UNVEILING TOP COW'S MITH

[MattBrady]

by Benjamin Ong Pang Kean

If you thought the world is getting safer, it’s not.

Especially if you’re living in the Top Cow Universe… You know, the same universe where you have creations like the Witchblade, Darkness, Hunter-Killer and… the M.I.T.H. Squad?

In July, co-writers Jennifer Brandes Hepler and Chris Hepler and artist Stephen Segovia will be introducing the Magical Intelligence Tactical Headquarters in M.I.T.H.: Operation Smoking Jaguar, an original graphic novel with a cover by Tyler Kirkham.

We tried to debunk the “M.I.T.H.” with the Heplers.

Newsarama: From the solicitation copy, it was revealed that “the Magical Intelligence Tactical Headquarters controls the real secret behind America's military might - magic wands, crystal coffins, and the occasional hundred-eyed invisible giant.” Um…

Chris Hepler: Well, we basically wanted M.I.T.H. to answer the question: "How the hell did a little upstart nation like the U.S. ever get to be the world's foremost superpower, anyway?" As creationists are happy to tell us, any answer that takes more than a word or two to say and involves any understanding of complex circumstances must be wrong. So, we figured that behind all those acronyms and enormous defense budgets, there was really only one way to explain it: we've got magic.

M.I.T.H., therefore, is about a United States which, early in the 20th century, discovered that everything you've ever read about in mythology or fairy tales is real. Ancient cultures knew how to work these magics, but their secrets have long been lost to modern, "developed" nations. When the American government realized how the use of magic would shift its place in the balance of power, it immediately classified all knowledge of the supernatural as a state secret... and founded the Magical Intelligence Tactical Headquarters to try to make heads or tails of the bizarre relics and creatures they found.

For a hundred years the soldiers of M.I.T.H. have been the most special of special forces, devoted to finding and reclaiming the lost magics of ancient civilizations in the name of national security. The reason the public “never hears about the successes,” as the CIA complains, is not because we can’t be trusted with the truth. It’s because no one would ever believe it.

In this graphic novel, Operation Smoking Jaguar, the CIA discovers that a nuclear weapon has been teleported out of its silo, meaning that we may no longer be alone in our mystical knowledge. While the lackadaisical President uses everything from mind-control to Snow White's crystal coffin to protect himself from the fallout, the M.I.T.H. team goes on a wild adventure through the Mayan underworld, looking for the heart of the World Tree, the only mythological item which might protect the nation against a nuclear blast.

It’s just your standard "boy-meets-megalomaniacal-Mayan-shaman, boy-loses-teammate-to-ancient-sacrifice, boy-fights-dragon-on-the-back-of-a-fighter-jet" story. With a couple of new twists.

NRAMA: Sounds like a page taken from a Hollywood movie pitch…

CH: Y'know that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark of the Covenant gets wheeled off into a warehouse full of a hundred other identical crates that you just know have something equally cool in them? These are the guys that own that warehouse, and it's every bit as cool as you thought.

Men in Black meets The Mummy, M.I.T.H. is one of those old-fashioned boy's adventure stories, Indiana Jones updated for the twenty-first century, with a mix of wild tomb-raiding action, military-magic hardware, and fairy tale jokes.

It's one of those comic books that you studio executives secretly don't get, but you know that there's a really big audience for and you don't want to miss out on the chance to have the next Spider-Man, so seriously, pick it up or you'll always be wondering if you're past your prime and too old to have your finger on the pulse of the eighteen-to-thirty-five demographic, so just stop dithering and greenlight the damn movie.

NRAMA: What was the inspiration behind the creation of M.I.T.H.?

Jennifer Brandes Hepler: I'll take the floor for this one, since the original concept came from me. M.I.T.H. was actually part of my response to September 11th. At the time, we had been working on something very light and meaningless, a Gilmore Girls spec script, I think, where Rory is trying to get a job on the school paper. After September 11th, that kind of writing was almost impossible to go back to.

On the other hand, writing something dark and depressing didn't exactly seem like the best way to, say, embrace life and move on. I remember vividly the day when I started to think about what I would want to see right now, and the first thing that came to mind was, "I want to see something where the CIA has a magic wand that they can just wave and make everything better." Out of that initial impulse (and with many changes along the way) grew M.I.T.H..

We had wanted to do a classic action-adventure story for a while, and the idea of starting with a typical political thriller plot (a missing nuclear weapon), then sending our heroes in the complete opposite direction to run around in Mayan pyramids looking for a magical tree while the world falls apart around them, just seemed to fit.

The story was originally conceived as a film script, but when the amazing Cindi Rice read it, she immediately thought about passing it to Top Cow, which was looking for new properties for graphic novels. They liked the story, we liked their previous work, and it has been a fantastic experience working with them to transform the script into a comic book. Stephen Segovia's art has added so much to it, and we can't wait to see the final product.

NRAMA: Who’s Special-ops soldier Hamilton Crow? Who are the rest of the M.I.T.H. squad?

CH: Our hero is Hamilton Crow, former Army Ranger, and the newest member of M.I.T.H.. Quick-witted, impulsive, and ruggedly individualistic, Crow epitomizes the "Army of One" slogan... and all the reasons that the chain-of-command, team-player Army has always hated it. Still awaiting his clearance to learn the true secret of M.I.T.H. when the story opens, Crow learns about magic along with the reader, and just what sacrifices it takes to earn a miracle.

