This week's sterling opening issue of Paradiso brings together the team of Ram V, Devmalya Pramanik, Dearbhla Kelly and Aditya Bidikar for a new story looking to the future of humanity. But before you start thinking this is another standard dystopian sci-fi series from Image, just hold on a moment -- there's something wholly different going on within the pages of this story, and it's a hugely promising and involving debut at Image Comics.

The story is set in a scrappy, hard-fought future where people are trying to improve their lives by pushing their way to a promised city known as "Paradiso." Among them is Jack Kryznan, an ordinary man holding an extraordinary secret, and as we start to follow his journey we're brought into a fully realized world of hope, ambition and double-dealing.

It stands out as a story with something to say, and the team of Ram V and Pramanik imbue each page with life, technological or organic. Sometimes both. CBR spoke to them both about their work on the series, how it came to find a home at Image, and how they think Indian sci-fi offers some new and fascinating ideas both about humanity's future and present.

CBR: On the inside cover of the first issue it says, "based on stories written by Ram V and Rajiv Bhakat". What were those stories? How long has Paradiso been in the back of your mind, Ram?

Ram V: I first wrote about this in my studio newsletter, called White Noise. Paradiso began as an idea first proposed during a train journey through North India. Rajiv (an architect and urban designer) and I were on a road trip. We were both amateur writers who wrote as a hobby. Rajiv mentioned wanting to set stories inside a living city... and we just ran with the idea from there.

There wasn’t a sprawling narrative to begin with. No unifying thread. We just wrote short stories and vignettes set inside this city. We populated it, gave it shape and solidity through these stories. They form the foundation, or to choose a better metaphor, they are the sandbox within which the story of Paradiso takes place. We first came up with the idea in 2011. I wrote comics in India, moved to the UK and wrote Black Mumba, before we decided to seriously look at turning Paradiso into a comic. I’d met Dev by then and took the idea to him. He absolutely loved it. We were freshly coming off our collaboration in Black Mumba and we both jumped into the project straight away. So, it’s been six years since we first had the idea!

How did Paradiso first come to find a home at Image Comics?

Ram: I think the first time I ever sent anything Paradiso-related to Image was over email. I remember getting an encouraging response at the time. Soon after, we’d continued working on the project, and I met Eric Stephenson at Thought Bubble 2016. I’d shown the work around to other creators by that time and people like Kieron Gillen and Ivan Brandon had encouraged me to pitch to him in person. So, that’s what I did. I showed Eric the pages, and a year later we were soliciting issue #1!

What was it about Image which made it the ideal home for the comic, in your mind?

Devmalya Pramanik: When we started pitching, I already had my heart set on Image. I’ve always had a soft spot for them and the kind of boundaries they push with their books. And with Paradiso, it seemed like a story tailor-made for their sci-fi publishing space.

Ram: I think, publishing a creator-owned book through Image has always been an aspiration. I’m still new to comics so I say this with the caveat that I could be off the mark here. But, to my understanding, Image is the ideal publisher for a creator/creative team that are largely confident in the vision they have for their book and can deliver it. I think Dev and I came into Paradiso with a largely clear idea of what we wanted to do and how we wanted the book to look and feel. That showed through in the pitch.

Beyond that, Image, in my time in comics, have been the place for new interesting ideas. New voices and aesthetics have often found their first footing at Image, and Image have shown time and again that they’ve been able to find those creators. It is of course exciting to be part of that. But more than anything else, I’m just happy to have a publisher of their magnitude backing the project. It lets me work professionally and do what I do best. Which is, focus on making the book!

One thing I’ve seen you write in previous interviews is how you finished an early draft of the story and realized that you’d Americanized it as a reflex. You subsequently redrafted to add more authenticity to the story. How important was it to the believability of the story that this version of the future doesn’t just feature the typical American protagonists -- that it has underexplored voices running in the lead roles?

