Infinite Dark is a new ongoing series from Top Cow and Image Comics by writer Ryan Cady, artist Andrea Mutti, color artist K. Michael Russell and letterer Ryan Peteri. It tells the story of a special sort of space station called the Orpheus which was built thousands of years from now to survive the heat death of the universe. The theory is that this station will survive until the next Big Bang. The survivors would then find a new planet and colonize it. However, while the station was built to house 15,000 people, none of the other residents got to the station before entropy claimed them. Only the 2,000 people who were built the station itself have survived the death of the universe. Now, a few years after the end of reality as we know it, there is something seriously wrong on the station and Deva, the head of the station's security, has to get to the bottom of it.

I spoke to Ryan Cady about the book...

Brian Cronin: When did you first develop the idea for Infinite Dark?

Ryan Cady: Well, it’s sort of cobbled together from a few different early ideas of mine - I'd been terrified of the Heat Death of the Universe since high school, and I'd wanted to use it as a bogeyman in something for years. I'd been talking to Andrea for a while about doing SOMETHING together, but nothing was clicking. Then in Winter 2017, after chatting with him following NYCC, he made it clear he wanted me to throw him something really personal, passionate, but still high concept. So I took a lot of the stuff I was going through at the time - depression, existential dread, fear of the future, survival as a virtue, all that - and threw them up against that ultimate villain, Heat Death. Oblivion, the end of everything. And it all just started falling into place.

BC: It is a hell of a high concept.

RC: Ha! Thanks. It helped that Andrea was REALLY into it from the get-go. We hit the ground running.

BC: What, exactly, is the situation that the people on the station are going through - they are the last 2,000 people in existence, but are there kids? What is

the deal there? Are they literally the LAST 2,000 people?

Pages from issue #1
Pages from issue #1
Pages from issue #1

RC: Hahahaha. You know, NOBODY has asked me about that, isn't that funny? A lot of the big world building stuff that hasn't been answered, people haven't really grilled me on.

BC I just figured that would sort of tie into said existential dread. Like, if they were the last 2,000 and there was no one set to pick up from them, then that's a whole new level of messed up. For instance, we don't see it in the first two issues, but DOES anyone on the station have a family? Or are they all loners who are meant to be the support staff for the real families who were meant to come later?

RC: The short answer is no - there are plans in place for them to survive, to repopulate (both conventionally and also with some far future genetic tech), but that all ties into their "what comes next" plans. Nobody on the station is quite sure how long it'll take for a new Big Bang - assuming one even comes - or if it's a matter of time at all. Is Time even happening outside the station, can they interact with that spacetime beyond their pseudoreality field, etc. They're in a kind of stasis, waiting to see what they have to do.

And there are a few people who have coupled up, a handful of preexisting families, but that really is the other big lonely aspect of the Orpheus - these were all support staff. Planners, builders, dreamers. Hard workers. A lot of them were loners to begin with, and many of those left their families behind - assuming they'd make it on board the station later.

BC: Gotcha. I imagine, having witnessed the heat death of the universe, they probably need longer to process than normal.

RC: Ha! Yeah, there's a lot of the "Sex/death oh god what now" circling around, but not a lot of healthy relationships. And I haven't been able to show that as much in these first couple issues - hopefully I've hinted at it well enough - but it will be expanded upon as the series continues.

BC: In #2, there was an interesting note that Earth was "thousands of years behind," so just curious; the basic set-up is that this roughly 10,000 years from now, is that correct? And so I imagine humans have colonized other planets, right?

RC: Yes! Absolutely. We've spread across the Milky Way and beyond, at this point. In issue 4, Deva will happen to mention that she was actually born in the Andromeda galaxy.

BC: I liked how you waited until issue #2 to fully introduce the concept of the technolinguists. It is something that could have been the hook of its own series, so it reminds me a lot of how Ash was used in Alien. This cool other concept that ties in with a seemingly unrelated type of story.

RC: It was VERY tempting to just frontload a lot of those cool sci-fi concepts, but I really wanted to focus on mood and character from the get-go. I love the idea of technolinguists and how they work, and I wish I could go into them more. How their brains function is actually part of WHY Alvin interacted with the mysterious Entity the way he did, but I couldn't go too in detail on that...and it's a bit of spoiler.

