS CUMMINS

This story is part of an editorial series presented by eBay.

ong before Charles Foster Kane ever uttered the word “Rosebud,” people were spending huge amounts of time, effort, and, of course, money trying to track down beloved items from their childhood. There’s something almost indescribably warm about old toys and possessions long gone. We infuse these things with memories of a time when life seemed dreamlike and full of potential. We live in an age of genuine wonders due to technology. For example: whatever “that thing” from your own past that you yearn to be reunited might be, it is simply a click away via eBay. With that in mind, we encourage you to take a trip down memory lane with us (and, if necessary, check your bank balance) because right now we are going to share with you a variety of beloved playthings that are considered holy grails for toy collectors and retronauts alike. Enjoy!

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Marvel World Adventure Playset ($5,000 - $9,000)

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teEnage MuTant NiNJa TurtLes TecHnodRomE ($500-$700)

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Cowabunga! We start this list with one of the especially cool TMNT offerings. Imagine eating pizza here? Whoa.

Nearly 50 years after its initial release, the Marvel World Adventure Playset from obscure (and long gone) Milton Bradley subsidiary Amsco remains the most jawdroppingly cool collectible based on properties from the House of Ideas. What makes this set so incredible is how it deftly recreates the Marvel Universe—the New York City parts of it, anyway. The Baxter Building, the Daily Bugle, Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum, etc., are all represented here via double-sided printed pieces of cardboard. The set pieces are cool, and the mini figures (also cardboard) feature a diverse array of characters from the comics, ranging from The Fantastic Four to Aunt May. Due to the multiple pieces included in the set, along with the fragility of half-century cardboard, finding a Marvel World Adventure Playset in decent condition will cost you big time. Worth it, though. As for Amsco, it also produced similar playsets for Planet of the Apes and The Waltons (!), which go for far less on the market.

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ClaSh of The TiTaNs KraKen ($500-$800)

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Release the Kraken! Mattel did just that in their 1981 toy line for the Harry Hamlin sword and sandals epic Clash of the Titans. Highlighted by special effects from none other than Ray Harryhausen, the movie offered up throwback visual thrills that were (tragically) becoming passé in the wake of blockbusters like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Mattel blundered their release of the film’s toys, straight up not offering action figures of the majority of the Titans who were clashing and also making the line’s centerpiece monster—this Kraken—nigh impossible to find at retail. It eventually turned up in closeout stores, though, but by then, Kraken mania had died down for all except the creature’s most hardcore fans.

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

OR’S COL L EC T DIGE S T

G.I. Joe U.S.S. FLAgG ($800-$5,000)

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With a price tag of roughly $110 and the fact that when assembled, it took up nearly eight feet of floor space, the G.I. Joe U.S.S. Flagg was never going to be much more than a niche item. Simply too expensive for most parents and overly large to be stocked heavily at retail, it remains one of the most fascinating toys of the 1980s—certainly the most hubristic. Not that the lucky few who actually got this military monster cared. For them, this is nothing short of THE ULTIMATE G.I. Joe collectible. And it still is.

–-–—×-–—––×– Star Trek MisSion tO GAmMa VI PlAyseT ($700-$1,000)

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Okay, this one is super weird. Released in the mid-1970s by then-action figure juggernaut Mego, the Star Trek Mission to Gamma VI playset attempted to recreate the sci-fi adventure of the television show. Make no mistake, it did so in excellent fashion… just a bit oddly. Everything about this playset feels casually strange—from the gigantic creature with glowing eyes whose main feature is that it can eat the Enterprise crew with its movable jaws, to an attached glove that doubles as an alien who can grab Spock and company for whatever dark fate awaits. In terms of both nostalgia and casual strangeness, the Mission to Gamma VI set helped bridge those wilderness years between Trek’s initial cancellation and cinematic relaunch. Combine that with some unique play figures (why do the non-descript aliens included here look like they are dancing?), and you’ve got one for the ages.

