BY JENNIFER M. CONTINO There aren't a lot of husband/wife comic book creative teams out there, but that didn't stop Adam Withers and Comfort Love from creating The Uniques. The family that comics together, stays together ... or something like that! Withers and Love have come up with a tale of heroes that follows "real time." If the series lasts thirty years, you'll see thirty years pass in the story as well. They're detailing the life and adventures of seven teenage heroes trying to make a difference in a world. Some are living up to a legacy, and some are just trying to create their own. But what sets this apart from the Teen Titans, New Mutants, Runaways or any other series featuring younger heroes trying to make their place in the world? For answers we turn to Withers and Love ....
THE PULSE: We'll start at the beginning, who or what are The Uniques?
ADAM WITHERS: 'Uniques' is the generic term for people with superhuman abilities. It's a way to classify them - uniques have powers, typics do not. They're still humans, and at the point when the story begins they've been fully accepted into day-to-day society. Their civil rights have been affirmed and legislated, so this isn't a story of race-relations and that sort of social conflict.
COMFORT LOVE: We called the book 'The Uniques' because it's not just about the characters we focus on in the beginning. It's about the world and all the people in it, and our entry into that world is through this group of seven teenagers who set out to 'change the world'.
Telepath is the de-facto leader, since she brought the team together. She's a Psion, which means she's got an array of mental powers at her disposal. Furthermore, she's the last of her kind - the only Psion left in the world. Her parents were the leaders of the League of Seven, so she sees it as her responsibility to follow those footsteps with a team of her own.
Her number two is Motherboard, a typic who is their eye in the sky and keeps the group coordinated in the field. Quake and Singe are a pair of rough-and-tumble guys who've been wandering from city to city and doling out their brand of vigilante hard-knocks before joining the team.
Scout is the sidekick to Ghost, a dark and brooding hero, and comes to the team out of a desire for friendship and a life outside of Ghost's shadowy existence. He maintains loyalties to both the group and to Ghost, which will lead to inevitable conflict as the story continues.
Finally, Kid Quick is a young speedster who grew up with Telepath and Motherboard, and the daughter of one of the only surviving members of the famed League of Seven.
Michael is a young man whose grandfather was a hero during World War II, but whose father withdrew his family from society. Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains, when his father dies he takes his grandfather's costume and weapons and leaves home and joins our merry band for no other reason than he was asked to.
ADAM WITHERS: From there, the book is really the story of these characters growing into a real team, but more than that it's about them growing up - the mistakes a person makes, the compromises they have to take, and the long road from youth to adulthood.
THE PULSE: What sets the world of The Uniques apart from a mainstream Marvel Comics or DC Comics universe or any place where there are super powers?
COMFORT LOVE: The most important thing for us is that time actually passes. Meaning that 60 years of comic is not compressed down into a mere ten years. We start the book in 1996 and continue year by year from there, not in real time, but not far from it.
ADAM WITHERS: We began concepting this story with the question of what we most liked about comics, and it came down to legacy, interconnection between the characters of the world, and a sense of history. But we also thought about the things that we felt comics most lacked, and that came down to growth and change.
COMFORT LOVE: Too often, we feel like major characters in comics are locked into boxes and aren't allowed to grow or change at all. Elaborate storylines are plotted out that ensure that the marquee characters will always remain essentially the same. We're doing the opposite and constructing an elaborate story that will change not only our characters but the world itself.
ADAM WITHERS: There will be no whitewashes, no retcons, no reboots, and no resurrections. We aren't trying to build a commercial property with this comic; we're trying to tell a good story. Death will be permanent, and some characters will grow to be unrecognizable from the people they were - for good and bad.
COMFORT LOVE: We both find a lot of excitement in looking at the more normal side of the fantastic. We're treating these characters as normal people, with all their flaws, foibles, and desires, who just happen to have powers. We're creating a world where most super-powered people would rather live an average life than wear a costume, and where we can approach super-heroing as an occupation as much as a calling. In some ways, that will make this book familiar to comic fans, but in a lot of fundamental ways it will make us very different from other stories.
