Humanity may be a fragile species, but it has the ability to accomplish extraordinary things due in large part to the power found in hope and optimism. Writer Rick Remender and artist Greg Tocchini's creator-owned sci-fi comic Low demonstrates the exactly this. The series, set thousands of years in the future, sows an era when humanity is literally waiting to die in several high tech cities at the bottom of the ocean because the surface of Earth has become uninhabitable. One family, however, has chosen to find a way to survive by discovering a new home for humanity.
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This hope has led Caine family matriarch Stel to carry on after the death of her husband and son, reunite with one of her adult daughters who were abducted as children, and travel to the mysterious surface. This journey also allowed her now deceased son Marik to inspire the slaves and gladiators of a pirate city. And in the series most recent arc, it led Tajo Caine and her allies, the robot Io and merwoman Mertali, to make a choice that will take them and their home city Salus into unexplored territory: Outer space.
Remender spoke with CBR about that big decision and how it will impact the series when it returns in 2018. We also examine the power of hope and what it means to the Caine family, and why taking a several month hiatus between arcs allows him and his collaborators to maintain the integrity and quality of the series.
CBR: It's been a while since we chatted about Low, and the world is in a very different place than it was when you started writing it. I imagine you are, too. What's it like writing Low in a world where the core tenet of the series, hope and what it can do, is a precious resource?
Rick Remender: If I'm honest, it's vey difficult. My current reserves of hope are low. See what I did there? [Laughs]
The idea behind Low is a lot of maintaining optimism and hope in the face of hopelessness. That bleakness is a choice because the more you endure the harder it is to challenge your sense of hope and your sense of optimism. So I always like to keep the stakes high for any of the books I write, but for Low I've tried to keep the stakes so insurmountably high that it was very difficult to understand how any character would maintain an optimistic point of view.
That forced me to think through and hopefully convey new and believable ways where we all can apply that type of thinking to whatever it is that we're dealing with in our own lives. That's always been the challenge for myself on this book. That will be tested quite a bit coming up.
In issue #19, Tajo and her allies' hope for a better future led them to make a very interesting choice for both the city of Salus and the direction of the book.
Yes, Issue #19 ended with an up ending where Tajo discovered that Io had downloaded a good chunk of her brother Marik's consciousness. He had come to Salus in order to continue to hunt for whatever he was programmed for, and he's discovered what he believes to be an inhabitable world in the nearby Andromeda system. The issue ends with Tajo, Io and Mertali tricking the senate into igniting Salus' engines, which will cause the city to ascend to the surface and out into space.
They don't have any hard evidence, but after a bomb was detonated on Salus' air filters last issue, they were left with a choice: They could launch up to the stars, and on their way through the atmosphere vent the smoke and bring in new oxygen. Then, they can take a chance on the journey to this world. Or, they could stay down there and die for sure.
That issue was very much written with the current situation of the world on my mind. [Laughs] The stakes and the direness of it were something that I escalated due to a lot of the feelings I have on our current dilemmas.
It was an up ending, though. Of course, that up ending doesn't last very long. [Laughs] I've written issue #20, and that's where we finally get to see whats happening on the surface. I have the next 10 issues very tightly broken down. We've done a lot of character and world building, and now we get the joy of the fast moving plot as the trains start to collide. We'll get to see everything unravel and payout as all of the cast members we've set into motion begin to seek out their desires and try to survive such bleak circumstances.
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Let's talk about the newest cast member of Low: Io. He doesn't strike me as your traditional robot character. From what I've read, the closest thing I can compare him to is Marvel Comics' Vision.
He's a robot whose had his owner's consciousness downloaded on top of some programming. There are a few other personalities wedged in there as well. They were downloaded onto servers that, over the course of 10-15,000 years, have degraded and corrupted. So he has a few more personalities than the Vision.
He doesn't remember much, because of downgrading, but he knows that he was sent out with this great purpose and that he has the answers. In issue #19, we saw that the part of Marik he downloaded in issue #16 has helped him find those answers
That makes him an interesting character because you can't quite believe much that he says, but you also can't not. With Marik's consciousness involved, you definitely have hope in what's going on in Io's degraded, broken down computer; that there is something in there that will lead to some hope, especially now that there is none.
With all those different voices in his head, Io has the potential to be a very unpredictable character.
Yes, and the fact that one of them is Marik means that by the end of issue #19 Mertali and Tajo are very trusting of him. They have no reason not to be. Maybe everything will be fine. Tajo is also very trusting of Mertali without having a whole lot of story about her. There's a lot of things I've left vague for reasons that we'll start to see pay out. There's also a big time jump coming in the story that will be pretty exciting.
