The likes of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones have dominated mainstream fantasy for years, but now a new comic book is joining the fray. Seven to Eternity by writer Rick Remender, aritst Jerome Opena and colorist Matt Hollingsworth follows the story of a dying knight, Adam Osidis, who retreated from civilization with his family only for trouble to come knocking courtesy of the God of Whispers, an evil who has taken over the land with a power not often seen in the world of fantasy.

Art by Jerome Opena and Matt Hollingsworth. Image Comics.

With Seven to Eternity #1 hitting next Wednesday, September 21, we hopped on the phone with Remender (known for his other works Uncanny X-Force, Uncanny Avengers, Deadly Class, and Fear Agent) to hear how he came up with a new kind of fantasy villain, how those other big fantasy properties may (or may not) have affected his process, and the strengths comic books have over other mediums that help tell a fantasy story.

Art by Jerome Opena and Matt Hollingsworth. Image Comics.

Art by Jerome Opena and Matt Hollingsworth. Image Comics.

The God of Whispers. Art by Jerome Opena and Matt Hollingsworth. Image Comics.

Art by Wes Craig and Lee Loughridge. Image Comics.

I do my very best to not allow external trends or zeitgeists to feed into what I'm producing.In terms of this, in the same way Fear Agent was fueled by a love of Wally Wood and Al Williamson and Frank Frazetta, Seven to Eternity and the world that they're in of Zhal is really heavily inspired by Jodorowsky and Moebius and Incal and things like that. The inspiration that we're taking and the place that we're building from, it remains the same.And so while we had been talking about it for all these years, to do something European and kind of leaning into the wild, freeform imagination of Jodorowsky and Moebius when those guys were working together, the big idea here was also not really solidified by, geez, three/four years ago in a conversation and I started developing this character, Adam, our lead.The idea here was to build a big world with a set of rules and boundaries that allowed us to explore it ourselves. But then to zero in on a very micro story. A very human story. In this case, that of the Osidis family, who are living on the outskirts of this world and have removed themselves from civilization. And then to use them to explore the world ourselves.We started with the big ideas of the world and then sort of zeroed back in on Adam. What we get is a story that is ultimately about something that we do everyday, which is compromise. I really liked the idea as I was developing Adam and developing his story and developing the difficult choices he's going to be presented with. I really fell in love with the notion that compromise is such an integral part of being a human being. You're compromising in every decision you make.I started this focus in on that, and dig into that, and then use that as the sort of spine for the adventure he goes on, and the dilemmas that he's faced with. None of the choices he's presented with are good, and so it's all a matter of balancing compromises. I don't think that the reader will have an idea if he's making the right choices and the right compromises probably until issue 12, based on the current outline.The building of [Seven to Eternity] has not been influenced by any of the current trends at all. It's very much a love letter to Heavy Metal Magazine, and The Incal, and tons of other Moebius and Jodorowsky stuff.I think it's informative. I think that it sets the story up. Pacing wise, it immerses you. When it transitions out of the one page of journal into the comic book you have information that informs why you should care and who these people are in a way that had I put that stuff into the comic it would have taken another eight pages.It's about being concise. I've been adding more and more prose into my work, in Tokyo Ghost and a lot in Deadly Class, and I like it. I think that people who don't mind reading find the immersion and their ability to get into a deeper place with the story to be satisfying. That's the kind of reader I want. Anybody who is afraid of reading a page of text is not the reader that I want. I don't mean that in a dick-ish way, but it's true. If reading one page of prose is going to be off-putting to you, probably the thought and the story we're telling here and the message that we're going to be hitting is not going to be something that's going to be something that a person who's afraid of a little prose can comprehend anyway.So I went through all that. I was like, look, a lot of the time you just have to follow your creative muse and do what you think is best for the story. It was always my intention from Day One to open these issues with a page of Adam's journal from the future to sort of add two perspectives of what's going on to the story. That journal carries through throughout the story in brief bits where we see little snippets of that journal kind of cut into it.Thank you, I appreciate that. The hardest part of the job is that I don't have any lack of story in these books. What I do have is that I do have to choose what parts I'm going to tell.With somebody like Jerome, who is spending three, four, five days drawing one page, you have to choose the most important bits. There can be no fat on the bone or else you're wasting this genius' time. And I do throw genius to Jerome, and there's no hyperbole there. He and Matt Hollingsworth are the very best art team I can imagine. In terms of a pairing, they're just incredible together.At first, we were thinking that we would make it very light and pastel and sort of this strange hyper color, and then, when you have Matt Hollingsworth, you let him do what he thinks is right. We discussed it with him, and eventually he gave us a few samples of what we were asking for, and then a few samples of what he would do, and it was clear that we're like, oh yeah! It's Matt Hollingsworth. Let him do what he's going to f---ing do. Oh hey, you're a genius. Yeah, what are we doing giving art direction?And that's just from Jerome and I having lived with this place and having talked about it for years. We finally got to a point with it where we had just a bag of ideas. But that's the joy of this. Matt is an invested participant in the project. He's not just a work for hire gun. He has a percentage of the property. He is a team member. That's because you can trust him to do the very best work that's possible in comic book coloring.Yeah, I can take strange detours and linger in places and do things that have no budgetary restraints.We have a scene in issue one, and I don't know if this is a spoiler, it's just a cool thing, where Adam