Marvel Universe's Most Powerful Immortals Clash in Gillen's Judgment Day Event

Earth in the Marvel Universe is home to several societies of immortals. What happens though when two of the most powerful tribes of these undying beings go to war? What kind of stakes does that create for the rest of the planet? How will Marvel's heroes deescalate and end such a war? These questions and more are the fuel for Marvel's upcoming summer event story. Free Comic Book Day: Avengers/X-Men by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Dustin Weaver will lay the groundwork for Marvel's explosive event. The six-issue mini-series Judgement Day mini-series is written by Gillen and with artwork by Valerio Schiti and will launch in July.

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CBR spoke with Gillen about the Marvel event, including asking about its major players, tie-ins, and how the scope, scale, and nature of the story evolve over its three acts. Also included with this interview is an exclusive look at three interior pages from Judgment Day #1 by Schiti and colorist Marte Gracia, and Peach Momoko's variant cover for issue #1

CBR: Last time we talked you mentioned how your current work-for-hire gigs have been pretty fulfilling. So, it's no surprise that you're trying your hand at an event book. What inspired Judgment Day though? And when did it become an event series?

Kieron Gillen: What I most like about Judgment Day is that it absolutely emerges from what I've been planning in Eternals and Immortal X-Men. I was originally planning it as an X-Men-Eternals war, but because it wasn't an event you don't get to blow up the entire planet [laughs]. When they asked if I could do that on a different scale though the answer was, "Oh yeah." Then it became something completely different where we took all the stuff that Immortal was doing, all the stuff that the X-Men line as a whole has been doing, all the original stories that Jason Aaron set up in Avengers, and everything in Eternals as well.

So, this pays off everything. The inciting incident of the whole crossover is something that comes from the X-office, and it juxtaposes with something happening simultaneously over in the Eternals office. My philosophy about my Marvel work and crossovers, in general, is that I want to reward people who read more books, and not punish people who don't. That's always where I've been when I write tie-ins, but now I'm literally in a very different position, but still using that as a guiding principle. So the hope is this will be good for writers, the books, and that it will be additive and exciting in a lot of ways. That's where this story came from. It's just that the ideas we're playing with are now on a different scale because they fit that scale.

It seems natural that the Eternals and X-Men would go to war since one side is all about eliminating change and the other is change personified.

The X-Men are the newest immortals on the block, and of course, the Eternals are the oldest. So, I've set things in such a way that there's a sense of overreach of what the Eternals should be doing. They view themselves as the Establishment's order. I think it was Gaiman who wrote the line, "We are the court of last resort," and court is not always a good thing [laughs] Courts are about someone deciding they have power over people. So, there's a tension there and it really comes to a boil.

For people who haven't been reading my Eternals run, part of it is the heroic Eternals, the people we're rooting for, have left Eternals society. One of the side effects of that is a lot of the people who are genuinely ethical are no longer part of the Eternals. So, this certainly involves hero versus hero elements, but it's not really a hero versus hero crossover. At the start, I very clearly say that the Eternals are the bad guys. There are good Eternals that are trying to stop them, but as a whole, the Eternals are very much the black hats in this particular scenario. You get to genuinely loathe them.

You mentioned the Eternals being the bad guys. I feel that's especially true given that in current issues of their series Thanos holds the position of Prime Eternal.

Yes. I don't want to say who's the Prime Eternal when Judgment Day begins. The status quo at the end of issue #12 is significant. There are three big changes in terms of Eternals society. So, things are cooked up in a different way, but they're definitely in a place where they're aggressive and want to establish their dominance for a variety of reasons. The first is that on a bad day the Eternals might go after the X-Men anyway, but here they have a much bigger reason for doing it. Then, of course, the X-Men have all these secrets and they're going to come out. They've also been making a lot of enemies and some of those enemies know other secrets too. There's a great push and pull there.

This event story is fallout from what starts as a war between the Eternals and the X-Men and becomes something significantly bigger. The problem with that though is it's built on the X-Men and Eternals material and this is for everyone who reads Marvel Universe comics (and anyone who wants to start reading Marvel comics). They don't know half this stuff! So, we need to make it meaningful to everyone, and the Avengers, at least at the start, are like the readers. They're trying to figure out what the hell has been going on [laughs]. It's like, "Thanos was here?" They certainly know some secrets and are suspicious, but they're the viewpoint characters in our first issue. You follow them and you realize what's going on.

