I’m very in love with Ryan’s stuff. It’s so exciting to be at the launch of a book and to be just that in love with your collaborator as I am with what Ryan has done and the energy in which he’s done it.

Did he just away and come back with these costume designs or did you work with him on any of them? How did that come together?

A mixture of everything. We were truly blessed. DC gave us almost an entire year headstart on trading this book. That is unheard of in mainstream comics. It’s unheard of in film and television. I didn’t even wrap my head around what a blessing it was until we started making the book and it was over and I go, “Oh my God, we had so much time to develop that was such a lovely thing.” But that was DC taking what needed to be done here very seriously. We’re really building a future and we’re building something that’s not retro, that’s not leaning on other people’s designs. We’re heading towards the premise of Legion through as modern eyes as we can.

I said, “Ryan, go draw the first things that pop into your head when I say the following things or just draw whatever’s in your head or I’ll send you things.” Hundreds of things of references to others people’s material and other illustrators and things like that and a lot of looking at one of the premises we put forward to each other and then to say this out loud it’s a little scary.

If you look at a lot of mainstream sci-fi, most of it is very wrapped around Jack Kirby, Moebius, or the illustrator John Berkeley. You see a lot of John Berkeley’s work in things like Guardians of the Galaxy. And it’s all gorgeous and it all affects me greatly and I said, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if we at least attempted to push past all that influence and towards a new kind of sci-fi?” Just to say that out loud and see what happens. It’s very exciting and nerve-wracking and it has inspired a great deal of cool work that you’ll see in the pages coming forward. Because I’ve seen the intricate detail of the first issue. I know that’s kind of a like a dick thing for a writer to say, “Hey, how about let’s take away all the things that people like and are popular and see what else we can do.”