This past Wednesday, WildStorm and writer Brian Wood (DMZ, Northlanders, Demo, Local), along with the extremely talented newcomer Rebekah Isaacs, reached back a decade or so to cull some cult-favorite characters out of obscurity and back into the limelight.
DV8, a title that originally spun out of Gen13 in 1996 and cancelled in 1999, is back with an 8-issue mini-series (read our review of DV8: Gods and Monsters #1). Successfully staying true to the characters while presenting them in a whole new light, I got the chance to talk with Brian Wood and Rebekah Isaacs about the series.
CraveOnline: Hey guys, thanks for taking the time to talk with us! Brian, from what I've read you've been pushing to get DV8 up and running for some time now. What finally got it the greenlight?
Brian Wood: I think what it was that, unlike times in the past, I just went ahead and wrote the proposal. In the past I would ask the editors if I could pitch them the book, and they would decline, citing various reasons why it wasn't feasible to bring the series back. This time, when editor Ben Abernathy expressed that same reluctance, I just went away and wrote the pitch as if he had said yes. It was a minor risk and I wish I had thought to do it in the past! And when I showed it to my editor, I guess it was enough to create interest to get the series to come back.
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CraveOnline: Rebekah, how did you get involved in the project?
Rebekah Isaacs: I graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design, which every year hosted an Editors Day where students could get their portfolios reviewed by editors from pretty much all the big publishers. I met Will Dennis from Vertigo through those and kept bugging him long after I graduated and moved to NY. My stuff was never gritty enough for Vertigo but after several submissions he sent my stuff to Ben Abernathy (our editor-extraordinaire on DV8) and recommended me to Brian when he was artist-hunting for the series. I was lucky enough to meet Ben at last year's NYCC a few months later. I was afraid my miserable karaoke skills might have lost me any job prospects, but I was drawing the first page a month later.
CraveOnline: It's remarkable to me how much business can get accomplished over karaoke. What's your experience been like working with WildStorm and Brian?
Rebekah Isaacs: Absolutely great. As a writer AND artist, he knows how to describe without dictating and his writing describes the feeling of each scene and the attitude of the characters while still allowing me freedom to interpret the acting and directing of the camera myself. And the few times that he suggested an alternative angle or layout, it was always an "Aha! Why didn't I think of that?" moment. I know my storytelling has improved tremendously from his input. Ben and the rest of the WildStorm team have been the most supportive, hands-on crew imaginable. I imagine it could be tough for an artist to go from the close support network of school to working professionally without a good editor cheering you on, so I feel really lucky. And they REALLY care about this book and making it amazing.
CraveOnline: Now, Gods and Monsters essentially seems like a new beginning for DV8. Why choose to "reboot" rather than continue from where the series left off previously?
Brian Wood: I really grappled with this. I felt caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand the original series ran for a good length and a lot of hardcore fans look back on it fondly. On the other hand, that was a decade ago and the vast majority of that old run is out of print. In the end I figured that it was smarter to, in a sense, start fresh so as to appeal to a larger potential audience, not just the fans who own all the original comics. It seemed deeply unfair (as well as just plain stupid) to write a new #1 that would require a reader to, what, scour eBay and the back issue bins at comic shops to put together a 32-issue collection of comics in order to understand the new #1? Looking at it like that, it was a no-brainer.
So I tried to write this new series with as much respect for the original as I could so as not to completely leave the original fans out in the cold. In that sense I don't consider it a total reboot. I didn't make any radical changes to the line-up or the characters. As far as that's concerned, this DV8 #1 is very similar to the original DV8 #1.
CraveOnline: Why DV8? With so many successful books under your name, I'm sure you've had an opportunity to write other superhero characters at some point. What is it about the DV8 characters that appeals to you?
Brian Wood: Yeah, I've had a offers to work on company books, and I've pitched for some of them too. But I'm not known as a guy who trades in this sort of material, so I suspect it never occurs to most editors to offer me work-for-hire work. Again, to keep name-dropping my editor, Ben Abernathy taken a lot of time to talk to me about Wildstorm. I can say with certainty that this is not the last book I'll write for them.
Anyway, the appeal of DV8 goes back, literally, to my first days of trying to work in comics professionally. Warren Ellis had just launched the original DV8, which was 1996, and it blew my mind. I found the characters to be really complex, complicated, weird, messed-up people with huge story potential. I guess I just read it at the right time and it stuck with me. It's such a cliche to say, but in this case its the literal truth. I've been trying to write DV8 for my entire career.
CraveOnline: Rebekah, were you a fan of DV8 before landing the gig?
Rebekah Isaacs: Honestly... I hadn't even heard of them! I didn't start reading comics seriously until I started at SCAD, which was 2003. I read Ellis' run on the series before starting on the new mini, though, and I can definitely see why so many fans are excited to see these characters revisited.
CraveOnline: Has this been opening up any new doors for you?
Rebekah Isaacs: Definitely. I feel beyond lucky to have one of my first mainstream projects with WildStorm, and especially with Brian, because it's gained me contacts I could never have imagined a year ago. I still go nuts when someone in the industry that I know by name follows me on Twitter or adds me as a Facebook friend. I'll probably always be a star-struck fangirl. As far as what comes next, I've gotten a few offers that were REALLY hard to pass up, but for now I owe my boyfriend a long-overdue vacation and then we're finishing up a creator-owned project before I commit to anything. 
CraveOnline: Brian, is it a challenge to write these characters "accessibly", or is that something you try to ignore?
Brian Wood: For me its easy, since I am an outsider to the world of superhero comics. I wouldn't know how to pander to the spandex set even if I wanted to. With the caveats I already touched on above, I approached this with the same POV as my original creator-owned material.
CraveOnline: You've got the new volume of Demo going along with DMZ and Northlanders still going strong. Anything else coming up that you can talk about?
Brian Wood: That's a lot! But yeah, there is one other, and that's the sequel to The New York Four, which is a YA book Ryan Kelly and I did for DC Comics' Minx imprint a couple years back. We're going a second series for Vertigo. But it's a ways off still... maybe it'll appear by the end of the year. That's five books I'm writing right now, and five books is more than enough, trust me!
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CraveOnline: Are there plans yet for anything beyond Gods and Monsters? Would either of you want to continue on?
Brian Wood: Maybe! I hope I can work with Rebekah again, but what that is exactly, I can't say. I'm sure now that DV8 is published and out there in the world, she'll be fielding an awful lot of offers.
Rebekah Isaacs: For my part, I guess it all depends on whether fans want to see more when it's all said and done! There's definitely a ton of potential in these characters for great stories, so even if I don't continue on personally, I hope they reappear in the WS universe soon.
CraveOnline: Thanks so much for your time, and best of luck on the series.