has to feed a dying dragon bird a crystal so that it can open reality like a pair of curtains and reveal a hidden city. I guess with CG these days it wouldn't be the most bank-breaking thing in the world to do.But I think that once you're dealing with the budgetary constraints of something, you look at Game of Thrones, and they have to choose their battles. They have to do five episodes with no effects, then they get decide this is where we're dumping our budget into, with the White Walkers attack.The thing about doing it in a comic book is that I never have to choose, I never have to make those choices. I can do what I want. I can get on the phone with Jerome and talk something out, then sit in my office staring at the ceiling until I have a vision of something that I see, or something that interests me. And it could cost any number of millions of dollars to produce it on film or television. But I have a genius engine Jerome Opeña who just takes my nonsense and creates just absolutely breathtaking illustrations with it.One thing that we're doing in this is -- and I don't know if this is a subconscious reaction to the Game of Thrones, but this is not a salacious sex and murder story. The first creator-owned book I've done in a while that's, it's not all ages, but I would say it's PG-13. We're not using tons of sex and profanity to make the fantasy adult. What's adult about it is the heart and the characters, and ultimately, the journey that they're on. That's a departure from a lot of what we're seeing in the fantasy genre these days as well.Yeah, but I mean, it's not graphic. It's somewhat graphic. [spoilery description of a character's death]. That feels like you could see that in Harry Potter thing that's PG-13 or whatever. And then [another spoilery description of a character's death] is terrifying, but it's also not like, it's not ratings adjustment.But that's what we're aiming for. Things that are more psychologically, oh my god, or things that are upsetting or graphic in a sense. Basically it's the closest I've gotten to Fear Agent since coming back to creator-owned comics in tone. Fear Agent had no four letter words until the occasional s---. The violence wasn't extreme, extreme graphic.I think it came from the compromise idea.The first version of this there was the God of Whispers (the Mud King is what Adam calls him) would have taken over the land with his armies and it was classic Frank Frazetta stuff, piles of eleven bodies and goblins and I realized, I've seen this. I've seen the conquering warlord take over the fantasy land. Well-covered material.So I got into the notion of how could he do this in another way that's more interesting? What's more true to the world I live in and how people take it over and manipulate and dominate? And it's obviously more through Machiavellian manipulation than it is through brute force. And that really fascinated me.What if you had a guy who basically was so well-connected that he could basically see your desires, see what you wanted most, and that was his power, and then if you allowed him, if you were to hear his offer, and here he knows what's in your heart and what you want... if you hear his offer and accept his offer to give you your wildest dreams, then he basically puts a worm in your head and you're one of his servants now. You live with free will, you go and enjoy your life having what you have, but now he can see what you see and hear what you hear and use that information to basically control the world through lies and through duplicity and through manipulation and rumors.That's where the God of Whispers comes from. He doesn't send his army in to take your town down. He finds a way to undermine the faith you have in your fellow man and to create rivalries and to make you fearful that you're going to lose what you have if you don't bend knee. Ultimately what happens then is he just uses these manipulations and this Machiavellian campaign of whispers to seed discontent. He'll take down an entire city doing this. And we see some of the examples of this in issue one. I thought that was way more interesting. This guy just sitting back someplace controlling the world through manipulation and lies.The first story goes 12 or 13 issues. We've already got the next 10 issues after that figured out. It's an ongoing that we will keep doing until either our fingers fall off or the sales dip, which, given the opening numbers I just saw, I don't think that will be an issue. I'd just say its an ongoing. The first story is at least, it's 12 to 13 issues, then we have another 10 or 15 planned after that.We got some big news that we haven't announced yet. Hopefully we will have an announcement in the next couple weeks, but the ball has moved further down the field and we are now in a pretty cool place.Yeah, I'm not popping corks yet. I'm very excited with where it landed, I'm very excited at the team we landed with. We couldn't be surrounded by better people to make this. I think it's got a really good chance of at least getting to pilot. It's a roll of the dice. We'll see. We are closer than I've ever been, that's for sure.The Russo Brothers are producing it. Sony is the studio. We've got Adam Targum, who is the showrunner coming in off of Banshee and Outcast. I'm co-writing the pilot with Miles Feldsott, who is a really tremendous writer who I'm pals with.We have more pieces than that that we haven't announced yet so, you know, we might see this thing happen.I became aware of them and a huge, huge fan during the Arrested Development and Community years. Arrested Development and Community are like, to me, two of the best things that were made in the past 10 years. They hold up to even the first eight or nine seasons of The Simpsons in re-watchability.They get character and they get comedy and they get structure and they get heart. And then they also can do great action.They're also the same age as me. They grew up watching the same stuff in the '80s and being cooked in the same pop culture stew. When we break story and we talk this stuff out and hang out, we're all really on the same page. Their notes are amazing, and their ideas are just exciting and great.The whole process, I just keep waiting for it to become a nightmare. Maybe it will. I'm sure there will be plenty of re-writing and things that become difficult, but so far, it's been a dream. All of my normal pessimism has to sit back and go, well, it's going to fall apart the next day. Up until this point it's been a dream team and it's been a complete pleasure to make it up until this stage.

Joshua is IGN’s Comics Editor. If Pokemon, Green Lantern, or Game of Thrones are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter @JoshuaYehl and IGN