In a world where humanity has vanished and eroded away, their legacy is the setting of Angelic, an all-ages series at Image Comics from the creative team of Si Spurrier (Godshaper, X-Men Legacy), Caspar Wijngaard, Jim Campbell and designer Emma Price. While fog pervades around the abandoned and overgrown high-rises, the surviving animals have evolved and developed their own societies, with culture, language -- but also with religous-based barriers and an enforced class system. Angelic is an all-ages series, but one told with the distinctive creative voices of Spurrier and Wijngaard.

The series will focus on Qora, a teenage winged monkey whose place in her society has already been dictated by her elders. When she starts to question their faith, however, it leads her on a wonderful and -- you'll be expecting this part -- weird adventure through their world. In the first of two interviews with the creative team, CBR spoke to writer Simon "Si" Spurrier in-depth -- as he puts it, "a classic Spurrier waxathon" -- about the themes and ideas of the series. Keep an eye on the site, as we'll also have an interview with the design team of Wijngaard and Price early next week.

CBR: When did the idea for Angelic first come together with Caspar? Had you been looking to collaborate for a while?

Si Spurrier: C’mon, there’s no mystery about where the idea came from. Teenage flying monkeys versus hedonistic cyber-dolphins in the ruins of a post-Apocalpytic Earth -- it’s the oldest story in the book.

OK, I’m deflecting. Problem is I don’t think it’s possible to easily analyze how, why, where or when ideas actually strike. For me they don’t really "strike" at all, so much as accrete bit-by-bit. A whole bunch of interests, preoccupations and ambitions, all mulching together in often unexpected but always organic ways. What I can say for sure is that I’d been itching to work with Caspar since reading Limbo, and when I pelted him with some seed-notions it was the kernel of what eventually became Angelic which seemed best poised to scratch our combined itches. Which, uh, sounds gross now that I type it, but you get what I mean.

Angelic is basically a story about Earth after humanity’s disappeared. That was immediately compelling to both of us. We challenged ourselves to create a tale which appeals to youngsters as much as adults -- that naturally guided our choices somewhat -- and the list of themes we wanted to explore acted as a sort of creative monorail to ferry us from awesome element to awesome element.

We ended up with a post-human world, toxic and ruined, where the only signs of civilization belong to our shameful leftovers: animals whose ancestors were genetically modified for a war they don’t remember, ruling over childlike societies in a world they don’t understand.

Weaponized gibbons, cybernetic dolphins, quantum alley cats and a whole tribe of flying monkeys living on skyscraper rooftops, high above the toxic fumes. And that’s just for starters.

Most of our story’s seen through the eyes of one winged monkey. She’s this brave, amazing, quizzical little thing called Qora, struggling against the repressive doctrines of the tribe’s religion. She’s expected to take part in all these meaningless ceremonies -- ceremonies which will ultimately cost her her freedom when she becomes an adult -- but all she wants to do is go have adventures.

So she runs -- well, flies -- away. And that’s when things get crazy…

This is an all-ages comic series -- but what does an all-ages comic from Si Spurrier and Caspar Wijngaard look and sound like? It’s hard to imagine you’re going to ignore more mature issues just because younger readers are picking the comic up?

Well, we’re angling for a very layered vibe. I have a massive cinecrush on movies like Wall-E or The Iron Giant, because whereas to kids they’re exceptional sci-fi romps about robots and friendship, adults easily perceive jokes and themes that are far, far bigger.

For instance, there’s a pointed metaphor at the heart of Angelic. Two opposing tribes, both representing wildly different versions of a faith-based society. One of them repressive, dogmatic, controlling, the other bloated, imperialistic and arrogant. Qora and her companion (about whom I’m saying nothing here!) are caught in the middle, trying to find a third way. A lot of important, timely stuff being said, basically. But if you’re an 8 year old reading this book you’re probably not going to detect much of the allegorical stuff, focusing instead on the main event: a story about two young dreamers running away from sucky homes to lean cool stuff about themselves and their world.

...all whilst being chased by all manner of disgruntled beasties, representatives of their own clans, and the shadows of some really big secrets from the distant past.

If we’ve done our jobs right -- and I have to say the number of adorable testimonials we’re getting from our comics heroes saying stuff like "I loved it! So did my kid!" suggests we’re on the right track -- then when we say "all ages" we really do mean it.

Religion and lore seem to be a huge part of world culture in this series -- and has been appearing with regularity in your stories for a while, including the current series Godshaper. What is it that interests you in exploring religious culture, both real and imagined?

Oof. That’s a big question for me. It’s one of the core topics that sort of makes me me, if “ability to rant about it in the pub for hours” is any useful metric. The others, fwiw, being Story, Mental Unwellness and Cheese.

