One of the biggest announcements at this year’s New York Comic Con was DC Comics’ Peacemaker Presents: The Vigilante/Eagly Double Feature! Written and drawn by some comic book all-stars, and touting DC Studios head James Gunn as a story consultant, the new miniseries takes place between Seasons 1 and 2 of the Max hit Peacemaker.
During a longer podcast recording with Tim Seeley, the writer of the Vigilante half of the book, Comic Book Club talked about how the vetting process for the comic book works with Gunn, how it connects to the Eagly story by Rex Ogle and Matteo Lolli, and also how — if at all — it sets up Peacemaker Season 2.
Read on for an edited section of the podcast about Peacemaker. And you can listen to the whole podcast below, which includes discussions of Image Comics Local Man ending abruptly and surprisingly, the controversy over Seeley’s Rogue: Savage Land series, and much more.
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Comic Book Club: This is a big con for you. I was at the Jim Lee & Friends panel yesterday, and you had an announcement that you’ve been working on for a long time now… Peacemaker Presents: The Vigilante/Eagly Double Feature! This is a bridge between Peacemaker Season 1 and Peacemaker Season 2, and you’re writing the Vigilante story with Mitch Gerads.
Tim Seeley: Amazing artist, Mr. Miracle, and all the tons of Batman stuff. He only works with Tom King, and the joke that he was telling me was when he first got to DC, he said “I want to work with the Grayson writer,” and they gave him the wrong one, and now they finally fixed it. I want to make sure I give Mitch credit for that joke.
And just to be clear, it’s not co-writing with James Gunn, he’s a story consultant on it.
Yeah. Lots of stuff has to go through James. When we started this, we gave him a list of ideas that we wanted to do with it. He picked the one that we ended up going with. And we have to make sure it passes the James joke test. Did it make him laugh? Cool. We’re good.
So do you perform scripts for him?
Yes, I call Freddie Stroma, and we work it out together. He does those parts, I do Peacemaker. It’s great. But it’s basically a trust-based thing where we’re hired because we have the right voice for James. So it’s collaborative. It has James’s name on it. It’s got the stamp of approval.
You’ve got a very similar sense of humor, but do you find you have to tweak it at all to match what’s going on on the show?
Only so much in that this is way dirtier and way meaner and way more violent even than I usually go. I’m making it more James violent, which is, I do crazy violent stuff, but I gotta turn this into a Gunn thing. This has got to be inspired by Toxic Avenger and all the sort of things that James loves. I turned in the issue four script, and I shocked myself. I have shocked myself with this one.
I was really struck by, on the panel, you said that you’re also very inspired by the Vigilante comics.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. The version that’s in the Peacemaker show is different than the original that comes from the comics, where he’s a district attorney. But the core is the same. And so I went back and read all of Marv’s [Wolfman] Vigilante stuff, when he was in Teen Titans and all that. And then we pulled all of his major bad guys. We’re using them, for but they’ve been James Gunn-ified. If in the original version, Adrian Chase is a district attorney in New York City, and is now a waiter in Evergreen, his villains have now been similarly upgraded or downgraded, depending on your viewpoint.
So instead of being mafia guys, they’re small-town crappy crime cabal, and we play a lot with how badly Vigilante wants to have villains. He just wants so badly to have his own rogues gallery. But clearly, part of the problem is that he and Peacemaker kill most of their villains. So he’s excited to have this cabal of villains. And so we Saber and Cannon. We use those guys, which were these hitmen that were working for opposing crime syndicates, and the guy with the gun is named Saber, and the guy with the sword is named Cannon. And that’s very confusing, so we make sure that’s part of the story.
Maybe this is getting too in the weeds, but since DC studios, the whole thing is, everything is part of everything… When you’re bringing in characters like that, there’s a potential they could end up on screen someday. Did you have to cast them? Do you have to clear them?
We don’t cast them, but one of the things I did was we took the original designs for those characters, and then some of our mafia guys, and we thought about them as if they would have to build these in actual suits. So Saber and Cannon’s costumes are sort of like Vigilante’s costume. It’s not casted so much as it is, because Mitch can do such a realistic style, we’re making it look as much like it’s inside the TV show as we possibly can.
There’s the Vigilante story, and then the Eagly story from Rex Ogle and Matteo Lolli. It seems like they dovetail together.
There is a connection. Peacemaker and Eagly go on a vacation together. And so their story is them traveling. In our story, when Vigilante finds out Peacemaker is gone, he assumes he’s been kidnapped, but it’s actually that Peacemaker is like, I gotta get away from this guy. He’s driving me crazy. And then he just forgets to tell him. Our connection to it is, in issue one, Peacemaker gets a phone call and he’s like, “Oh God, I forgot to tell Adrian I’m going.” Instead of admitting he screwed up, he’s like, “I’ve been kidnapped.” So that leads into our story, and it’s Vigilante trying to track down the kidnappers of Peacemaker.
How much of a bridge is it? Does it walk us right up to Peacemaker Season 2?
It definitely connects [to] the end. I don’t want to give too much away, because of how Season 2 of the show works. There’s an interesting way we have to connect it. I’ll say that.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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