It's drama for the people who know what has been going on because it's secrets coming out and you're seeing people's responses to them. It's really getting people on board for the journey on the way in. The Avengers also have some significant stakes in the story based on how lied to they've been by everybody from the start and the fact that they're literally sitting inside a Celestial. You should not have made your headquarters a Celestial if you did not want to be involved in this [laughs].

Yes, the teaser literally has them in the middle of this conflict. So it looks like they're caught up in things and have to make decisions rather quickly.

Yes, they are definitely A) Trying to catch up, and B) Trying to do the right thing. Especially in the first act of the story, and from there it will only get harder for them. They're trying to figure out how to bring this war to an end without destroying the Earth because if the Eternals want to hurt something they can. As our lead in to Judgment Day, we have the "Road to Judgment" over in Eternals and it's primarily about them trying to finish the war before anyone realizes it's begun. That will give you an idea of where the Eternals are. They don't necessarily fight fair. The Mutants don't either.

When I was thinking about this, I felt myself deconstructing events I've liked in the past. As in, "What do I like? How can I do something that tickles the same parts in a new way?" As part of that, I was looking at how big the Widescreen wave of superhero comics got. So, there's certainly some of that, but I really wanted to merge it with something philosophical. Putting aside Secret Wars, the first Marvel event I read was Infinity Gauntlet. Where there are questions of, "What is right? What is power? Why do people do what they do?" That's at the core of this as well.

This is a story about super-beings, but I want a human-on-the-street element to it as well. If I had to define my own view of the Marvel Universe it's that there's always a sense that somebody could go and get a pizza slice. That, to me, is the Marvel Universe. Throughout most of this comic, Druig is carrying a takeaway coffee [laughs]. So, one of our big, immortal villains really likes his coffee. A Marvel event is moving from the sheer majesty of the Kirby scale to the low level of having a nice slice.

That's what I was trying to do, and the hardest thing about all of this has been editing. It's not like writing an X-Men or Eternals book where it's like, "These are my characters. I'm writing them." This is me trying to write the entire Marvel Universe simultaneously. I know this is an X-Men, Eternals, an Avengers book, but "What is Reed Richards thinking?," is a perfectly valid question because I'm writing the entire Marvel world and I want it to feel that way.

You mention philosophical implications and it just occurred to me an X-Men and Eternals war is a conflict where neither side can really die, and if an Eternal is killed and resurrected it does collateral damage to humans.

Yes, splash damage is a key, especially in the first act. What we're mainly talking about right now is the first act of this story. When we get to the second act it changes the approach slightly, and then in the third act it becomes even more... Eventy? [laughs] The third act really has some of the deepest and most Starlin-esque philosophical stuff in there as well some of the biggest explosions you'll ever see.

Some of the build-up to Judgment Day appears to begin in Eternals #10, out now, which is a story that pits the Eternals against the Avengers, correct?

Yes, but it's a quiet conflict. The reason why it's a conflict is that the Eternals have been lying to the Avengers for a while now, and to get what they want they need to infiltrate the Avengers headquarters and gather some ancient information. They're not going to tell the Avengers what they need and why they need it. They lied about something earlier and now they're trapped and have to try and carry on. So, it's definitely the moment where you start to see the tension brewing. By the end of these issues, you'll see why the Avengers are justifiably suspicious of the Eternals.

So, this is where the labeled build-up starts, but the real joy of it is you have been reading the build-up for a while. If you have been reading X-Men comics it's been several years. If you've been reading Avengers comics it's been Jason Aaron's run, and it's been issue #1 panel one of my Eternals. Remember, Celestia, the special we did for Eternals? That was all about Ajak wanting to pick a fight with the Avengers. I don't know if people realized reading that story that it was the start of something big. We didn't stress it. If you want to revisit some of the build-up to this go back and read that special.