Ram: I should clarify: What you might have read was in response to a question that asked if I thought it was important to have Indian voices telling stories in international comics. And so, I was speaking about the early stories I was writing and how the lack of representation influenced me. It wasn’t specifically about Paradiso. I think by the time I was writing Paradiso, my intent to create a narrative that was reflective of my own background and inclusive of the idea of what a future society might actually look like was already part of my thought process.

I think stereotypes are always best avoided. People are complex. Put a group of people together and the complexity rises exponentially. I think it’s time we stopped trying to fit people into molds that serve the story. It’s time we stopped representing modern society with a kind of naïve homogeneity. It often makes for boring, one-dimensional characters/societies. I think a good story makes room for complex characters to often make unusual choices. Add to that, characters that come from diverse cultural backgrounds (as a future metropolis might conceivably have) and it provides the writer with the ability to tell a more believable story as you say, despite the characters acting in interesting and non-intuitive ways.

For me, it is more interesting to write a character who stumbles into their role than one who comes into the story knowing exactly who/what he is and that he must now do everything that fits into that trope. I like my characters to find their moments of heroism, cowardice, malice, kindness etc -- as people do in life.

So who is Jack Kryznan, the lead of your story? What’s going on in his head as the series starts?

Ram: In the interest of keeping this spoiler-free, I’m going to have to keep it vague. Jack Kryznan, for all practical purposes in this story is a pretty average guy except for two defining distinctions. The first of which we see in a flashback. He encounters "The Watcher" as a young boy and narrowly escapes being killed. Jack is left traumatized by these events, but they also drive him. Like a scab you can’t stop picking at. Jack is, on some level, determined to unravel the meaning of those events. But, there is another layer to it, which I won’t give away just now. Let’s just say, the Jack we see in the opening doesn’t quite know the full extent of who he is.

The second distinction is that he is in possession of a device that is capable of bringing dead technology to life. We won’t go into how exactly it does that. That’s another reveal. But it will suffice to say that this makes Jack a target for anyone who knows he has this device. So far, he’s kept it relatively low key. Using it rarely to help himself here and there. But that’s about to change. So, everybody wants a piece of Jack.

On a storytelling level. Jack is a relatively unmarked canvas. I like my characters to develop as the story goes along. I like them to pick up bruises and scars. Here, at the beginning, Jack is a cipher and so the reader will find it easy to step into his shoes and experience Paradiso for a while.

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His design is pretty interesting -- as is the design for all the characters, in fact. What was your approach in terms of how you wanted the comic to look, how the buildings and outfits and vehicles fit together?

Dev: The basis of the designs in this story is in scarcity. The only way you get things is by patching broken remnants together or jerry-rigging old tech. Resources are hard to procure without proper infrastructure. It’s why scavenging is a very lucrative job in the universe of Paradiso. That’s what the designs are centered around -- you see people wearing clothing built from bits and pieces of recycled material and it is all functional. You see structures built on the skeleton of older places, and vehicles that look like they have been welded together.

As for Paradiso itself? Weird stuff is happening inside the city, so we’ve also tried to infuse the cityscape with a sense of the uncanny and unexplained. Of course, you’ll see what all that amounts to, in the end.

Ram: Yeah, I’ll agree with Dev. But I’ll add that another interesting aspect of the design was to extrapolate what the world would look like if we lived in the ruins of our own hi-tech past. A kind of literal retro-futurism. So, while people struggle with scavenging to get by, they’re also living within the remnants of a city that once was the epitome of technological advancement. Aquarius being a great visual to show that. The transport conduit held trains the size of shipping liners and the tracks they moved on were so huge that buildings and rooms were will into the side of the channel dug for them. Rajiv had a key role to play with the architectural aspects of the city as well!

Also, designing The Guardians was fun. They’re just crazy and conceptually pretty out-there. A kind of mish-mash of something that’s part machine but made to look human and act human. And they have some interesting abilities as well. I cannot wait to reveal more about them! But, spoilers!

You mentioned Black Mumba, the Kickstarter comic you worked on together previously. How did you first meet each other?

