by Vince Brusio The end of all things fascinates Jonathan Hickman . When all moving parts stand still, he wants to take a digital picture, put that picture under a microscope, and look for the links that connect the chaos. Then he wants to write about it. But as we learn in this interview for his new Image book The Dying and The Dead , it’s just as important to be in the right place to make sense of the chaos as it is in knowing how to talk about it to other people. Limiting yourself to working inside a set page-count can be detrimental to the creative process, and thus limit your imagination to telling a complete story. And for that reason, The Dying and The Dead #1 ( NOV140534 ) is not your typical comic book. Look for The Dying and The Dead #1 ( NOV140534 ) in comic shops January 28. Download the PREVIEWS Prevue here . ********** PREVIEWSworld : For those who may not be up to speed on what you’re doing with The Dying and The Dead , how would you talk about it to an audience at a Comic Con? How would you convince people to read a comic book about folks who qualify for Social Security? Jonathan Hickman : I think it's in the job description to make the reader either have some kind of reaction to or some kind of connection with the characters in the book, but I don't think that's universally hard to do with older characters. Almost all of us have parents and grandparents and, even if someone can't relate to them, they certainly can wrap their head around 'getting old' or one day dying. And I guess I should point out that I have a tendency to grab onto a theme and work it a bunch of ways before moving on to something else. There might be other small things I've done playing with the idea of 'endings or death' but the three projects I've mainly been working on for the last couple years all play with the same idea. Avengers is about death on an oppressive and epic scale, East of West is about a literal, mythic Death, and The Dying and The Dead is about one man’s personal crusade to either escape or overcome it. As for convincing people to read it, I guess I'd say that, like most of the books coming out of Image, it's a high quality comic and something that you can't find anywhere else in the industry. We're very, very proud of it. PREVIEWSworld : With all your other projects going on ( The Manhattan Projects , East of West , etc.), how were you able to carve up the time stream so as to fit this one into your schedule? Let us follow you into the wormhole to see how you did it. Jonathan Hickman : Well, I've been pretty straight forward in telling people that after I finish my current Marvel work I'm going to take a bit of a break and catch up on some sleep. Even though Avengers issues will be coming out the first quarter of next year, I'll actually be done in December, so all I have left is finishing the eight issues of the recently announced Secret Wars . The reality is, even with three Image books, my workload is going to be half of what it was. Thank God. PREVIEWSworld : Without giving away too much, what scene(s) would you most likely want to blog about as being representative of the tone or fun factor for the first story arc? Jonathan Hickman : Ryan Bodenheim has absolutely destroyed on this first issue so it's tough to name one, but, if pressed, there's a bit with a meeting at an old church in the desert that I loooove. Oh, I should point out that while the book is priced at $4.50, it's a full sixty pages of story. It's just a giant package of amazing art and I'm super proud of what Ryan has accomplished. PREVIEWSworld : What is the most challenging aspect about writing this story? Did it involve you trying anything new, as the title suggests these are the type of characters more likely to read a road map than program a GPS. Jonathan Hickman : I think the most challenging aspect of this doesn't have to do with story at all. I've had the privilege of being around some crazy interesting older people in my life, and probably one of my favorite, fun things I've done was writing Old Man Fury at Marvel — getting to a place to write that is easy. The difficult thing about this story that concerned both myself and Ryan had to do with breaking up the story, and us feeling like it wouldn't necessarily lend itself to twenty-something page increments. So we said screw it. Some of the issues are just bigger than normal. PREVIEWSworld : If people want to contact you to learn more about this book, what social site are you most likely to use? I'm the worst at Twitter ( @JHickman ), but I will be posting art teases and other promo stuff up until the day the book is in stores. If you can tolerate the soccer, I might be worth the follow.