THE PULSE: When we were talking about the series, you mentioned something happens to cause a void in the hero population. What was that event that made these teens feel as if they had big shoes to fill?
ADAM WITHERS: It happens in the beginning of the first issue, and it's a big deal. An attack is made that manages to wipe out virtually all of the world's top-tier heroes and a great many heads of state all at once.
COMFORT LOVE: Not only that, but an ensuing shockwave kills everybody with psychic powers. Every psionic man, woman, and child dies at once. All of them, except for one young girl called Telepath, who falls into a coma. She wakes up two years later into a world that looks the same but feels very different to her, and has to decide what to do next.
ADAM WITHERS: Telepath's parents were major figures on the global stage. They led the League of Seven, as we said, and that was a huge deal, and she wants to live up to that legacy. At the same time though, like all teenagers, she wants to be her own person and not be stuck in their shadow. At first she tries to do it on her own, but it quickly becomes clear that the actions of one hero on her own won't amount to much. So she and her best friend, Motherboard, decide to start a team.
COMFORT LOVE: Which is a difficult because with the loss of so many A-list heroes, any unique with real potential and skill had already been snatched up by the big teams with holes to fill in their rosters. So our team is really the bottom of the barrel - unknown, untested, and unsure.
THE PULSE: Why did you want to have this series be mainly about teens with superpowers?
COMFORT LOVE: Well, since we wanted to make the series about growth and change, starting with teenagers seemed the best way to go. If we started them older and more established, you'd miss some of the most crucial years as they learned the kind of people they wanted to be, and struggled just to get their feet under them.
ADAM WITHERS: But they won't stay teenagers. Over the course of the series - and we have easily 100+ issues of story worked out - you'll watch them grow from teens to adults in their 40's-50's. It's a sort of generational story you almost never get to see in comics, and we're very excited about it. Just look at the changes and events in our world over the last 30 years - now imagine adding uniques to the mix.
COMFORT LOVE: And just from the standpoint of a couple comic fans, we've always been drawn more to the sidekicks than the big characters. We've always been bigger fans of the Robins of the world than the Batmen.
ADAM WITHERS: There's just a sense of fun and hopefulness that younger people have in general. It's that feeling that your whole life is in front of you and anything can happen. It's all new and it's all possible. Of course, we beat a lot of that out of them over time, but that's life, isn't it? We'll see how idealistic and hopeful they can stay when their youthful optimism slams into the brick wall of the real world.
THE PULSE: It is tough for a lot of writers, who are outside that age group, to sometimes really capture the enthusiasm and "feel" of a teenage world. How did you get in touch with the youth of today to make your comic feel authentic?
ADAM WITHERS: Well, part of the reason the comic is set in the 90's to begin with is because that's when we were teenagers. We're only 28 years old now, but we still wanted to set it in a time where we could feel more authentic, among other reasons.
COMFORT LOVE: We are also teachers in the Continuing Studies program at Kendall College of Art and Design, and have been teaching teens of about the same ages as our characters for the last eight years. It keeps you pretty abreast of how teens talk and act, and has informed some of our writing, including the decision not to hold back in terms of language.
ADAM WITHERS: Yeah, some people may not like it, but nobody swears more often or more creatively than teenagers. We want these characters to feel and act in as believably real a manner as we can, and that means that we aren't holding anything back just to keep it PG-13. It's a strange irony that writing a book featuring 15-19 year old characters who talk and act like 15-19 year olds really do has led to a comic that some people would say a 15 year old shouldn't be allowed to read.
THE PULSE: It does seem tough to imagine someone with super powers would live a life as kind of a middle class instead of using powers to become rich, famous and renowned. Why do you think we don't really have a lot of stories about that side of powers?