Dev: When we met, we had worked in the indie industry for a couple of years in India. We always talked about working and never got around to it. And eventually when we got around to actually working on a project, it was Black Mumba. It was a dream project for me. Noir, heavy blacks and use of negative space, and as I went along, I saw my style evolve and change through the book. At the end of Black Mumba, Ram broached the idea of working on Paradiso and that was also a great idea. I loved it. And so, we started working on the pitch together.

Ram: Black Mumba was really the first time I made a comic that was available in a market outside of India. I knew that it was going to have that '40s crime noir aesthetic, and you can tell, Dev’s style was a perfect fit for that visual aesthetic. We Kickstarted Black Mumba, funded it in five days, and went on to raise 150 percent of our target. I knew then that the people who’d worked with me on that book were good collaborators and I’ve tried to create more work with all of them since. So hopefully, Paradiso is the first of many such collaborations!

What do you think your continuing creative collaboration has brought to the world of Paradiso?

Dev: Working with Ram is always fun. We are always on the same page, and our minds are weirdly in sync. But there is also room for individual ideas which leads to very interesting discussions that help both of us grow as artists. We have always worked well together, and our working chemistry improves with every issue of Paradiso we make. As for Paradiso, the storytelling through the issues keeps evolving more and more because we help each other grow.

Ram: Yeah, agreed. It’s always fun working with me. Ha!

Dev’s being very nice. But I think he’s getting at what I think makes us work very well together. We can be friends and fans of each other’s work. But we can also be honest with each other without egos getting in the way of creating good work. Everything is in service of a better book. I love that about working with Dev. And of course, the world of Paradiso would not be what it is without him. I script for my artists. Every time Dev sends me pages, the next script will lean on his strengths and will evolve as he does. I do think writers should script with their artist’s strengths and preferences in mind.

Image have published a lot of sci-fi futures in their time, but what’s interesting about Paradiso is the hope which the characters have. Was that a driving theme for you both -- the idea that everybody is on this journey to try and make their own better future?

Ram: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with this one. Sure, Paradiso to some extent is dystopian. But, as you say, this story is about hope. More specifically, it is about resilience. The idea that life finds a way. And human beings, like all other creatures, learn to adapt. Which presents us with a new normal. A new reality. And perhaps, in a time with self-destructive tendencies are only too evident in human beings. This story, to me, is a way to remind myself that while we talk of tax cuts and economies and capitalism and cyber warfare.

Somewhere, in this very world, right now, there are people just trying to get by in their daily lives. Putting in extraordinary effort for the things we take for granted. Perhaps a part of Paradiso reflects that sentiment. We might be frail, but if there is a thing we know, it is to get up, dust ourselves off and build things from scratch.

Dev: That’s what we had in mind for the characters and the story. Underneath all the gloom and destruction, the basic theme of the story is hope. Everyone is hoping for something better, including the city. I have always loved stories with this theme of people fighting on and moving forward through adversities.

The concept of Paradiso ultimately comes from your work in the Indian comics scene. What are your goals now, moving forward with Paradiso now launching at Image? Are there other comics you’d like to bring to the international audience through publishers like Image, and stories you're interested in telling?

Ram: Yeah, absolutely. The immediate aim is to be consistent and professional in delivering Paradiso. We intend for the book to have a few volumes of content. So, our priority is to make sure that we produce those books to our standard and get them out in time. Beyond that, I do have plans to bring more comics and collaborations to Image. Hopefully, they’ll continue to have us! On a personal level, I do want to bring more stories that combine my multicultural influences. I think you’ll see evidence of that in work that is already scheduled to come out through other publishers in 2018.

Dev: Ram and I do have plans to keep working together. And I might start working on some stories I have been thinking about in the future. I would love to bring stories from our culture over into western comics, if I can! I’m a huge horror fan and India has a very nice palette for horror stories. I also want to make science fiction more common in Indian comics.

Paradiso #1 is on sale now from Image Comics. Paradiso #2 is scheduled for release on Jan. 10.