STAN LEE'S THE DEVIL'S QUINTET INTERVIEW WITH GILL CHAMPION & JAY BONANSINGA

INTERVIEW BY GALAXY

The ripple effect of Stan Lee will beeternally present in the pop culture sphere. He forever changed the way we not only viewed comic books, but fictional stories, broadening the possibilities of narrative and depth of character.

Prior to his death in 2018, he and his right-hand man Gill Champion recruited The Walking Dead veteran Jay Bonansinga to tackle the Marvel Comics legend’s first novel, The Devil’s Quintet. The story follows a group of soldiers who are offered a deal with the devil that would give them superpowers, but would require them to act as his bounty hunters in return. It’s here where our protagonists come face to face with their own humanity and must make a crucial choice.

While reflecting on Stan Lee’s impact and his unparalleled vision, Jay and Gill chat with Galaxy and delve into some of the more granular aspects of building a superhero—or supervillain—story: the questions they’re forced to ask themselves while constructing the story’s foundation and figuring out the true anatomy of these characters and their limitations.

Gill Champion & Jay Bonansinga: POW! Entertainment

GILL CHAMPION & JAY BONANSINGA

SPOILER: What is this book about? JAY BONANSINGA: When I was lucky enough to be brought on board on this project, I had a feeling it was going to be the most interesting ride of my life and career. And so far, it hasn’t disappointed. It began as a premise that Stan Lee created, and it was a little different. GILL CHAMPION: It was. One of the things that Stan always wanted to do was write a novel. As the years went by, he was preoccupied with so many other things. But he was always infatuated with heroes and villains, and wanted to tackle this particular story. It’s probably a little different and darker than most of the Stan Lee projects we did at POW! that he was known for. It started with a concept. We were determined to find the right person to begin collaboration with, and we were lucky enough to come across Jay. After meeting and conversing with Jay, Stan was thrilled, before he passed, that he was passing the torch of this particular project on to Jay.

SPOILER: Was the story something that was close to Stan’s heart? Or was it more of an homage to ideas that he gave before he passed?

GILL CHAMPION: Stan and I spent countless hours over the years talking about good and evil, and heroes and villains, and Stan always wanted to write this story about the ultimate villain. The devil is the ultimate representative of evil. Stan always wanted to have a hero too, and he was always attracted to stories that had to do with the military. So, taking these two elements and putting them together, Stan created the idea of The Devil’s Quintet. As the twilight was coming up on him, it was really something he wanted to put down in order to express some of his feelings about this particular journey, that he felt was very personal to him as well. JAY BONANSINGA: I would also add that Stan was a genius at creating superheroes that were human and flawed and accessible to readers. People identified with his superheroes. Spider-Man is one of the prototypical human-sized superheroes. And this book is the ultimate version of that for me. Because when you’re a soldier, especially a special forces soldier, you’re pretty much the superhero of the military. But you also go and do what they tell you to do. You’re kind of an employee. That was one

of the first hooks that sunk into me about this premise: a bunch of incredibly elite, badass former Navy SEALs, and now they’re assassins for the government. Then they’re drawn into a Faustian bargain. For me, it resonated a lot. I have friends who were in the military. I had this one friend who would just help go through my past novels to make sure the military protocol was correct.

So, by the time I had this great opportunity, I had known quite a bit about military protocol. And it’s so eerie about how it jives with what a real soldier has to do in the modern world. And these characters talk about that. It’s a gumbo of different genres. It’s action, it’s military, it’s horror, it’s fantasy, it’s mordant humor. I just hope that Stan would have been as proud of this as I am. GILL CHAMPION: I’m sure he would have. And hopefully he’s smiling down and not looking up [laughs]. JAY BONANSINGA: [laughs] GILL CHAMPION: The military always played such a strong role in everything we did. Stan would usually think of who the villain should be first. And in this case, we have the ultimate villain. Then you try to come up with superheroes that seemed that the odds are already so far stacked against them that, how could they ever become superheroes? The journey of this military quintet is probably one of the most fascinating journeys because it combines both fiction and nonfiction. It makes for an incredible story for multiple generations of fans that will want to read this book, and on a global basis because of Stan’s reach.