BC: And, interestingly, I was just reading about how the original screenwriter of Alien fought against the inclusion of Ash for that very reason (that, while a cool concept, it was too much of its own distinct idea).

RC: I actually didn't know that about Ash! That makes sense, though. God, you've paid me a really big compliment there, personally, and I appreciate that. ALIEN is so formative for me.

BC: This book certainly evokes that fear of the unknown that Alien delivered beautifully. The claustrophobia of it all

RC: I'm glad to hear it. So much of that is Andrea and K Mike, of course. But I'm glad it comes through in the writing, too. I really want to tread that line between dread, claustrophobic fear, and that sort of resilient survival instinct/hope that is so inherent to some of the best sci-fi.

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='A total HR disaster...']

BC: The leadership of the space station reminds me a lot of how Robert Kirkman spends so much time in The Walking Dead with the idea of "How WOULD we go on if we were in this situation?" In Infinite Dark, the four section chiefs form a sort of four-part dictatorship, of sorts. Did they have a plan for how society would have been ruled had the full 15,000 people showed up on the station?"

And how did you come up with the idea of having, in effect, a four-person dictatorship?

RC: So, at Top Cow, Henry Barajas - who does a lot of their marketing and promo and stuff - always calls the book "HR Disaster," as a joke. But funny enough, it really covers what's at play there? There was so much planning in place for how humanity would've thrived on the station - elections, planned neighborhoods, civic engagement...and when none of the colonists made it on board, the Orpheus crew just let it be business as usual. In post-apocalyptic stories, it's so often these maverick hard-asses that wind up in charge - like in Walking Dead. But if we all worked in an office, and the world ended outside, but everything was normal inside the office? I feel like most people would just clock in and report to their supervisors.

RC: In earlier drafts, the Board of Directors were a bit more ruthless and divisive - more dictatorial - but I thought that if their employees were sort of filling that old power dynamic, why would they shift it to become worse?

BC: It's interesting that it's an even number of leaders, though. One of the big plot points in the book is the idea that Deva is always outvoted 3-1, but imagine if the decisions were ties all the time! Chaos!

RC: Exactly! It's an...HR DISASTER! Thank goodness one of them threw himself into nothingness, am I right? Much better voting dynamic.

RC: And yeah, Deva - by virtue of having such a different background and occupation - is usually the maverick voter. It doesn't help that she's more emotionally motivated than the other three were, I think.

BC: Director Chalos is particularly fascinating in that regard.

RC: He's my story editor's favorite character, actually.

BC: For a station where mental health is such a big deal, him being in charge of that is a game-changer.

RC: Definitely. Looking that far ahead, medical technology-wise – in a lot of ways, mental health is going to be more concerning than physical.

BC: When he and Deva go into the joint session - if the simulator set-up changes because they were both in there, why doesn't he see what Deva sees?

RC: Well...here's the tricky part. He CAN see the Entity to a degree - he comments on noting that something manifested. But the way that it affected

Deva...there's a strong implication that coming face-to-face with that Thing has allowed It to touch her, in some way.

RC: Ike's operating under a clinical bias, to be sure - but he's also seeing simple manifestations, the simulations without context.

RC: I'm glad you caught that, though.

RC: I worried a lot about having a big chunk of my second issue basically just be a therapy session. But I figured - it works for the Sopranos!

BC: The therapy adds an innovative element to it, as we rarely get to see people going through horror actually get to discuss the issue through therapy as it is going on, and since so much of horror is based on those principles, it is perfect.

RC: Thank you! I'm really glad that the therapy stuff reads well.

BC: How much of a free hand did Andrea have in designing the characters? Did you have specific ethnicities in mind for the characters or was it, in effect, blind casting for Andrea?

RC: I always try to let the artist have as much control as they want. I feel like it's easy as a writer to get weirdly controlling and demanding, but it's a collaboration - and generally, they know art way better than I will. I gave general guidelines for everyone's basic appearance and background, but it was a lot more emotional stuff - "this is a person who looks like they might ask to speak to your manager" - that kind of thing. The only thing I've been kind of nitpicky on is that I really wanted to hammer home that a lot of our current notions of ethnic makeup should be moot, 10,000 years from now. People are going to have diversity, for sure, especially living in different galaxies - but our current ideas of who’s what are gonna be irrelevant in a lot of ways. So if somebody came out looking clearly like a typical 2000s American white dude, or something, I tried to give a nudge.