I have a whole crapload of homespun theories about faith and religion (which are two utterly distinct things, btw). I guess I’m a reluctant skeptic about most things -- as in: I really really really really want there to be ghosts and gods and fairies and aliens but sorry sorry sorry everything I’ve seen so far is just too damn silly and pointless. One of the reasons I’m so comfortable being a writer is that I can play with these things through the lens of fiction and not be quite so heartbroken about their sincere lack of reality. The other reason, btw, is that I can legit say that if the universe is only experienced through sensation and perception (it is) then all we can truly know for sure about reality or magic or fantasy or pretty much anything is that there’s no functional difference between changing someone’s mind and changing the Universe. Stories are wizardry, plain and simple.

Anyway, I digress. We’re talking about religion. My current conception is that all organized religious doctrines are expressions of a singular mental technology innovated by early humans, who needed give/get-style structures to guide their daily lives and stop them murdering each other. As a technology it was fabulously successful in its primary purpose, which was to allow us to transition from familial groups to tribal groups, then onwards to national and economically structured societies. But like all good technologies it had its own superfluousness built into it. We no longer need it. Now we have game theory, the Social Contract and common-bloody-sense to tell us Thou Shalt Not Kill and all the rest. We understand that “moral good” is a sensible survival strategy, and we don’t need to be blackmailed into it by by a big beard in the sky out of fear of damnation.

In my more fanciful moments I like to imagine we’re just waiting now for the next spiritual technology to come along, to help us transition to whatever comes next.

Anyway, I’ve gone tooootally off topic here.

The cogent part of all this is that Angelic deals with religion in the "social rulebook" sense. To an extent our characters -- all animals -- are like children playing at grownups. They’re on the cusp of what I mentioned earlier: this critical moment that you no longer need to be told to “be good or God will be angry”, because you’re mature enough to know it for yourself.

Qora’s grown up in this weird, repressive faith. She’s been taught from an early age that her gods -- "the Makers" -- ascended into the heavens long ago, leaving the monkeys -- "the Monks" -- as stewards of the Earth. They’re the last defenders of goodness against evil, which is personified by a gang of rampaging cybernetic rocket-powered dolphins - "the dolts" - who come tearing through town at odd intervals. The monkeys believe that if they do everything the Makers expect of them - endless rituals, cleaning and maintaining strange relics - then eventually they’ll return and cleanse the planet.

Naturally, part of Qora buys into this dogma. She’s never known anything else. But she’s also driven to rebel against how unfair it all is. The females in this society are treated appallingly, curiosity and difference are actively punished, and then there’s the awful "Alter-Peace" ceremony. I’ll come back to that, but it’s pretty chilling.

Again: this stuff is all pretty high-falutin' if you choose to seat it. But it’s not being rammed down our readers’ throats, and we’re definitely not preaching. Angelic is first and foremost an adventure about a brave young monkey who flies away from a cruel life, because she just wants to have adventures.

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Monkeys are also a recurring feature in your work -- your lead here is a winged monkey called Qora. What led you to have the lead characters be animals rather than humans? Does it create an unknown quantity for readers?

It’s about perspective, I think. These animal characters are weirdly easy to relate to because they approach the world in an inherently childlike way. They don’t understand everything around them, they’re often overly trusting and credulous, but they’re vibrant and vivacious and curious. And, yes, sometimes cruel. Spend any time watching kids at play and try telling me there isn’t a dark spark inside all of us. Qora’s troop of winged monkeys are modeled on nothing so much as a kindergarten group pretending to be grownups.

But there’s a funky anthropic disconnect too, which endows everything with borrowed fantasy. When we (the readers) see the world of Angelic we’re aware it’s a place of ruined buildings, shattered technologies, biological experiments and the scars of war. But when seen through the eyes of Qora, with her childlike wonder, her courage and her sheer bloody-minded determination to explore, it becomes a place of bright and colorful magics, the mysterious secrets of the past, mystical monsters and wise allies. Mankind occupies roughly the same cultural space for Qora as a pantheon of gods or angels would for us. It’s an utterly seductive perspective.

It’s easy to describe Angelic as a post apocalyptic story, but from the POV of Qora and the other animals we meet it’s pure adventure-fable. She’s on a quest to find out what happened to her own mythical creators.

The one thing I’d add is that I don’t entirely subscribe to the view that "child friendly" should always mean "simple," or indeed, "light." I think kids have a lot more capacity for dealing with dark, difficult, scary stuff than we give them credit for.

What kind of a character is Qora? What are her thoughts and feelings as the story begins?

She’s so great. She’s brave and optimistic and above all, curious. Her biggest problem is that she’s grown up in this society which condemns questions and applies some pretty horrible expectations on its females.

Specifically, Qora’s immediate future hinges around a horrible ritual. It’s supposed to be this big exciting Rite Of Adulthood -- a very holy moment -- but Qora’s terrified of it, with good reason. Two chosen monkeys step into "the alter-peace" -- a holy shrine at the heart of the community (clearly a piece of old gene-splicing technology). Lights flash, steam blasts. And when the pair emerge the female is pregnant. Not with some dumb, voiceless "normal" monkey, but with all the gifts of the Makers: wings, opposable thumbs, colored fur. The tribe sees this as the holiest of miracles, and a sure sign of the Makers’ favor.