We're going to leapfrog a few story arcs into the future. Everybody will just have to catch up with the events that have transpired as we go. It's all a lot of fun. We'll establish who's all there and what is what, but I don't think people will be ready for what all is going on.
With Salus and its citizens getting ready to leave this planet, it feels like Low is opening up in a lot of new directions.
You want to keep things moving. I'm working on the pitch for the television adaptation, and in that we can take something like the first six issues and find a way to unpack it into a whole season of television. In comic books, though, people have to wait so long between issues, and every single scene has to be hand drawn and colored. You have to be much more economical with your story telling and a lot more concise. Things also have to keep moving.
In TV, people might zone out and give you a couple episodes where things don't happen... [Coughs] Twin Peaks[Coughs]...[Laughs] People might be able to let that go, and still gladly tune in next week. In comics if you have to wait a month per issue and two months go by and the comic isn't grabbing you and there's no momentum it's very easy to sack that book.
I always try to make sure I'm giving things the fastest pacing while not being too fast. I find navigating those two things to be the most difficult balancing act of being a comic book writer.
If you look at our 19 issues of Low, we set up Volden, which is the city of no hope. When we last saw them they were preparing to attack Salus. We now see that Salus has left the bottom of the sea in the hope of achieving orbit and traveling to another solar system and galaxy. You have Stel in some kind of dire situation on the surface. Then we've got Stel's daughter, Della, off in the Caine helm suit. She thought she killed her sister and left her to die. Then off she went to find her mother. Then we've got Stel's other daughter, Tajo, who is sort of the Stockholm syndrome sufferer who's gone through hell. She basically murdered an entire dome full of lecherous pirates but still maybe has a million souls on her conscience. We took 19 issues to set all those things up and now we get to start really delivering on colliding them into one another.
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One of the things that struck me when I was reading these most recent issues of Low was Greg Tocchini's art really brought me back to when I was a kid and used to steal looks at the magazine Heavy Metal. It has the lush, sweeping environments, high tech sci-fi, beautiful people, action and violence.
This is definitely a love letter to that. When Greg and I were working on The Last Days of American Crime together we would talk about how this stuff is such classic European Heavy Metal, I loved it so much. I thought we should do a sci-fi book.
When I brought up science fiction, he was like, “YES!” It seemed like that was where he naturally belonged. So I couldn't be more proud of this series. It's a slow burn and I'm letting myself tell the story in probably the same way Lynch is with Twin Peaks where sometimes you just need to trust your audience and allow yourself to drift in parts of the story.
Ultimately to me, what Greg is doing is so beautiful that I could write an issue of literally anything. If I did that it would be worth the cost of admission just to see Greg and colorist Dave McCaig go in and bring it to life.
Has Low's return been scheduled yet?
We're in the same situation with Low as we are with Seven to Eternity. If we had brought in other artists earlier to help out Greg, it wouldn't be as jarring, but after 19 issues of just Greg, I don't think we can bring in other people to help him out. And Greg is the same as Jerome Opeña. These guys are just high level geniuses and they pour so much into every page. So we just kind of went back around and the conversation ended with the fact that we might need to take several months off
In the comic book industry, your option is to keep plugging in a lot of different artists and keep things shipping every 30 days or faster, or to have gaps, which nobody loves, but they allow for us to make our best and most consistent work. They allow for us to keep the integrity and same teams together. So Low will return in 2018.
I think that gap between arcs is becoming more and more common, and it's something that people who appreciate creator owned comics expect and don't really mind.
There's really no way around it even with powerhouse machines like Wes Craig [artist on Deadly Class] or Matteo Scalera [who draws Black Science] who are also high level geniuses and can produce a huge quantity of pages. Even on those books when we try to not do a break and keep it going I think my work suffers. I think their work might suffer to.
When I take the break and we have the time to go, “Okay, we have three months. And in those three months we can get a couple of issues done, but we don't have to ship them.” So we're stockpiling issues and that gives us an opportunity to take a breath and talk about things. I can sit out in the backyard, think, and write notes. You're not under that constant crack of the whip to keep typing no matter what it is you're typing.
So I prefer it and I think that in the end when you look back on it and we have these stories in big, collected hardcovers and the books have reached their conclusions that it will help them to hopefully have a long life; where people can see that we gave several years of our lives to these giant hardcovers, and the love pays out. So when we have our third Low hardcover coming out in a few years and have kept the same artist and allowed them to do their best work I don't think anybody will look back and and go, “But it wasn't monthly every month!” I think the quality of the book is more important than making sure that shipping schedule is rapid fire.