RC: That and I wanted a decent amount of genderfluid/queer folks around. I felt that representation was important, considering it's so far in the future, and what we have now.

Pages from issue #2
Pages from issue #2
Pages from issue #2

BC: I saw somewhere that the title of the book was a Sandman reference. Could you elaborate a bit on that?

RC: Yeah! So, my original title was "No Stars," but lots of people hated that, hahah. So we kept it as working title for months, and then Matt Hawkins and I were just spitballing titles, and we tried "Infinite Dark," and it sounded weirdly familiar. He and I both dug it, and I was trying to figure out why it seemed to work so well. After a few days we figured out why – it’s a phrase in one of Dream's lines from volume one. "Everything outside my kingdom is infinite dust, infinite dark," he says.

Sandman is still my top comic of all time, and so that moment is so fitting - and his name being Morpheus and the space station being named Orpheus - it all sort of tied together. It was suddenly just like, the perfect title for what we were doing, and here it was connected to such a formative series for me.

RC: My girlfriend actually helped me catch it, so she deserves a lot of that credit for helping us realize and finally choose that title.

BC: That's awesome.

BC: Does Sm1th have a specific voice, or does Sm1th sound different to each person?

RC: He definitely has the same crisp, proper, almost British-y voice for everyone. I like to imagine SM1TH sounds a little bit like Alfred from the Batman Animated series, but maybe a little less cartoonish. Always uplifting, a little wry. He might be my favorite character. He has a monologue in issue 4 that was my favorite moment to write in the whole series.

Page 3: [valnet-url-page page=3 paginated=0 text='Finding hope even in the bleakness of the end of the universe...']

BC: The end of #2 brings up the slightly more direct threat of "What happens if this station fails?"

Is that an actual threat or is the station essentially built to last however long it takes to see if the Big Bang happens again?

RC: Oh, that is absolutely a threat. It's got some great security measures, and there are very few ways it could be destroyed - but as we'll see in the next couple issues, we're looking at a perfect storm of "Oh, we could all die. We could survive the end of the universe and still lose."

RC: I think it's kind of a Chekov's gun situation for me. I put all these folks on this ship and made it clear that if it failed, humanity was doomed... So now I have to put them through the ringer a bit. I'm sure they'll find a way to save themselves. Probably. Hopefully.

BC: Well, that's sort of the metaphorical aspect of it all, right? That this is sort of like depression manifested and they are how people survive depression in real life. They are that survivor's instinct that people have that gets them through depression.

RC: Exactly! But you know, for me, that means it's a deeply optimistic book, in a lot of ways. A lot of folks have commented on how bleak it is -- and it definitely is. I want to explore some absolutely dreadful stuff, but like...we SURVIVED THE END OF THE UNIVERSE. So, ultimately, I want this to be a hopeful, optimistic book. But much like depression in real life, that's a journey - a struggle for survival - that you have to get through.

BC: Ha! Exactly. It reminds me of the reactions some people had after the midterm elections this year. Like I would have to remind my wife, "This was a GOOD result."

RC: Oh man, exactly. I was like, "Oh, I was so prepared for so much worse. I was prepared for defeat, and we got a singular victory."

BC: Although, I guess just like surviving the heat death of the universe, it's all how you look at it.

RC: Exactly.

BC: Will we be meeting new cast members as the series goes on, or have we already seen the basic lead cast of the series? There are obviously 2,000 other people out there.

RC: We've seen most everybody important for a while. Kirin in issue two is the last of the “main” characters we introduce, but I've got a handful of key new faces for future issues. I really wish I could do this series for like, 60 issues, and I could just devote whole issues to technolinguists, and what it's like to be a doctor 10,000 years from now, and like, just show people going on dates and all that. And I've got some storylines coming that will be a bit more "these are the people, these are their lives," but I can only show so many of them.