ADAM WITHERS: I think people assume it would be boring. It's the same reason you don't see a lot of healthy, stable marriages in comics - people assume that marriage is boring and uninteresting to readers, so they always muck it up.
COMFORT LOVE: For us, finding the mundane in the super is part of the fun. In our world, there are a lot of uniques out there. They aren't common, but they aren't rare either. Just being different isn't enough to make you famous anymore. But there are a lot of people in the real world who work hard daily to make this world a better place in ways that won't bring fame or wealth, and there are a lot of really talented, special people who never gain any renown for what they do.
ADAM WITHERS: Honestly, I think most people just want to live their lives in peace. Even with their powers, uniques want what we all do. The example we like to use is a guy with electricity powers. Just because he can shoot lightning doesn't mean he'd automatically want to start wearing his underwear outside his pants and fight crime, and it doesn't mean all his morals would instantly evaporate and turn him into a bank robber. What's more likely is he'd get a job at the power plant, clock in like the rest of us and read a book or something while they draw off that free electricity he generates.
COMFORT LOVE: But that very normalcy leads to a world that is subtly quite different from ours. I mean, we're talking about a guy who can generate nearly limitless free, clean energy. It opens all kinds of doors for society, and while our hypothesis is that cultures would remain very similar to those we're familiar with, there are still things that make their world a different place beneath the surface.
ADAM WITHERS: Japan is an example, where one family emerges whose members are basically pure energy. They have a palace built that harnesses that energy constantly and powers the entire nation. Having access to limitless pure, clean and free power has allowed Japan to become a high-tech, super advanced 'country of tomorrow.' It's a sci-fi fan's paradise, but the Japanese people are culturally and socially very similar to the way we know them today. The world changes, but people are people wherever you go, and even the unbelievable can become average if you're around it long enough.
THE PULSE: Obviously it's more engaging for the reader to relate to the everyman type of hero, someone we all could aspire to be, how do you make your characters relatable to Joe or Jane Average?
COMFORT LOVE: Well, in the Uniques it's about the people, not the powers. Our favorite things to draw and write are the personal moments where the characters are just talking together. Big fights are fun, but our book is more focused on the relationships and personal stories of the characters that really make the big things and big fights matter.
ADAM WITHERS: None of these characters are perfect, and few of them are even that good to start with. There are several comics that talk about their characters being inexperienced and unskilled and needing to learn the ropes, but we actually show that. Issue by issue, we are watching these kids become heroes and become friends, and it's a friendship we want the readers to share in.
COMFORT LOVE: When it comes to the main seven characters we worked really hard to keep them authentic and believable. When you read them, part of our intention is to make them familiar to you. We want you to be like, "Yeah, I know a guy just like that." These are people you know, people we know, and that's the fun. We want people read The Uniques and feel like their coming back to hang out with their friends every issue.
THE PULSE: What influenced you the most when you were working on The Uniques? Were you inspired/affected by series like Teen Titans, New Mutants, Infinity Inc., Runaways or others where teens take the lead?
COMFORT LOVE: Some of our favorite comics have been Generation X, Gen 13, Invincible, Ultimate Spider-Man, Runaways and Teen Titans. So yeah, we're well versed in teen hero books. But when we approached The Uniques, we wanted to do it from a different angle than most teen comics, and we looked to different influences.
ADAM WITHERS: Comic-wise, we're probably drawing more from our love of Gaiman's Sandman and Ennis' Preacher than anything else, which probably sounds strange for a comic about teen supers. We aren't trying to do yet another deconstruction of super-heroes, though, so don't expect The Uniques to be about tearing down conventional expectations just because. We're aiming for relatable and believable, but also for a sense of whimsy and fun. The book will go a lot of places in the emotional spectrum, but we've never held the belief that for a book to be realistic it had to be dark and depressing all the time. You look at Sandman and Preacher and you can see some of what we're getting at with that.