SPOILER: What’s the biggest advantage of doing this in novel form? JAY BONANSINGA: There’s a thing that you work with in film and prose and fiction and comic books

GILL CHAMPION & JAY BONANSINGA

something that I went from an undergraduate to a PhD working for [The Walking Dead’s] Robert Kirkman—and it’s called “tone.” I know this sounds like a cheesy cliché, but when I’m working on Devil’s Quintet, it feels like Stan is a North Star. Whenever I do something, I’m like, “What would Stan do?” There’s a Stan Lee tone. You don’t see it in prose very often because he was a creature of the graphic comic book, but I had eight years and millions of words and eight complete books with Kirkman, absorbing the comic book feel. Comic books are here and now. They’re closer to film than they are to literature. And so, I immediately started thinking in present tense. These soldiers are in the here and now.

It was very comparable to The Walking Dead field. Yeah, you can have flashbacks—and we do have them. But The Devil’s Quintet is really in-your-face, forward moving, and visual.

GILL CHAMPION: When you read the book, you become so engrossed with the characters. Reading is an imaginative process. You can very well see it as if you’re reading a film script because the characters are so three-dimensional. You truly feel like you’re put in this as an observer in a visual journey. And that’s what really attracted me to Jay’s writing. You feel like you’re living it along with the protagonist and antagonist as well.

JAY BONANSINGA: In Stan Lee’s original premise, he describes the devil. Maybe one day, Gill, you guys will publish that premise. It’s so interesting. For a Jewish person, there’s not really a devil. Stan’s devil was almost Dickensian. So, I figured

Gill Champion & Jay Bonansinga: POW! Entertainment

for each character, their own version of the devil would be different. That’s how I started. That was a Stan Lee thing. I used that as the commander of the quintet, but it changes for everybody. GILL CHAMPION: The interesting thing about Stan’s characters was that they were always flawed. A superpower is both a blessing and a curse. It’s something that’s such a strong part of wish fulfillment: “If I were a superhero, would I be able to be that person?” It comes along with both happiness and sadness. And the complexity of these characters is very understandable. In a comic book, you don’t get a chance to get that, although it’s an imaginative process. But here, Jay laid it out so that everyone gets to know all these characters. And that’s what’s just so amazing, and what separates this medium, and what makes this book different.

With The Exorcist or The Shining, those are stories that people identified with, and yet at the same time, scared the hell out of them. That’s what we have here. It’s what Stan left as part of his legacy, and Jay’s taking that on to flesh it out.

SPOILER: How long did it take to come up with the whole story and all the intricacies?

JAY BONANSINGA: About a year. I’m in the middle of book 2 right now, but I’m already thinking in terms of book 3 and 4. It just keeps getting richer and richer. Good versus evil is an archetype; a classic conflict in story. The devil is the world’s greatest supervillain, and God is the world’s greatest superhero. The mechanical part of writing it was probably close to a year, but I started thinking about it a year before I wrote the book. I started working on the proposal with Gill’s help, and I started thinking about the arc of the story and where it’s gonna go. I read extensively, not in terms of military protocol, but in terms of religion. There’s such a rich meaning to mine there in a superhero story when it comes to religion. It doesn’t matter if you’re religious or not, but in this book there’s all sorts of tips of the hat to the history of religion throughout the millennia.

Here’s a bit of a spoiler: They find that the devil can listen in to what they’re saying to each other. And through this Rube Goldberg, twisty story, they discover that if they can get to a church and get inside that enclosure, then the devil can’t hear them. That’s their cone of silence.

SPOILER: Why do you think the devil honed in on these five people?

