The quest to liberate an oppressed land from the grip of a despotic king is a classic fantasy trope, but when the king is a master manipulator and the heroes standing up to him are a band of physically and emotionally battered mystics things start to become a lot more interesting. That's the set up for writer Rick Remender and artist Jerome Opena's creator owned Image Comics series Seven to Eternity where ailing Adam Osidis and several other Mosaks (people with mystical powers) embark on an epic journey across the world of Zhal to end the rule of the tyrannical, silver-tongued, Mosak, Garils Sulm, AKA the Mud King.

Unfortunately for Adam and company, the only way to do that is to bring the Mud King to a far off wizard. In the series' currently unfolding second arc, they've had to endure the Mud King's verbal machinations, haunted swamps and hostile populations, all while being chased by the villain's champions. Along the way, readers have met some new characters and made startling discoveries about the established cast.

RELATED: Rick Remender Talks New Studio, Comic Work Update

CBR spoke with Remender about the twists, turns and new cast members of the arc, which comes to a close with this month's Seven to Eternity #9. The writer also hinted at what readers can expect from the series moving forward, including the possibility of someday creating their own adventures on Zhal via a pen and paper Seven to Eternity roleplaying game.

[valnet-url-page paginated=1 text='Click%20Here%20to%20Read%20the%20Full%20Interview%20on%20a%20Single%20Page']

CBR: With these last few issues of Seven to Eternity you've built an epic story of chases and races. Adam Osidis is racing against death to find a cure to the disease that's killing him and liberate Zhal from the rule of the villainous Mud King; Jevalia and the other Mosak are chasing after Adam who went off on his own with their prisoner, the Mud King; and the rest of the Mud King's forces are chasing all of them.

Rick Remender: Yeah, that's some good broad strokes on it.

I think there's some interpersonal stuff that hopefully shines through, but in terms of motives and driving forces pushing things forward that's pretty much it.

Another thing that has become clear in these most recent issues is that Seven to Eternity is a fantasy story with a lot of influences, but I see a lot of the Western genre in the book as well in that your characters are going on a long journey with a prisoner in their custody. Was that intentional?

Yes. I obviously had reread Dune, and Lord of the Rings and, for fun, I reread a bunch of old D&D stuff that I had written in eight grade. I then watched three or four westerns and read a book on the Comanche. So my head was kind of cooked between those things when I was writing this.

This second arc also added a lot of new elements and wrinkles to your ongoing story. Some of the most interesting revelations were about the Mud King. The Mosak Jevalia revealed that Adam's father and the Mud King were very close. So corrupting Adam is something very personal to Garils Sulm. We also learned that he had a pretty tragic back story involving a murderous grandfather. Can you talk a little more about that?

I don't want to confirm or deny anything that one character is proposing about another because that's sort of a fun mystery. Is Jevalia right?

At this point, the Mud King's motives are entirely suspect. We don't quite know what his motives are. Everybody seems to have a different impression of him and what he's up to. As we unfold the story we begin to see that there is more to him than meets the eye.

So there are some fun answers to come about why he did what he did in issue #6. We have not reached the stage of the game yet though where we'll hang a lantern on what particular motive the Mud King has.

The Mud King is known for his silver tongue and bending people to his will. Should the readers trust anything he says?

If anything he's the highest level Machiavellian manipulator of people. That's kind of the fun of the character. As they're on this journey with him they're trying to suss out what he wants. In issue #4 he has an opportunity to escape and he doesn't take it. Instead he enacts his revenge on Patchwork.

So there's a lot of unanswered questions with him that are going to play a big role in the third arc.

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Seven%20to%20Eternity%3A%20Dragan%27s%20Arrival%20and%20Spiritbox%27s%20True%20Motivations']



In issues #7-8 you followed the other Mosak as they tried to save Jevalia from dying. Accompanying them on that journey is Adam's daughter, Katie Osidis. We got some insight into her thought process in those issues, and it feels like she's one of the least emotionally scarred characters in this story, but she has grown up away from the rest of the world. Would you say that's a fair characterization of her?

Yeah, and the biggest crime she's committed is disobeying Adam and leaving the family behind in order to follow him out into the world in hopes of helping. So far Katie has lived a somewhat secluded and safe life. She also has the perspective of hearing her grandfather and father's ideologies. So coming up in a few issues she comes to some different conclusions then we'd might expect. She's definitely having her eyes opened to what it is that waited beyond their little farm.

It's interesting to compare and contrast Katie and Adam's relationship with the other prominent father-daughter relationship in your creator owned books, Grant and Pia McKay of Black Science.

I hadn't thought about those contrasts. Yeah, Pia and Grant were very estranged until he did some pretty wonderfully heroic things to earn back her trust. Katie and Adam have always been very close. Hence her strong desire to come protect her father and help him on his current mission.

So, yes, they are quite different dynamics with quite different backstories obviously, but it all ends in tragedy for all of them anyway. [Laughs]

[Laughs] During Katie and the Mosak's adventures in issues #7-8 we meet a new mercenary character named Dragan. What inspired his creation? What kind of role will he play in the series moving forward?

He plays a pretty big role coming up, and without giving anything away I think that the financially motivated are always interesting characters. Because any situation you put them in you're challenging their core principle, which is money, money, money.