COMFORT LOVE: I think our biggest influence, though, has been TV. Specifically the really good TV of the last several years - shows like Six Feet Under, Rome, Journeyman, Battlestar Galactica, and The Wire. These aren't about plot, they're about character. Particularly because these shows were self-contained, with a beginning, middle and ending, which meant that the characters had an arc and were allowed to change as that arc progressed towards its conclusion.
ADAM WITHERS: In the same way that I look at Battlestar Galactica and don't see a science fiction show so much as a deeply emotional human drama that happens to be set in space, I think of The Uniques as a human story that happens to involve super heroes.
THE PULSE: When we've had over 60 years of heroes and sidekicks, what truly does make your story Unique? What are we getting here that we haven't already seen before? Why should PULSE readers check this out?
ADAM WITHERS: We don't want to be presumptuous, but it seems the pendulum of superhero comic plotting has swung away from character and depth and is heavily on the side of big events and crossovers that are more about pushing product while only delivering superficial developments for characters. It's a bull in a china shop, and we wanted to pull back and tell a story that can be huge and epic and deal with world-shaping events while focusing on the people involved instead of the event itself, all while staying true to who our characters are and where they're going.
COMFORT LOVE: When you read the Uniques you are reading a comic about a journey. We start with these seven kids at the beginning of their journey, and will be riding it out several decades into their future to see a conclusion that involves them, their forebears and the generations behind them.
ADAM WITHERS: We aren't trying to get a movie deal or a TV pilot, and we aren't writing a comic to sell toys and underoos and make millions by following some unwritten formula. Heck, we'd probably turn down a movie deal if it were offered! We're just trying to tell a good story; the kind of comic we've wanted to read our whole lives, but haven't ever gotten to see.
COMFORT LOVE: We've worked our butts off to make this the best comic we possibly could. Not just in terms of story, but in the lines and the color too. It doesn't look like other books, but we think that's a strength. The Uniques is the culmination of years of hard work and we are elated to actually have it come into fruition.
THE PULSE: What have been some of the biggest challenges of not falling back on old conventions or ground that has been tread? How do you keep it fresh?
ADAM WITHERS: We try not to get too caught up in that. You said yourself that there's 60 years of superhero comics out there, and trying to be totally new and original can be a losing game. Everything's been done in one way or another, we're just trying to tell our story the best way we can.
COMFORT LOVE: If anything, the challenge has been that it is a book about super heroes, and there's a tendency to see costumes and powers and assume that it's the same old song and dance. When we talk about it breaking conventions and dealing with more realistic people, we get people assuming it's just another Watchmen. When we say it's a book about teen heroes that are good friends trying to break out of the shadow of their predecessors, people assume it's Teen Titans.
ADAM WITHERS: Heck, just the idea of uniques and typics makes people jump to the X-Men paradigm of 'fighting to protect a world that hates and fears you.' And to an extent, you can't get away from that. We just focus on making these characters their own people despite the archetypes, and hope that those who actually read the book can feel the difference. If you stick with us long enough, you'll see that we're our own thing, and while The Uniques pays homage to the comics we love, it is anything but a rehash of old concepts.
COMFORT LOVE: We have to say that our art style has been a challenge for people, too. We've been trying to break into comics for a long time, and though we don't see our style as being that far off from a lot of popular artists, editors never knew how to classify us.
ADAM WITHERS: Right. It's as if you're either Tim Sale or Jim Lee and there's no in-between. We're too animated for the 'edgy' titles and too realistic for the kiddie stuff. Nobody has told us we aren't good - we've gotten nothing but glowing reviews for the last couple years. But the belief is that we're 'too different' for current audiences to accept us.
COMFORT LOVE: Obviously, we don't think that's true. But the rejection was part of what lit the fire under us to start working for ourselves on The Uniques, so it might be a blessing in disguise. We'll have to see whether audiences have as much of a problem handling our art style as some editors think they would, but so far we've gotten nothing but positive responses to the comic, and the art's been a really big part of that.
