As the dispatches fly from the opulent and self-titled Hilluminati command post, writer Bryan Edward Hill has the stylized air of a thoughtful man, dissecting popular culture and the craft of writing alongside what it means to be a black man in America in 2018. He is reflective. Assertive. Kind.

Hill is also stubborn. But thoughtful. Thoughtfully stubborn, if that's a thing that one can be. So if someone had attempted to persuade him to not talk to white supremacists during research for his new Vertigo series "American Carnage," he would have dodged with a rebuff, explained passionately in a parry why he needed to pry inside the tiny minds of hate mongers and gone and done the damn thing, which is, of course, exactly what he did.

"They didn't trust that I wasn't trying to set them up in some way," Hill said. "Like this articulate black guy coming in, seemingly calm, it had to be some kind of trap, right? So you get through that initial kind of thing, and then some people kind of throw some slurs at you and poke you a little bit to see if you respond. And it's not that easy to get me to respond, so that didn't work.

"And then when they wore themselves out of all that, they would just start talking. And there's something that happens when you put two human beings in front of each other, looking each other in the eye, people seek to relate to other people."

That process of relation -- here, between Hill and inveterate racists -- involved them turning from slurs directed at him and on to anti-Semitism, a process Hill described darkly as some attempt to find "a common denominator."

"I thought that was a fascinating thing," Hill said. "How they were trying to find a room inside of the mansion of their madness where I might be able to agree with them a little bit, despite how they felt about me personally."

"American Carnage' #1, cover

Hill mined the interaction for its nuances -- the facial expressions, the eye contact, the moments where even a white supremacist looked to the black man next to him for permission to continue speaking. The research was important, he said, because he wants "American Carnage" -- a series in which a light-skinned mixed-race former FBI agent infiltrates a hate group -- to be more than a milquetoast, milky-thin balm against racism. ("If the book was just about 'racism is bad' and 'racist violence is bad,' you don't need an ongoing comic book series to tell you that," Hill says. "And if you do need an ongoing comic book series to tell you that, you're not going to read my book.") His aim is to go deeper, to explore how fear can push people to anger and hatred, and if that took, as he said, a "stupid thing" like talking to white supremacists, then it was simply the transaction cost of putting out a new book on a legendary line.

"I've always been a guy that likes taking risks, for better or worse," said Hill, who test drove a Ferrari F430 for his recent five-issue arc on "Detective Comics." "And if you're working on a Vertigo title, I think taking a risk is a prerequisite for having that logo on your cover."

Of G-men and pain

In another one of his Twitter missives, Hill confessed to two professional aspirations as a child: comic book writer (not all that unusual given that's what he does now in addition to film and television writing) and FBI agent (certainly a bit stranger). Hill said his fascination with the agency stemmed from his childhood in St. Louis as a "poor black kid" who found himself with a scholarship to the elite John Burroughs School, a prep academy in the affluent suburb of Ladue, Missouri.

With two lives in two different places, Hill said he had difficultly figuring out who he was.

"When you have trouble with identity, you want to assert yourself in some way," Hill said. "And I think the idea of being an FBI agent, of being a soldier in the course of good -- obviously I had a very simplistic view of the FBI growing up. It's more complex now. But back then, I thought, 'Well, maybe this is a place that can define me. Maybe if I became one of these things and got a badge and a definition, I would finally know who I was.'"

"American Carnage" #1, variant cover

Hill's lead character in "American Carnage" is Richard Wright, a former G-man with a talent for undercover operations in a job that only served to, as Hill says, take "little parts of his soul" as he danced from deception to deception in search of service, purpose and place. After his two-step ends with a bad shooting, Wright drifts into a life of self-pity, prostitutes and sleezy $750-a-week private detective work until a former colleague investigating the lynching death of an FBI agent shows up with a plea to "do that thing you do," an imperative that drives Wright back into the field and deep undercover.

"In a lot of ways, Richard is me looking at what may have happened to me had I gone down that path," Hill said. "Because now I realize that those issues you have with identity, those issues you have with self-definition, no system can make those issues go away. No fraternity can make those issues go away. You have to deal with them on your own."

A 'Preacher' for the 'Heat' of 2018

In the first issue, Hill does not craft a work that screams about our current political moment, but there are references -- including a title that adopts the signature line from Donald Trump's inaugural address and a passing line that observes "MAGA" as a convenient label for all things right wing. But overall, it has a much older feel, with inks, colors and layouts much closer to Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's "Preacher" than anything else that purports to be today's satire or political commentary in comics. That was by design, Hill said, as he listed touchstones like "Preacher," Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso's "100 Bullets" and Jason Aaron and R. M. Guera's "Scalped" as works that he and artist Leandro Fernandez wanted to emulate.

"American Carnage" #1, unlettered interior art

"To me those works have a timeless quality," Hill said. "They don't feel so rooted in a time and a place. Maybe if you're familiar with comic book history, you can kind of recognize them as an era. But I think for a lot of people just picking them up, they just feel vital and actual and persistent."

But great comics from the vaults of Vertigo aren't the only things inspiring Hill's work in "American Carnage." As any member of the Hilluminati would know, Hill is a fan of filmmaker Michael Mann and many of his genre crime movies, so they too find their way into the new series.

"We never really get people in pastels, you know," Hill said. "We don't really go full 'Miami Vice,' but I think there are certainly elements of this that feel a bit like 'Heat' in moments, a bit like 'Collateral' in moments. Maybe even 'Thief.'

I'm a big fan of the movie 'Thief.'"

A reason for the madness

Hill is stubborn. But also thoughtful.

"American Carnage" #1, unlettered interior art

The issue -- the white-hot pressure point of racial violence and its intersection with politics -- he dredges up in "American Carnage" is not there simply to shock or alarm; rather, Hill said, the series is designed to give readers a place where they can explore dangerous ideas in a safe way.

"Let me drag up all of these things out of the world, out of my soul, out of my mind. All of it. And let me bleed onto the page, so the reader doesn't have to," Hill said. "But maybe through experiencing the work, they can kind of come to reconcile the fear and the anger that they may feel around this stuff too."

"American Carnage" #1, by writer Bryan Edward Hill and artist Leandro Fernandez, with colors by Dean White and lettering by Pat Brosseau, goes on sale Wednesday.