Javier Grillo-Marxuach talks Middleman, Super Skrull

Javier Grillo-Marxuach, writer of the upcoming Super Skrull mini-series for Marvel, Middleman for Viper and a little TV show you might have heard of called Lost, talked to SciFi.com about his work at Marvel:

"I'm working on Marvel's Super-Skrull miniseries," he said. An old-school Marvel villain who battled the likes of the Fantastic Four, Thor and Captain Marvel, Super-Skrull is being tinkered with for a new destiny. "They have a big event called Annihilation," Grillo-Marxuach said. "That's their big spring line of comic books. I'm taking this 33-year-old Marvel villain and turning him into a hero and exploring him a little bit more closely. It's a four-issue miniseries that is part of a greater event. The event is a preamble with four four-issue miniseries featuring different characters, and then a six-issue miniseries that explains the Annihilation wave's assault on the Marvel galaxy. It's a huge event, and it's really cool. Working with Marvel characters that are legacy characters is pretty exciting."

He also spoke in length about Middleman, the comic that started as a TV pilot:

Volume two of The Middleman started last fall, and Grillo-Marxuach said the new series offers a lot more action-adventure. "The first four issues were very much what I had envisioned, and then as I started to script the second four, that's where I took all the lessons I learned from working with [artist] Les McClaine and the audience response to it and put them into the second miniseries. I think one of the criticisms I got most consistently about the [first] book was about the pacing. I don't think people disliked it necessarily, but the first four issues were based on a TV pilot, and they had a lot of dialogue, and it was about setting up the characters. I feel like the second miniseries is richer in incident. It's about hitting the ground running and setting up something that has action and adventure all the way through. We've tried really hard to add a lot of visual spectacle and crowds of thousands, while still keeping the nice intimate, banter-y tone of the first one."

In future issues, Grillo-Marxuach revealed that there will be "hundreds of marauding masked wrestlers attacking! It's a little bit sexier and action-packed. There is a lot of shocking destiny in it. Actually, one of our main characters is going to be shot, and I'm settling a couple of things from the first series, in terms of getting some characters sort of done with."