THE PULSE: What have been the biggest challenges of collaborating on The Uniques? Has it made the relationship stronger or led to a lot of arguments?
ADAM WITHERS: It's a little of both, actually, but much more the former than the latter.
COMFORT LOVE: The basis of The Uniques was a story that I'd been building in my head since I was 13 years old. When we decided a few years ago to really start working on a comic of our own, The Uniques just seemed like the best choice. But that meant that I came to the table already having strong opinions about the characters and the story. Honestly, though - having the ability to really collaborate with someone and get so deep into the psychology and sociology of the characters and world I'd been fiddling with for so long, let alone that it's my husband I'm working with, has been the greatest, most wonderful thing that's ever happened to me. I'd say if anything it's strengthened our relationship.
ADAM WITHERS: One of our favorite things to do is just take a break during the day, take a walk, and bounce story ideas off of each other. We're talking about stories all the time, and plotting this book's future far beyond where we're at right now. And to get a chance to have both the male and the female perspective on things has been invaluable and is just another one of those things that makes The Uniques… well, unique.
COMFORT LOVE: And when there are arguments, it usually leads to stronger story beats and better character moments, so as hard as it can be, it's worth it.
THE PULSE: How long has The Uniques been both online and offline?
COMFORT LOVE: Issue #1 went up in early March, and issue #2 was out in April.
ADAM WITHERS: We plan on being able to release bi-monthly, since we're doing the whole shebang ourselves (with help from a letterer and some fine people who do our color separations). Though that's a bit of a wait, sometimes, the tradeoff is that we average a 26 page count, with 36 for the first issue, and in full color, which few self-published comics can do.
COMFORT LOVE: It's designed as a traditional print comic, but we've tried to integrate some extras into the web distribution. Primarily, the fact that you can download a digital copy of every issue in PDF or CBZ format for only 99¢ is a direct appeal to potential readers that you can give The Uniques a try for the cost of a song on iTunes.
ADAM WITHERS: We do offer a print version for $5 through Indy Planet, but we have more than that at the website. We have a director's commentary podcast and a soundtrack for every issue, trying to get as much of a 'Collector's Edition DVD' feel as we can. There's also an extensive character bio section featuring a brief history of the world of The Uniques, and a big art gallery.
COMFORT LOVE: We've got a forum, too, which is really neat. I mean, everybody's got their own forum these days, but now we do too, and we put up special Uniques stuff there that nobody else gets to see. We don't think of The Uniques as a web-comic, really, but we are definitely going the extra mile to make the website a part of the experience.
THE PULSE: Very few people make it rich by doing independent comic books, when you're not creating comics, what's your job that pays the bills?
ADAM WITHERS: We teach, like we said, but we also do freelance illustration on the side.
COMFORT LOVE: We've done some role-playing illustration, too, for companies like Green Ronin and Palladium Books.
ADAM WITHERS: We live a really meager existence, but we have very few real needs and are very happy in our poor lifestyle. Nothing would make us happier than selling just enough Uniques comics to keep us at this level for as long as we can.
COMFORT LOVE: We don't need much, but we should make it plain that we can't afford to continue making The Uniques if it doesn't sell. The less business we do, the more other freelance jobs we have to take, and that slows down our production schedule and thus our sales drop more. We need people to support us in order to keep going, and that's just the way it is.
THE PULSE: What other projects are you working on?
ADAM WITHERS: Nothing at the moment, though we recently finished work on some illustrations for the upcoming 'Freedom's Most Wanted' sourcebook for the Mutants & Masterminds RPG by Green Ronin.
COMFORT LOVE: Our focus right now is The Uniques. We're working really hard to get it off the ground and flying, and it's taking most of our time. It'll all be worth it, though, if people like it enough that we get to keep going. We've got enough story for these characters to last a long, long time, we just need the readers' support to get there.
The first two issues of The Uniques are available now.
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