In the opening arc of writer Rick Remender and artist Matteo Scalera's creator-owned Image Comic series Black Science, scientist Grant McKay took his friends and family on a dimension-hopping jaunt across the many realities of the “Eververse.” That dangerous odyssey cost McKay his intellect, his family and the lives of a number of his friends. But worse still is that, at the end of the most recent arc, a number of the monsters and alien menaces McKay and his team encountered in their interdimensional trek followed them back to their home reality.

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In Black Science #31, released last month, Remender and Scalera kicked off a new arc that sees McKay dealing with the chaos of the invasion and reuniting with some of his long-lost family. CBR spoke with Remender about the arc, how McKay and his daughter Pia are handling the loss of his intellect and her absorption of it, and how the series will run quite a bit longer than Remender originally anticipated.

CBR: A while back you pledged a return to the fun, velocity and chaos of Black Science's original arc, and recent issues fulfilled that promise and then some with the fire ghosts and the millipede death cult running loose on Earth. How does it feel to get to this part of your larger story? And will things slow down at all from here on out?

Rick Remender: No, we're in the chaos zone. Matteo and I have already finished issues #32 and #33.

It's odd, because I wrote this one so long ago that when I came back to it I had to ask Matteo, “Our initial intention was to go crazy, but is this too crazy?” [Laughs] He then talked me down and we went over the story, picked at it, and made sure we were still into it. We both agreed that we are still into it.

We took a bit of a breather in the book to do some character work and get into some of the human circumstances of Kadir, Sarah and Pia, and some of the other cast on Earth, like Grant, who was in the asylum. I find if I'm just doing the slow character-building stuff and the build of the tension that there's not enough action. Then once I get into the action I'm like, “There's not enough character work!” So I'm never confident with what we're doing in anything I've ever written. [Laughs] I'm always second-guessing everything, which can be good and bad.

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Every single thing we've seen in every issue plays a role in what's coming. That was the fun idea of the whole thing. We're going to go travel and do all these crazy things. We're going to bounce around all these different dimensions and meet all these different characters, and then we're going to smash all of them together on the real Earth in this arc.

[Laughs] It's a tremendous amount of fun. I wish I could talk more about what's coming up. I could just sit here and create goofy characters and strange shit and have Matteo Scalera draw them for the rest of my life and I would be happy. Him and our colorist Morino Diniso are so phenomenal together, and I'm cooking up scenes where I'm apologizing in the script. I'm like, “I know that's a lot of stuff and I'm super-sorry. That's what we agreed on, though, right?”

He comes back with stuff that's so lavish and cuts no corners. It's just incredible. So the crazy gets continuously turned up here for a good four to five issues.

One of the most fun, goofy and ridiculously enjoyable characters Matteo brought to life in issues #30 and #31 was Har'Logh the Defiler, the giant pink demon creature that reminded me of a Muppet. Who came up with Har'Logh's appearance?

[Laughs] Matteo came up with the idea to make him a cute and fuzzy thing. I don't remember what I originally described Har'Logh as, but when I got Matteo's pages and called him on Skype I was like, “Dude that's just a big teddy bear right there.” He was like, “Yeah, it's a big teddy bear.” Then I was like, “Oh, for the demon! Oh, my God!” Once he told me I was like, “Yes!” So I got to write all of the same dialogue for this horrible demon creature, but it's coming out of this giant, fuzzy teddy bear from a dimension where Care Bear-like creatures are devils. That was so much fun and so ridiculous.

The last arc ended with the death of one of the series' major villains, the Mister Block of Grant's world, correct?

Yes, that was the Block from Grant's world. He paid the price for his shenanigans, but before dying he revealed that he was from another dimension and had been traveling around spreading his industry from dimension to dimension. It always led to the same sort of chaos.

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So even though he's gone, his machinations are far from over?

Indeed, and there are a lot of other Blocks. We still have the millipede Block, and we still have Blocks in some of the other places we'll go to. The force of Block, the force of Grant, and the force of Kadir are three strong forces throughout the Eververse.

Black Science #33 by Matteo Scalera

As we've seen throughout the series, the Eververse is a big place, but issue #31 suggests that this arc is partly about reuniting your cast which has been stranded in different dimensions for quite a while. Is that true?

Yes, without giving away too much, all the pieces are slammed together. So all the things that were separated and all the people we saw torn apart are all coming back together. Everybody is in the arc. They're all very changed.

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One of the things I wrote at the top of the script for Issue 31 was “action comics!” It's an action comic, and that's OK! [Laughs] Like I said, I always hem and haw and teeth-gnash over that, but issues #31-34 are action from front to back. It's pretty glorious to see Matteo unleashed like this.

One of the fun developments in Black Science #31 was seeing Grant's daughter Pia with his genius intellect.

[Laughs] Yes, we're doing nutty stuff, and I think that's the promise of the book. A witch stole Grant's intellect, and when Pia and her current crew came back in contact with the witch, she managed to steal the witch's book and reabsorb her father's intellect. So now Pia has got the high-level science brain.

Can you talk a little more about the places you'll visit in this new arc? Are we headed to new worlds? Familiar ones? Or a bit of both?

It's a bunch of stuff we have seen and a bunch of stuff we haven't all smashed together and coming down on the heads of our cast.

Black Science #34 by Matteo Scalera

I understand Matteo got injured a while back, but now he's sort of back in full force?

Yeah. I believe Issue 29 was a little late, and we were late with Issue 30. Matteo took about two and a half months off because he tore up his shoulder pretty badly while doing some martial-arts training.

He had to undergo some really gnarly surgery. So we took that time off and as soon as he could move his arm again pages started filling up my inbox. We've completed several issues now and he's back at a full clip being the machine that I can barely keep fed. Fortunately I used that time to write some issues.

I didn't know Matteo studied martial arts. It seems like that's another thing he's got going as an artist. When you give him a fight scene he knows what the human body can do.

Yeah, totally. He's one of those guys where the fight scenes always come back better than you imagine them. Pretty much everything does with all of my guys. I know everybody says that about their artists, but some nights I'll be up till five in the morning looking at pages from my teams and be in total disbelief of what I'm seeing from all these guys.

The last time we chatted it sounded like the end of the story you're telling in Black Science was in sight. Is that still the case?

The series got extended a little bit, my outlining being what it is. [Laughs] It's like, “I can wrap it up in 10 issues. No, 12! No, 14!” So I believe we've still got another 13 issues to go, and who knows? We'll see how that goes. [Laughs] Muses strike, and I realize I need more time for things.

Matteo and I will talk about that and I'll say, “If you don't agree that we don't need the time for this we won't do it.” I'll then pitch him my ideas. He'll pitch me some ideas. We'll talk those through. I'll bounce things off our editor, Sebastian Girner, and then it will come back and I'll ask, “What do you think? Are we going to do it?” And then Matteo is like, “Yes we have to do that. Add more issues. Fine, fine, fine.”

So there's still another year and a half of the book to come. I probably announced that we were wrapping it way too soon, given that it's pretty far from actually wrapping. There's still an end in sight. It's just not any time soon.


Black Science #32, by Rick Remender and Matteo Scalera, is available now from Image Comics.