As the writer of Immortal X-Men and Eternals you're quite familiar with those characters, but what's it like writing the Avengers? Which of Earth's Mightiest Heroes are you especially enjoying writing?

This is a very character-driven crossover. We have explosions, and lots of people having moments and doing really cool things, but you really need characters to have a strong emotional throughline. I'm very aware of that with the casts of Eternals and Immortal X-Men. In this event book I'm aware of those characters that I'll follow as leads, and the ones I'll follow in the tie-in books.

With the Avengers though the backbone of the event is Iron Man and Cap/Steve. That's partially because Iron Man is the one who's had the biggest relationship with the Eternals in my run, and Steve speaks to the themes of the book. There's a science team and an action team aspect. Steve is kind of the boots on the ground trying to win hearts and minds of it. Iron Man is the more technical aspect.

It's interesting thinking about the crossover memberships between the Avengers and the other groups. Eternals and X-Men have both been part of the Avengers' ranks.

Early on one of my favorite minor beats is where the Avengers are talking to Sersi. Iron Man is interrogating her and then Cap enters. Instantly he's like, "No. She's an Avenger. We treat her right." That speaks to both Cap and the history there.

What else can you tell us about the Judgment Day tie-ins?

The great joy of the Hickman created X-Cult on Slack is we're all very much like, "This is what we're doing." So I've been wearing both hats; me as an Immortal X-Men writer and me as an Eternals writer sending stuff over. It's like, "This is what I'm doing. Here are some opportunities. What do people want?"

So I went over my thoughts with all of them and Al Ewing loved it all immediately. His book, X-Men Red involves a major asset the X-Men have -- Arakko/Mars, home to like a million warrior mutants. In fact, one of my major sort of through acts involves the stuff Al is setting up with Magneto over in X-Men Red. It's killer. All those ideas came from Al.

In the first act, we're talking about the war. So the tie-ins will look into the other aspects of the war in that initial action. When we hit act two there's an entirely different set of opportunities for the books. I wrote a document explaining how it all works and basically said it's a place for you to play. Go have fun. The first few scripts that have come in have been really striking and they're entirely about the book in question. That's what I most hope from the second act – the tie-ins are about the book that’s tying in as much as (if not more than) the Event.

As a reader, I hate when my books get derailed by a crossover. So, a part of this crossover is to make it key stuff for everyone's books and create an opportunity to add to their books. It's flexible and can be molded to whatever they want to write, especially in the second act. It's like, "Here's something. I'd love to see what you can do with it, and please feel free to pass if you're not into it."

Do you know if there will be Avengers-themed tie-ins?

There are definitely a few one-shots and tie-ins that fall under the Avengers family.

Artist Valerio Schiti's recent work on cosmic events like Empyre and X-books like S.W.O.R.D. suggests he'd be the perfect collaborator for this.

Yeah. One thing that's really striking is how he handles new stuff like monsters and threats. He goes for it and sends me these designs that look like they were for a two-billion-dollar budget movie. I get so inspired by them that I write old-school Marvel character sheets for each of these things. [Laughs] The idea that I can throw out a character design and he makes it live is everything.

Also, it's a nightmarishly difficult job doing a crossover. There are so many characters, and he makes it look easy, especially since I'm compressing. The scripts are tight. I'm doing big events: a single page with a handful of panels. He doesn't make that feel small. Every panel feels like a world exploding -- whether it's literal or emotional.

Finally, how does it feel to be launching Judgment Day with a Free Comic Book Day story?

This is the first time I've done a Free Comic Book Day story for Marvel. It was a lot of fun, and I thought, "If this is somebody's first Marvel comic they're getting a really intense dose of stuff." [laughs] I hope it's a great intro, and people like it. Dustin Weaver killed on the art. Every time I've worked with Dustin I've ended up actively upset that I don't get to work with him all the time.

The title of this story is Judgment Day. It's about judgment. So one of the themes we end up doing involves the eye of judgment being turned on to all the characters. That can be done in lots of different ways. So, this is a story about heroism, sacrifice, judgment, and justification that will take people for a ride. We're going to make people cry, laugh, think, and hopefully have a great summer. I look forward to everyone's judgment [laughs].

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