Shauna Mirez is the M.I.T.H. team's Arcanist, a walking encyclopedia of ancient history, folklore, and languages. Mexican-American, young, beautiful and only a few years out of school, it's her job to decipher the obscure fables and fairy tales of a new culture before whatever it is this week decides to eat them all. Shauna is intense, intelligent and headstrong, the heart and soul of the team, and more than a match for Crow.

Their commanding officer, Drake Brunell, is M.I.T.H.'s longest-serving CO, a gruff man who can't quite rationalize the need for magic in the War on Terror with the sometimes ridiculous fairy-tale rules which go along with it. Crow is everything he hates in a subordinate -- he's disobedient, snarky... and right.

Back in D.C., Victor Gaetano is our main eye on the crisis, a career CIA man and M.I.T.H.'s liaison to the White House. He is the single highest-ranked officer in M.I.T.H., and the one who is tasked with explaining with a straight face why the only hope for U.S. national security may lie in an ancient Mayan ruin, and why hundred-eyed invisible giants ought not to be funded on taxpayer dollars.

NRAMA: And the bad guy is…?

CH: …The guy who wins our personal "best-dressed" award in Stephen Segovia and Tyler Kirkham's fabulous art. Our villain, Ma Qu Xbalan (MAH khu JBAL-ahn, in our closest phonetic Tzotzil), is a Mayan shaman who is using the ancient Mayan religion and magics to ensure that this world is destroyed just as the ancient prophecies predicted. (For those who aren't up on their "Ancient Prophecies of Annihilation and Other Fun Stories," the Mayan calendar did predict a cosmic disaster that would end the world some time in the early twenty-first century).

NRAMA: What do you hope to achieve with M.I.T.H.?

CH: Glory, honor and action figures.

NRAMA: Ah, that must be the George Lucas in you talking, right?

CH: Seriously, while we certainly would enjoy seeing M.I.T.H. return to its roots on the big screen, right now, we mostly just want to achieve a bunch of happy readers. If we can make a few people laugh, maybe convince a few nutjobs that Harry Potter is really CIA propaganda, and hopefully have some call for further adventures, we'll be pretty happy.

NRAMA: Now, that sounds more like a comic book writer talking…

CH: As far as what we want to achieve as writers, we've both been huge fans of mythology since we were kids, and one of the things that's always struck us is how silly most of it is by today's standards. In Norse mythology, the goddess Freya drives a chariot pulled by four grey cats (we have a gray cat... he's not pullin' anything). In West African mythology, there are demons that can only be driven off if you offer them booze. And yet when people sit down to use this stuff, they always go for the easy ones, the stories that, y'know, make sense. Even Hercules and Xena didn't go into all the really weirdo stuff myths are capable of.

In M.I.T.H., we want to use the entire compost heap of world mythology, combine it with some straight-faced government bureaucratese and set the whole thing on frappe.

NRAMA: Right, a comic book writer who has Hollywood in his sight. In this case, make it two of you. So, what's your background in comics, anyway? What have you done prior to this?

Ch: While we are both long-time comics readers (starting with the Pinis' Elfquest books and progressing through a lot of DC/Vertigo stuff, Rising Stars, Fray, and some others), this is our first published work in the comics field.

As we hinted earlier, we came to this deal via Hollywood, where we've been working as screen and television writers for the past several years. We did a stint on CBS's The Agency, a CIA drama which was on for two seasons a few years back (and which might also explain where our bottomless desire to make fun of the CIA comes from). We've also developed feature film projects with a number of companies, mostly sci-fi and fantasy book and video game adaptations, and mostly still at a stage where we shouldn't talk about them publicly.

Before that, we did some work that comes a little closer to comics -- we used to write for a bunch of paper-and-pencil roleplaying games, including "Cyberpirates" for Shadowrun, "The Ork Nation of Cara Fahd" for Earthdawn, "Creatures of the Nightcycle" for Paranoia and "Bearers of Jade" for Legend of the Five Rings. While these projects are still some of the closest to our hearts, we were driven from that field by a strong urge not to live in our parents' basements.

Combine all that with some dabbling in computer game writing and a few novel manuscripts, and we've pretty much written anything that has words. We've really enjoyed working with Top Cow, though, and are hoping that this won't be our last foray into the world of comics.

NRAMA: Lastly, is this set in the same universe as Mark Waid and Marc Silvestri’s Hunter-Killer and V.I.C.E.?

CH: Well, as funny as it might be to have the folks in Hunter-Killer going after the seven dwarves, that's probably not on Top Cow's agenda any time soon. On the other hand, we're not necessarily in the loop on their other projects, and we shouldn't rule out any crossovers later down the line. In general though, Hunter-Killer and V.I.C.E. seem a whole lot darker than what we're doing.

M.I.T.H.: Operation Smoking Jaguar, 112 pages with a cover price of $9.99, is scheduled to be in stores in July.

[Vyper]

This just sounds far too cool to pass up. I've always wondered, after watching Raider of the Lost Ark, if the government warehouse thing was going to be explored anywhere. Plus, the bit about the President hiding in Snow White's crystal coffin from the nuclear fallout was just priceless.

[joebrown]

been hearing about this for a while...it's a great idea and certainly has potential, but I'm also terribly afraid it's going to feel like a wannabe BPRD...

also, anyone familiar with the interior artist? It's nice to have the cover but...

[Blablabla]

i allready preordered it and i can't wait for it.

[Simon Bowland]

I'm the letterer on MITH, and I can vouch for the interior artwork. It looks fantastic, and it's backed up by some top-notch coloring. Hopefully they'll release some preview pages of the interiors but I'd recommend everyone check the book out!