There are comics in the weekly buy pile that I’ll pick up before I tackle before others. Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t buy the comics if I didn’t want to read them, but there are some that get consumed front to back first and foremost. Sometimes it’s the creators, sometimes it’s the characters, sometimes a combo of the two.
Fred Van Lente is one of those writers whose work is always at the top of the buy pile.
For an example of why, search no further than The Future Is ******, his series that debuted last year from Rekcah Comics. With art by Ennio Bufi, The Future Is ****** transports readers to a dystopian future where the black hats–the criminal hackers–now control the all aspects of life, with high-tech terrorists and despotic corpos exploiting technology to exploit the rest of us. Fun and fast-paced and maybe a little too close for comfort to our world at times, The Future Is ****** is a mind-twist that you won’t want to put down, even when you have to read it through your fingers.
I had the opportunity to interview Fred Van Lente last year about the idea behind The Future Is ******, working with the creative team, his influences for the comic, and how art is mirroring real life and vice versa. Van Lente’s work is always catnip to me–or batteries to the Machines in The Matrix. He knows how to take genres with which we think we’re comfortable, twist them sideways, and force us to reconsider how we view those genres–all while taking us on a damn wild ride. The Future Is ****** is no different!
Editor’s note: This interview was conducted last year. Due to technical issues, we had trouble getting the interview to post. Now that has been resolved, we are publishing the interview in full.
FreakSugar: Before we get into the book itself, what was the genesis or impetus for The Future Is ******?
Fred Van Lente: Like all great cyber-security companies, Black Hills Information Security has a comic book arm, Rekcah Comics (spell it backwards), and they wanted to do a long-form series. They reached out to me, we did a bunch of very amazing writer’s meetings well they told me about their world of black-hat versus white-hat hackers, they recommended a bunch of read and watch and I did. And this amazing five-year series—yeah, I said it, Rekcah made a FIVE-YEAR COMMITMENT to this book!—is the result, one I couldn’t be more proud of.
FS: For folks considering picking up the book, what is the conceit of the series?
FVL: As we say in the opening crawl of the series, in the not-so-near-future — mumble, mumble number of decades from now — there’s a hacker war in which the black hats, the criminal hackers, won. What do criminals do when they win? They become the law. Basically it’s a future that’s a chaotic free-for-all of cybernetic exploitation and all-powerful corporations—and the Internet is everywhere, thanks to the perfection of technology known today as Augmented Reality (AR), where the internet is projected directly onto your eyeballs. Goodbye cell phones! All of eternity is screen time, now.
I guess that sounds pretty bleak, but! You need incredible obstacles for heroes to shine.
FS: The cast is full of immediately well-defined characters. What can you tell us about who we’ll meet?
FVL: Into this future in which you have no rights, only terms of service, the mysterious WHEELER operates an illegal white-hat hacking group that reaches out and saves people from being swallowed up by cyber-gangsters and despotic corpos. With him is MARTINA, the team’s daredevil “meatwork” specialist who does the hand-on stuff while the keyboard jockeys are doing their thing. ELI is the anxiety-filled dreamer who is a master of detecting vulnerabilities in systems—because he’s literally afraid of everything. SALLY is the retro dumpster diver who builds the team’s special tech. She has to wear an exo-skeleton because she’s spent decades in Earth orbit—think Tony Stark, if he was a hobo. And last but not least is ART, the Chameleon-like AI who never leads the side (or the collar) of ARF, his adorable service dog.
FS: The exponential use of technology in the world can be disconcerting and frightening. There are certainly a whole host of elements of that in your book. What was the research process like for writing the comic? Or was it just living in the world as we know it now?
FVL: I have been working on this series for a couple years now, and it has been a little disconcerting to see the present overtake some of my ideas, ha ha. But there is a lot of amazing work being done in bio-tech, augmented reality, space travel, et al, that’s just in the conceptual stages right now but will be the part of our everyday lives in the near future. We’re definitely trying to do some predictions here—not just the bad stuff!
FS: Following up on that, so much of the world isn’t going to stop using new tech without considering the consequences—or not caring about those consequences. Given how much theft is occurring with AI-generated images, where do you see as the future of art and writing? I know this is less about the comic, but as a writer and a teacher, it’s increasingly worrisome for me and I wanted to know your perspective.
FVL: I don’t see much difference between students using AI to “write” their school papers and any other piece of writing, creative or otherwise, generated by AI and not a person. Students do it because they don’t want to read the book or do the assignment—they just need this thing, this output, to appease their teacher and get the grade. They see the act of writing as pointless labor they want to skip over. But in art, the labor is the point. The labor is the magic. The output is the end of a process, but for you, the creator, the process is kind of the point.
I think part of the reason non-creatives think AI writing will be a big thing is many of them—not a knock, I just hear it in interviews all the time—think that “Having an Idea” is the important part of writing. Then you just plug that idea into ChatGPT and it spits out a story. When really everybody has ideas, that’s not that impressive. It’s what you do with the ideas that separates the great practitioners from the hacks—human and AI alike.
FS: The art is an amalgam of slick and grimy—perfect for this future world. What is the collaboration process like with the rest of the creative team?
FVL: It’s been fantastic! Ennio Bufi is such a great artist and is criminally unknown on these shores. He has done such a fantastic job with these layering levels of AR reality, and the character designs are top-notch.
One of the advantages of the five-year plan is that we can plan out all these great artists for both the interiors and the covers. We’re going to get a bunch of stellar talents on the latter, Jae Lee is on #1, we’ve got Rob Guillory, Michael Allred…and a bunch more that haven’t been announced yet. So excited!
FS: What are some of your favorite cyber-punk/cyber sci-fi tales?
FVL: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is likely the main one, I read that in college and it blew my mind. I think the first of Gisbon’s Spread Trilogy I read was Mona Lisa Overdrive, that always had a soft spot in my heart.
Though actually, I think my all time favorite cyberpunk thing in any media is CD Projetk’s Cyberpunk 2077. I played the hell out of that game! All three life paths. I think it may be the greatest video game RPG of all time.
In speaking of Keanu Reeves in a cyberpunk thing, at my local theater here in Brooklyn I got the chance to see the director of Johnny Mnemonic introduce a black and white cut of the movie, not the kind of bastardized version that wound up in theaters. People who are cyberpunk fans and/or Keanu fans should try and check out the black and white version if they can, it’s awesome.
FS: If you had a final pitch for The Future Is ******, what would it be?
I will just reiterate for the last time the five-year promise, which even blew me away when I heard it. This was after I made my initial pitch and wrote my initial stories. It excited Rekcah enough to make this massive commitment, and I think it will do the same for you as a reader, too.
The Future Is ****** #16 is on sale now from Rekcah Comics.