JAY BONANSINGA: That’s a great question. In terms of our early development of this, I think it was Gill who said, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was another quintet—a Vietnam-era quintet—but they didn’t work out?” I was like, “Oh, I love that!” So, we’re using that more than once—a sort of B story. There’s an aspect of the devil in this Stan Lee universe where he has a job to do. He may be the prince of darkness, but he is also a professional. He needs freelancers to help him track down people who have skipped on their own deals. The devil can’t kill you, so he needs humans in this earthly realm to kill you.

SPOILER: The intricacy of this story is found in the tension of whether or not these people choose to do this anymore. JAY BONANSINGA: Right! It’s the tip of the iceberg. That’s what Stan Lee gave his artists. He gave them the tip of the iceberg, and then there’s so much to these characters and ideas that the stories tell themselves. When you’re writing something like this, you have to ask yourself fascinating questions like, “Do these characters know about other superheroes? Do they know about The Avengers?” And I had to ask myself that when I was working on The Walking Dead: “Have these characters seen Night of the Living Dead? Because of pop culture, do they know that they have to destroy the brains of these zombies?” My answer to that is usually yes. They exist in our universe. They know what a superhero is. It adds to the richness. This is a bad example, but

GILL CHAMPION & JAY BONANSINGA

it’s like if another person knows what an alcoholic is but they still drink and drink and drink, and eventually go, “You know? I’m an alcoholic.” You live in a universe where Spider-Man exists. But then when you become a superhero, it becomes even more terrifying in a sense.

SPOILER: It’s about free will—these choices humans make all the time, whether they have superpowers or not. GILL CHAMPION: That’s really the crux of what it is. Every hero at some point has to make a decision: “Am I a hero or do I have villainy in me?” The antagonist always has to believe just as strongly in their beliefs. And that’s part of the battle. Both of these forces feel just as strongly.

SPOILER: And sometimes the humanity doesn’t fully come in until after they get the powers. JAY BONANSINGA: Another question you have to answer in a story like this is, “If we don’t go along with the devil, will he just take these superpowers away? Can we use these superpowers against the devil? Can we use them to do good?” These are eternal questions. I think of it as the Haunted House Syndrome. People are in a haunted house—why don’t they just move? [laughs] I mean, maybe they can’t afford a mortgage, but still! If there are these demons in there, why don’t they just move away? And so, you come up with clever little impediments. And we came up with a big one for this. We came up with the reason why the devil cannot just take those powers away, and maybe they can use them against the devil.

SPOILER: How long will this story keep going? JAY BONANSINGA: There’s gonna be part 2, part 3, part 4. It’s very possible—I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, but it will become a television series as well. All this stuff is in development. A story does, at a certain point, take over.

It starts to breathe. These are human beings just like the rest of us. That was the genius of Robert Kirkman, to take something that was a trope—a zombie? When I first heard about it, I was like, “No, that will never work.” And then I read the first issue of the comic book and I’m like, “It’s genius!” And the reason it’s genius is because there’s just one thing that you have to suspend your disbelief about, and it’s that people could crawl out of the grave and want to eat you. But everything surrounding it is hyperrealistic. It’s real people dealing with real-life issues. And that’s a component here with The Devil’s Quintet. That’s what makes it great. GILL CHAMPION: As we started working on the original treatment we thought, “Hey, this would make a great movie.” And as we continued to work with Jay, and saw the richness of the story and the depth of the characters, we now think that this will make a great series. We are in the process of, at least from book 1, becoming a series. And as we continue to publish the books, it will hopefully go on and live a life of many seasons. There’s so much potential in this and we’re hoping that the readers will get to this and share our enthusiasm.

SPOILER: The story is so great. It’s about the thing that terrifies us humans the most: making decisions. GILL CHAMPION: Besides being entertaining and visual, I’m thinking it will make readers think a little bit about their own lives and their own choices. And if we’ve done all that, then it will be very satisfying.

Reading was always important to Stan. That’s why he always tried to elevate the level of comic books to not only entertain and to look at the pictures, but to be able to read. [Books] were always an important part of Stan’s life, and hopefully this book will be an important part of his legacy. People will be able to sit down and read a book!

Gill Champion & Jay Bonansinga: POW! Entertainment