Days before Emerald City Comic-Con, Valiant Entertainment announced a new BLOODSHOT comic series, along with a new creative team. Writer Tim Seeley is accompanied by an amazingly creative team including Brett Booth, Adelso Corona, Andrew Dalhouse, & Dave Sharpe. I had the opportunity to speak with Tim Seeley during the conference in March 2019 in Seattle.
Six months later we are on the eve of BLOODSHOT #1’s release, the following is the edited interview.
Bloodshot #1 cover by Declan Shalvey
Scott: So Bloodshot is a recent announcement.
Tim: Recently announced, but I’ve been working on it since August 2018. They start early at Valiant, they get their stuff done ahead of schedule.
S: Yeah, I think a couple years ago when I went to one of the Valiant panels with Dinesh [Shamdasani], they were on the ball, staying 6 months ahead of schedule.
T: Yes. Which everyone else’s business don’t.
S: Exactly. It is a good point to pride yourself on. When is the first issue of your Bloodshot scheduled to come out?
T: Not until September, so we have a while.
S: So at that point you’ll have been working on it for a year.
T: More than a year, I’ll have more than 12 issues done by the time the first issue comes out. Which is kind of weird, that is never done in comics.
S: So you’ll have 12 issues scripted by September, but how is the schedule For the art?
T: We’re at issue 4 right now, so we’re plenty ahead.
S: So the artist you’re working with is Brett Booth…
T: ...With Adelso Corona on inks.
S: Is this a complete reboot of Bloodshot again or is it a continuation of the Rising Spirit story?
T: No, the idea was to take a little bit of everything and make it really accessible, without abandoning any of the set up. The important touchstones for this are the last big series from Jeff Lemire (Salvation, Reborn, Harbinger Wars 2). All those things are important and happened, this will be tied into it. It will be accessible, starting with the platonic ideal version of Bloodshot. A guy on the run who has these powers, and people want to use him. He does good things even though he doesn’t have an incentive to do them, thats where our series will start. Just one big chase action scene, introducing lots of new faces and new connections and factions.
Bloodshot #1 Interior Page
S: So the jumping on point is getting ahead of the big Bloodshot film coming out in 2020?
T: Yeah. One of the things we originally talked about is if someone walking into a comic shop after the movie and says “I want some Bloodshot” this would be the book that you give them. Really accessible, doesn’t demand you having to pick something else up but doesn’t punish you either.
S: Is there any plan to have this tie into the movie at all, or is it a separate universe?
T: It’s separate. The movie is its own thing, the Valiant universe comics are going to continue being the Valiant universe comics. The movie will be an adaption of the concept, but we’re not messing it. We’re excited that it exists, and if I have to tie into a Vin Diesel movie, I’m happy to do so, but we’re not connecting it. We’re doing our own thing.
S: Did you read much Valiant in the 1990’s during their initial heyday?
T: Yeah. In the 90’s my brother and I had a system where each of us would get a certain amount of comics each month so we could get all the Valiant, Marvel, DC and Image comics. That was our deal. My Valiant books were Harbinger, Shadowman and Archer & Armstrong. My brother Steve had X-O and Bloodshot. So I read them all, but I didn’t have them, we’d just switched off on our books. Steve was into the chromium covers, he had the access to that sweet, sweet chromium.
S: That’s something I really like about Valiant, their variant covers. I know the most recent run with Quantum & Woody had all those foils variant covers. I love the novelty, give me glow-in-the-dark, scratch n sniff.
T: If it is incentive for a limited number of accounts, make it special and weird. Some readers just want to pick up the trades, but if you’re the kind of person that likes the full experience of comic book collecting, we’ve got that for you too. We’ll make an electric blood version, or whatever we end up making.
Carbon Fiber Incentive Cover by Jonboy Meyers
S: Is there any plan for you to supply any of your own artwork for the series?
T: There’s no need for me to since we have Brett. I’ve went too far as a comic writer that I haven’t really drawn my own comic in six years, when I used to do it full time. So I’ve been trying to get back to it. I’ve been doing some layout for this other book I working on. Otherwise, I only end up drawing at cons.
S: You started your career in comics as an artist on GI Joe, and then worked on Nightwing/Grayson, are you using the military/spy genre experience on Bloodshot?
T: I learned a lot about the readers of GI Joe, Bloodshot, Punisher so I know what they’re into, but I also know what I’m into. I like the crazier side of it, the high espionage stuff. So I’ll be bringing a little bit of both into. So that with some additional backdrop research, I’m trying to make the book feel semi-real, I don’t want to be too real because that would be a bummer.
S: Any chance we going to see some of a horror edge to this, with your experience with Revival and Hack/Slash?
T: Yeah. A little bit. Inherently, Bloodshot is not scary, but can be kind of grotesque. That side of the horror thing. The horror fiction story of Frankenstein, the monster, cast off experiment, Bloodshot is that.
S: Lastly, do you have any recommendations for what you’re currently reading?
T: Sure. I got a whole bunch of that I dropped in my bag for the trip here. I just checked out a couple books from Vault that are really solid that I really liked and just read Coda from Boom! That I thought was cool. The artwork is insane. I just had a change to read the first issue of Punk Mambo here by Cullen Bunn, which is right up my alley. I never have a problem finding thins to read.
Be sure to pick up this new series out Wednesday, September 25th.