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How did he know about the wrestler and the space squid?
How he knows how to find these kids is something I won't explain until much, much later.
Sure. Wouldn't want to spoil it.
It's different being cagey about your stories than it is being cagey about a record coming out or something. It's like, No, I actually can't tell you, because that happens in like Series 5. So anyway, what we're looking at here, it's one of these scenarios where stuff has already gone bad. We get a breather on the ship that gives a little bit of character, kind of showing how cold Hargreeves is, and how bad of a father he is. 'Cause he's an alien. He doesn't know how to raise kids. He treats these kids as tools, basically, to save the world. And then you go back to the Tower, where things have gone from bad to worse. Basically the image I had in my head that really spawned this whole scene was a 10-year-old child knocking out the Eiffel Tower. I thought that was something so insane, and so over-the-top that I had to do it in a comic. And then we come to find that, in the control tower, after all these years, there's a zombie robot Gustave Eiffel. Which, I don't know how the French are gonna feel about that. I think Gustave Eiffel is a pretty big national hero.
Okay. Well, that all makes perfect sense. Now: Is it a coincidence that these 10-year-olds appear to share makeup tips with My Chemical Romance?
They actually have masks. I'm a big fan of domino masks, like Zorro, or Robin. You could put a domino mask on anything, and it becomes a superhero. You put a domino mask on a milkman, and he becomes, like, Super Milkman. So they're actually just mild-mannered British schoolchildren with a little of The Prisoner mixed in. I threw domino masks on them, and wiped their identities.
They're just referred to as numbers throughout?
Yeah, also inspired by The Prisoner. I wanted Hargreeves to really alienate these kids. A lot of the focus of the book is connecting with that part of somebody that, when they were a kid, they were forced to do something they didn't want to do. Like if your parents wanted you to play soccer, but you didn't want to. And if you're not really great at it, how bad do you feel about yourself? I was trying to connect on that level. So to further alienate these kids, he wiped their identities. They have no names. They're not allowed to play with other children. They have to wear masks at all times. And they can't even call him ''Dad''.
And then he dies, and they have to come back together.
Yeah. He passes away at the end of this issue. They disbanded a while ago, because of lots of personal problems, and the death of one of the kids. They disbanded when they were in their 20s.
Oh, they're like a boy band!
They are like a boy band. They were literally these kids that were there to save the world — those were the salad days — and then when they get older, they're supposed to be responsible superheroes, but they're not any good at it. They don't know how to interact with each other or anybody else, and they mess up in this thing called the Jennifer Incident. So after that they were like, This is useless, we're wasting our time. And the second issue is called We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals.
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