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SuPer Powers HaLl OF JuSticE ($100-$400)

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“Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice…” Those words are like catnip to a generation of comic fans who grew up with the various permutations of the Super Friends TV show. Beginning 50 years ago and running through 1985, these cartoons were a superhero-filled oasis on Saturday morning television that brought an array of DC characters to animation. And we couldn’t get enough of it. To correspond with the show’s Super Powers relaunch and their toy line of the same name, Kenner released the Hall of Justice playset. For reasons best left to future historians, the toy

version of the Hall was given a strange yellow, blue and red paint scheme. As for the toy itself? Well, basically, it was a place where our heroes could rest. Yep. That’s about it. There was a computer screen that featured a “Trouble Alert” notice to let Superman and company know that the time to stop playing Space Uno had come and the gang needed to do some actual heroics. This is one weird toy. However, nostalgia being what it is and the Super Powers line being frankly awesome as a whole, this set is a much-demanded one. So come on in and sit a spell. Deal with the world’s evil later.

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StAr WArs DeaTh STaR PlAYset ($1,000-$2,000)

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The tales of how there were no Star Wars figures available the Christmas of 1977 (leading to Kenner selling a literal empty package promising toys to come) is the stuff of pop culture legend. The 1978 holiday season had no such problems. Case in point: The Death Star Playset. This gargantuan toy may not have aesthetically looked like the Death Star, but who cares, given how much absolute play value was packed onto every level. Our favorite bit? The inclusion of the Dianoga trash monster in the garbage room of the detention level.

DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

Barbie Dream House

OR’S COL L EC T DIGE S T

($500-$3,000)

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One of the many noteworthy takeaways from Greta Grewig’s Barbie is how cool the iconic doll’s home is. As of writing this you can purchase a replica of the 2023 Dream House as featured in the blockbuster, but it is worth mentioning that Mattel has been issuing luxurious residences for Barbie since 1962. (As of writing this there is no Mojo Dojo Casa House for Ken). Of the various models over the decades, our

personal favorite is the late 1970s model which features a rustic color scheme and plenty of space for Barbie and friends to be their spectacular selves. In a genius bit of marketing, the house came unfurnished. By allowing children to personalize the home through picking and choosing from additional accessories that were available, Mattel offered up a play experience that was unique for everyone—making Barbie’s Dream Home a truly unique toy that still draws fans today.

Visit the eBay Collectibles instagram FOR Epic giveaways, ultra-rare collectibles, and exclusive presales. NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK

THE FOURTH WALL: FILMMAKING SECRETS UNCOVERED

A GUIDE TO UNDEAD FRANCE

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon production designer Clovis Weil offers a trip through zombie-strewn Paris. BY ALEC BOJALAD

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DEN OF GEEK | NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023

2. The School: A school of lost French children in episode two is one of the show’s more intimate designs. “The idea was to create some childish-feeling things. These children have grown up with a weird psyche, and we had drawings and paintings on the wall that evoked that. If you spend time alone in [the school] set, you

can have a strong feeling of who inhabited it and how they worked as a community.” 3. Demimonde: A postapocalyptic night club was a first for the franchise. “To be honest, that was my favorite. I loved the industrial feel of it. You can mix many things together. We have a classical statue inside a sewer with graffiti. At first, it was written [to be in] the catacombs of Paris. That was a good spot but a bit too cliche for my taste.” 4. Zombie Environments: “Inside the [secluded] communities, there were no zombies. As soon as we were out, we had different ways to play with [the walkers]. There were some sets where we could have body parts and heads on spikes.”

IMAGE CREDIT: AMC NETWORKS

1. Paris: Working on the streets of Paris presents some unique challenges. “For a few sets, we [worked] with the VFX department. Like the Eiffel Tower sequence. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but that wasn’t shot at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower! It’s completely impossible. The most difficult part was the fact that we needed to be quick. We do things where people live. It’s hard to manage with everyone in the neighborhood.”

NEW YORK COMIC CON 2023 | DEN OF GEEK