BC: Andrea did a really great job on the end of #2 with the frantic pace. It's hard to convey the sense that people are in a hurry sometimes on ostensibly static artwork and that really made you feel Deva's rush to get to Karin and Sebastian and the dread of it all.

RC: Oh man, I LOVE those last couple pages. Page 19 was so, so perfect. And I loved the way he closed out 20. He's so masterful at pacing things out.

BC: How do you deal with the "need" to have issues end on cliffhangers like that? That's always the interesting challenge with periodical books that are meant to also be read as a collected work. Is it a matter of plotting out the beats or is a more natural thing?

RC: You know, it can kind of suck, but I'm sort of attuned to it now. I've been working in 20 page scripts almost exclusively for the past couple years, and a lot of 4-issue arcs. So it kind of plays to how I beat it out in my head.

RC: For this series, though, oddly enough, it ended up working out perfectly. I knew that I wanted to end issue 1 on that silhouette, and I knew that 2 had to end with the power going out - and 3 has a strong cliffhanger image I had from the get go. 4's is a bit less "Wait, wait, what's next!?" but it's still a cliffhanger, and it serves as a nice bookend to this first volume. I managed not to play myself, for once, haha.

BC: Ha!

BC: By the way, it's interesting that you say "Mysterious Entity" earlier. So that's a more definitive "There is definitely SOMEthing out there?" and not a more speculative "Is there something or is Deva just seeing things?" question?

RC: I'm trying to play it very coy. But there's definitely SOMETHING. How much of it is in Deva's head, what is It, what does It want, etc.

BC: Let's do some Cady promotions! DC Talent Showcase is out soon, right? You must be pumped.

Cover to this year's DC New Talent Showcase!

RC: Yes! I am chomping at the bit to see that thing printed. Isaac Goodhart and I put together a Zatanna story I'm insanely proud of. I wanted to do something where I could say, "If I never work at DC again, I'll always be proud of this." But the whole Showcase is great like that. Everyone really put their all in this year.

BC: What else do you have in the pipeline?

RC: It's been a lot of creator-owned, because I wasn't developing for-hire much when I was in the DC workshop. So I've got a webcomic, actually, that's had some fits and starts but should be announced in the next couple months. Really excited about that. Also another book at Top Cow, if you can believe it - in very early stages, but quite different from Infinite Dark.

And two OGNs, actually! One creator-owned and one for-hire, and I'm really stoked on those.

BC: Too soon for further details on the other books?

RC: I've posted a few teases of the creator-owned OGN - it's an adventure story, kind of like MAD MAX meets INDIANA JONES? It's with Cem Iroz, a really talented artist out of Turkey.

RC: And the for-hire one is a very out-there project - I'm really excited about it, cause it's inexplicably right in my wheelhouse. But it's the kind of thing that might make people go, "Huh. Weird." I think that one will actually announce soonish, because I turned in solicit text yesterday.

BC: Oh neat.

RC: And I have a few other little tiny kernels, but I don't want to jinx them by even teasing! I'm just grateful to keep busy, haha.

BC: I totally get that. The life of the freelancer, where you have all of this POSSIBLE stuff that you can't talk about

RC: I just looked over a short interview I did at NYCC, and like 90% of it was, "Oh, I can't talk about this thing I'm doing, but it's so cool!" And I always feel like an ass saying that, haha. But it's all about keeping fingers and toes crossed.

BC: Who came up with the idea of the creator essays on the back of Infinite Dark? They're a great addition. They're not going to be available in the trades, right? Sort of like the backmatter in the Brubaker/Phillips individual issues. A little extra bang for your buck

RC: I'm hoping to fit them in the trades, but yeah, I can't guarantee it, so it's definitely one of the appeals of grabbing those single issues! It was something I was toying with as we were prepping the first issue for print, actually. I didn’t know if it would resonate, but I wanted to hear from other people who’d kind of leaned into horror or fallen in love with the genre when their mental health was at its worst. I just went on twitter and was like, "I had this idea, would anybody be into it?" And so many creators and critics reached out, I was blown away. Thankfully, they’re a lot more insightful than I am.

RC: We've got some really fantastic ones lined up for future issues, too. I really lucked out!

BC: That's great.