Even though writer Matt Fraction already has two freshly launched creator-owned comic books in Sex Criminals and Satellite Sam, that didn't stop him from taking to the Image Expo stage to announce a brand new series called Ody-C with artist Christian Ward. A release date was not given other than it will be out in 2014.

We sat down with Fraction to get the details on his new work, take the temperature of his already-launched comics, get a report on Hawkeye, and ask him the hottest question in comics right now: What is Matt Fraction going to write next at Marvel?

Odysseus from Ody-C by Christian Ward.

Casanova teaser.

I wanted to write a hero comic for my daughter, and they weren't going to let me write Wonder Woman any time soon. So I started thinking about what a classical hero is and what a strong warrior and character and mother is. I started thinking about The Odyssey and giving my daughter Odysseus as a mother and a warrior. That was honestly the seed of it.Christian and I were friendly and were mutual admirers of one another. We wanted to do something at some point, and I wanted to find something suitably big and spacey for him to draw, so maybe we could take advantage of his art in the way that Infinite Vacation had. Everything just kind of fell into place, just the idea of like, "Oh, what if we did The Odyssey, but all the guys are girls?" So I'd gone back and I was re-reading The Odyssey to familiarize myself with it. It's all told out of order, and there are chapters missing, and you kind of have to know what's happening in these other plays to understand the whole story. I was like, "This is exactly like comics!" So I thought it was a chance to retell this classical story that I love very much and give my daughter a hero. So I guess that was the start of it.Yeah, I mean it is graphic. It's not all-ages, but neither is The Odyssey, if you've read it. It's as appropriate as The Odyssey is. But no, it's not an all-ages book. It's not like I'm going to read it to my three-year-old, but one day it will be for her. That's the idea. But when it's appropriate for her to read The Odyssey, she can also read this. It's contextually and content-wise identical.It was just more interesting. It is a very masculine story in a lot of ways. So to put more women into it, I don't know, it became an exercise.Sure, sure. Yeah, but right away Homer's Odyssey is about a man trying to return to his estate. His wife and his child are a part of that. It's very much about trying to go back to his stuff and the seat of his wealth and things. While he has a wife that he purports to love, there are other women in his life and all this kind of stuff.In Ody-C, in this book we're doing, it's about a mother trying to be reunited with her child. I don't know if that's me projecting my own cultural and gender biases or what, but it immediately re-contextualizes what the quest is. It's not about the stuff, it's not about the homestead, it's about the family that she's trying to be reunited with. Why not have a mom that kicks ass in a comic book, you know? Why not make mom the hero of this great war? Yeah, then it just became an exercise in how interesting it becomes. You start to think about Zeus as a woman. What does that mean? Zeus is such a tempestuous prick in all the myths, and it just changes everything. It became interesting as an exercise to see where it took me, how far down the rabbit hole goes.It's deeply spacey and psychedelic and gorgeous. I think Christian sees colors that normal people don't see. I don't know how he works, but it is beautiful, vivid and rich, and very cosmic. It sort of exists higher than the rest of us. You kind of have to tilt your head to see it. It's awe-inspiring. I worked with Christian on a short story, just as a kind of getting-to-know-you thing, and that blew me away. So to see him doing these giant, celestial star-gods and stuff, it's really explosive.He's my cousin. No, I've been a fan of his for a very long time, and I would not be a writer I don't think if it wasn't for his work. He's an incredibly important author in my life. He's a big comics fan, as anybody who's read his work can tell. We met at a signing, and he was as much a fan of me as I was of his. He actually brought his own books in hopes that I would show up. It was the craziest thing ever. We started talking after that and became friends and friendly. Our families have eaten together and spent time together. We've become friends, and it's amazing.We were on a podcast, and we made a joke, and he made some comment about how the comic he really wants to write are backup stories on Casanova. I was like, "Okay, great. Let's get the script going on Monday." He's like, "Okay, I'm on it." Afterwards, I was like, "Were we kidding? Would you really want to do it?" He's like, "Yeah!" So I had to ask the twins [Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon] if they were into it, and yeah. So I'm now getting to write a book with honestly one of my literary heroes.They're not quite a travel log, but sort of like a travel log. It's sort of a look at all the places Casanova has left behind at the end of Volume 3.We catch him, appropriately enough, a couple of years after the end of Volume 3. Casanova has retrograde amnesia, so he doesn't remember anything. He doesn't know who he is, he doesn't know where he came from, he doesn't know how he got there. He's living on our Earth and our world and our reality. He's living in Los Angeles, and he has a strange job for a very strange, very wealthy and mysterious man. That's kind of where we find him. He's completely disconnected from everything and everyone. He has no recollection of it all, so it's a great place for new readers because he doesn't know what happened in Volumes 1 through 3 either. What happens is all the people in all the worlds he's ever pissed off or have done wrong or have killed or thwarted or destroyed or provoked or otherwise angered, they find out that he's here and helpless as a kitten, and they all come after him -- as he and his boss get involved in a kind of game with one another.