[MUSIC PLAYING]
Yeah, we're back here with Hacksaw Gerry Duggan.
Hello, Gerry.
My favorite wrestler growing up was always Macho Man.
And on the schoolyard I was Hacksaw.
And now, I sound like Hacksaw and it's only been 1 and 1/2
days of New York Comic Con.
Yeah.
Or two days of Comic Con, or whatever.
What is time?
Yeah, what is time?
Anybody watching, if you are coming to Comic Con,
bring a giant 2 by 4 to give to Jerry here at the convention.
That would be terrific.
And then, you can talk to him about all the comics
that he's writing, like X-Men.
Man, let me be honest with you.
I love you.
I adore you. - Thank you.
You're one of my favorite people in comics--
- Love you too. - --personally, professionally.
And the first issue or two, I was like, OK,
this is good of X-Men.
But I was like, all right, this is good.
I like it.
But I need more.
I wasn't 1,000,000% on to it.
And as it's gone on, it's been one of those books,
every time I get an issue, I read it and I go, damn it.
It's so good.
And then, I reread one through six recently,
because someone on one of our podcasts
wanted to talk about that arc.
And I, having read it then as a solid story,
I was like, this is so frigging good.
You guys have been killing it.
Well, thank you.
I'm so lucky again, in collaborators.
Pepe and C.F. And it's a murderer's row of art talent.
And we pitched a beginning, a middle, and an end.
And we're executing on it now.
And the best is yet to come.
The next year is bananas.
If you've been having fun now, you're
primed for what is to come.
And I think we're teasing what we're
calling the next era of X-Men at the Next Big Thing panel.
Right.
So yeah, well, we had talked to all about that news
throughout this weekend.
One of the great things about what
you guys have been doing over on the X books
is elevating characters.
And I know you have characters that you love in the X books
and seeing them in there.
I, huge Forge fan.
So seeing Forge in the book--
Oh, awesome, me too.
--makes me so happy.
And he's so good.
But we were doing a thing on the stage this weekend.
And I asked, what's your favorite X-Men character?
And a guy said Sink.
And I--
Oh, awesome.
Which could have happened.
But like I feel like kind of pushing Sink and showing how
amazing that character can be.
Well, Jonathan and Mahmud Asrar ascent.
There's an amazing story that they did in the vault.
And what a gift it was to the character.
But then hopefully, to all of the fans.
Even if you weren't a Sink fan, I feel like that story
made you a Sink fan.
And so I'm just trying not to fumble the torch.
Please don't fumble the torch.
Everything then gets burned to the ground.
Fire arrives.
But when you have Pepe and C.F. And those artists,
it's just a tremendous gift.
It's a real privilege to be writing X-Men now.
And Sink is one of my favorites now.
So good.
Yeah.
I have-- I, really going in, it was Cyclops.
And now, if you're taking one of them from the team,
I got to give up Cyclops.
Wow.
You know what?
That's fine.
He'll find another team.
He'll lead something.
I've actually, because of your books, and other books,
Cyclops has been really great the last couple of years.
Also, I want to make sure we talk
about Invincible Iron Man--
Yes.
--which is very exciting, brand new series.
Tell us a little bit about it.
I didn't know that I would have an opportunity
to write Iron Man, ever.
And the stars aligned.
It's the 60th anniversary next year.
The Cantwell run and his collaborators
did such a wonderful job with him.
I'm inheriting a ground level Iron Man.
And I don't know how to build complicated things.
I like LEGO sets with instructions.
Because when you are doing what we do for a living
and making stories that don't have instructions,
that sort of is very enjoyable to let your brain
make a LEGO or something.
But I thought, what's the thing that I could have Tony build
that I do know how to make?
And so I pitched the idea that he'd
be writing his autobiography over the course of the run.
And that was a big buy.
Because what it will do for us hopefully, is we'll
have a lot of stories in the present.
And then, we'll be able to go and flashback to.
One of the great things about Iron Man
is you love the gadgets.
You love the toys.
You love the different armors.
So the first one up is the Silver Centurion armor,
always one of my favorites.
I was a huge fan of Armor Wars.
It allows us to honestly use some of the tricks
that we were deploying on Deadpool, where we
did flashback inventory issues.
These are not gags.
These are more untold stories of Iron Man.
Huge Iron Man fan.
So for me, a privilege to have a really
wonderful solo character and the best superhero team in comics.
Yeah.
What other supporting characters of villains can you tease out?
At this point, I know we're a little bit away from it.
Rhodey, for sure as War Machine.
Riri has a really cool part in it
that I can't talk about, because it will
spoil what comes before me.
And a really brand new terrifying villain.
We have to be really good to our villains.
The better we are to our villains,
the better the story is.
And what we hope is that this is a great Tony Stark villain
and a great Iron Man villain.
All in one.
Very cool.
Looking forward to that.
One request for it.
In Armor Wars, Rhodey brings a whole bunch of blood
onto a helicopter.
There's a like just a drifting case.
And then they stuff it in an armor to fool people.
Can you please have an Iron Man armor explode
with blood all over people?
Yes.
All right, guys.
Expect lots of blood in Invincible Iron Man.
Thanks to Gerry Duggan.
Thanks, Gerry.
Thank you.