But there’s a cruel twist. When a female emerges from the Alter-Peace, pregnant, she’s also had her wings surgically removed. Because -- so the males say-- a mother has no business flying around when she’s got duties to attend.

Which. Wow. Awful.

So: no wonder Qora flies away.

By issue #2 we’ve introduced a second companion-protagonist who’ll join her adventures. I won’t say much about him now, but he’s sort of her perfect foil. He’s surly and irritable where Qora is bright and adventurous. We get into a buddy-movie vibe pretty quickly.

Oh, and in issue #2 there’s a levitating whale, which is always a giggle.

The book is set on a decimated future earth, which is something we’ve seen many times over the years. But Angelic looks so totally different to anything else I can recall -- what were your inspirations in constructing this smoky, wild, inviting and threatening world?

[Laughs] Well, I guess I’ve touched on this above, with all the “post apocalypse perceived as fantasy” stuff. In short: Angelic's a story about Earth, after us. There are definitely hints from the start of a terrible war which was fought in the distant past, with animals used as assets by mankind. None of our characters really know much about that, but it’s no great leap to assume their ancestors were engineered through artificial means for a particular purpose.

I guess all I can add is that the question of “what made the world like this?” is really one of the big things at the heart of the heroine’s journey, so it’d be spoiler-suicide to answer straight out.

Basically, we worked out the history of our world when planning the comic, then jumped forward to what its remnants would look like a century or so later.

What’s it been like working together on the book? How has the collaboration grown and developed the story into a real, (partially) breathable world?

Caspar’s a superstar, honestly. Those clean lines married to a bold palette and dreamlike backgrounds -- it’s perfect for the layered “any age” approach we’re after. I first saw his work in Image’s exceptional Limbo -- with Dan Watters writing -- and immediately started chasing him. (Dan and I are actually co-writing a Shadow series for Dynamite at the moment -- that’s going to be a very, very interesting book -- so I’m keeping both these geniuses busy all at once. I’m despicable.)

The great thing is that I can no longer remember how much of the characters and the world was present in my first hazy descriptions of the project, and how much has effervesced from Caspar’s imagination. There are whole plot twists which hinge entirely on details Caspar’s injected along the way. That’s the nature of a really great collaboration.

Same’s true with Emma and Jim. You know you’ve got a great team when everything turns out greater than the sum of its parts. There’s nothing better than the perpetual reminder that these roles we unforgivably assume to "support," rather than creative -- letters, design, color, editing -- are integral parts of the whole and can literally transform the package when handled by creatives at the top of their game. Jim’s instinct for eyetrack and his intuitive feel for applying eccentric typefaces to strange characters... Emma’s peerless knack for distilling the feel and form of a story to its purest liquor and using it to create a logo, a package-feel, a brand. We dismiss these parts of the collaborative process at our peril.

Basically, I’ve got pretty much the best team in comics, and if I could marry Caspar and Jim too I totally would. Alas, Emma got there first. She is as cunning as she is talented.

With each step she takes, Qora matures and develops -- we quite sharply get to see her grow up and get an idea of what "rebellion" is. As a writer, how important is the contrast of that surface-level futuristic dystopia to the actual story of adulthood which unfolds through the start of the series?

That’s a very good question. Hmm. This far into an interview, which is already a classic Spurrier waxathon, it’s probably deadly to dive too deep here, so let me just repeat the usual mantra -- layers! Hidden subtexts if you care to see them! Adventure and fun at the top! - and add that the emotional growth of a character is obviously a big deal when it comes to longform comics. You can’t have a coming-of-age literally every episode. You can’t just hammer out one allegory-for-crossing-the-threshold-of-adulthood arc after another.

Luckily Qora and her mysterious companion are both such compelling characters, and their world (which we’ve frankly stumbled into as much as we’ve invented it) is so full of wonders and secrets and subtexts, that I don’t see us running out of fodder for our primary mission -- adventure with laaaayyyeeeerrss! -- any time soon. "Futuristic dystopia" is such a splendidly vague term, packed with all the possibilities one cares to mine. And they all feed into new themes, new character-changes, etc.

Without going into spoilery territory, in a story tacitly about society and culture, every personal revelation has a knock-on effect. So, just to give you one example, however Qora has changed by the end of the first arc, there are immediately questions about how the New Qora approaches her people, her world, etc, in the next arc.

I think I have a pretty good idea where the grand macro story ends, but there are a lot of surprises planned on the way there.

Every page of Angelic provokes so many questions -- both from readers and the characters themselves. Do you think that’s ultimately the hope of the comic, thematically, and narratively -- to encourage questions and celebrate independent thought?

I mean… this feels totally out of character to me, but there’s really only one answer to that, and it’s a one-worder:

Yes.

But, like, a big yes. With fireworks and love and death and chocolate.

Angelic #1 is scheduled for release on Sept. 20 from Image Comics.