So in this case he's got this frog, which we'll reveal more about later, that he has to feed gold too. We don't know quite what its motive is in needing the gold, but his choices are ultimately established as always being financial. He's also got a sword that can tell him which decision will lead him to the greatest chance of wealth. That obviously is an interesting situation to be in given some of the situations that these characters end up in.

What's it like bouncing a purely mercenary character like Dragan off the other more heroically motivated members of your Mosak cast that he's joined up with?

Goblin and Katie are sort of the purest of the bunch. We revealed that Spiritbox is anything but pure. His motive is to simply deliver the Mud King to the wizard so he can be released from his armor and sent to the well. He doesn't want to be alive anymore. He's committed some pretty atrocious crimes.

Then, of the cast that are still alive, you've got Jevalia who has now been sort of left behind and tainted by this mystical swamp. We've seen a turn in her.

Is Spiritbox motived at all by ideas like atonement?

The upfront motive that's established in issue #8 is that he wants to be released. So when he meets the Spitwitch in the smelting inferno and she offers to release him he hesitates for a good little bit and considers her offer before he finally acts. If you look at the way it beats out he doesn't actually kill the witch until Goblin and Katie have emerged victorious from their battle with the other Spiritboxes.

So at present, the appearance is that his motive is solely to complete his task so he can die. There's obviously a character arc there though. Sometimes arcs can go darker than dark, and sometimes they can veer the other way. So we'll have to see with him.

James Harren did a fantastic job illustrating issues #7-8. Might we see more from him or another guest artist further down the road?

It's possible. Right now it's a hard deliberation. Jerome is one of the very best artists in the world, and what he puts into his pages is so labored. So in order for the book to maintain any kind of regular schedule we might need to have guest artists from time to time. We've also discussed just letting there be four month gaps between story arcs and just having Jerome.

We've waffled on this quite a bit actually. With James it was a no brainer. If we find that we have other people of James' caliber who we can plug into the schedule and do some work with than it's very possible. There's another world though where we might just keep things going with bigger gaps between arcs to allow Jerome to catch up and have it just be him on art.

For right now, Jerome has finished issue #9, and he's well into issue #10. The plan then is he'd do up through issue #14. Then it's possible we might need to bring somebody in for a couple issues. So we're just taking things as they come.

Page 3: [valnet-url-page page=3 paginated=0 text='Seven%20to%20Eternity%3A%20The%20RPG%3F']



In issue #9 you and Jerome bring the second arc of Seven to Eternity to a close and put the focus back on Adam and the Mud King. What else can you tell us about the issue?

Issue #9 is a big one. Adam is making choices that have large consequences, and he runs into a very angry Mosak. It also sees him face some difficult decisions while in transit with the Mud King. That relationship begin to thaw a little bit as well, which will have some unexpected consequences.

So there's a pretty big return of a character we haven't seen in a while in issue #9. I'm pretty excited about that. It's something that I set up a long time ago, and I've been pretty eager to pull the trigger on.

Jerome and [colorist] Matt Hollingsworth have done an amazing job on issue #9. It's one of the most spectacularly looking comics I've ever seen, much less been associated with. It's an absolute work of art.

In terms of big twist and turns will issue #9 be comparable to some of the other major issues we've seen in some of your other books like the Freshmen finals story in Deadly Class?

I wouldn't say it's quite as big as the culling of the rats in Deadly Class. It's close though.

If anything this issue has the biggest choice we've seen Adam make yet. It should make a lot of people very happy.

Then as we discussed earlier, you guys are still determining when issue #10 of Seven to Eternity will hit, correct? It might be three months or it might be four months?

Our next arc, as it is currently structured, will be entirely Jerome. It has a lot of big payouts and Jerome wanted to draw all of it. Obviously I'd like him to draw as much as he's capable of drawing. So I would say there will be a four month gap between issues #9 and #10 while we catch up.

Are you able to reveal about how far along you're into your outline for Seven to Eternity?

I've gotten it beat out to around issue #17, but as I move around I'm dealing with one thing that [artist] Wes [Craig] and I were just laughing about in Deadly Class. I've been doing this for 20 years and I still can't guesstimate how much I can fit into a comic.

So I'll outline something and what I break down as one issue often unpacks into two issues. Sometimes even three. Wes always laughs at those, because sometimes those are the scripts that come back where every page is nine panels. [Laughs] He goes, “Yeah, good job on that one.”

Finally, Pinnacle Entertainment recently created a roleplaying game based on your Fear Agent series for use with their Savage Worlds system of rules. It seems like given that some of Seven to Eternity was inspired by the original RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, and the sprawling nature of it's setting, the world of Zhal, this series would make for a fun RPG as well. Any interest in seeing that developed further down the line?

Yeah, a huge amount of work went into Fear Agent. That spent two and a half years in the development process. They don't mess around. There's so much detail. I was getting questions in the middle of the night all the time about specific things where I had to go back and really think about them.

They did such a tremendous job on Fear Agent. It will be very exciting to see everybody get a chance to play it when it comes out. Should the next one be Seven to Eternity I think it would obviously lend itself very well to a roleplaying game.