Saladin Ahmed has written some of Marvel’s biggest heroes, from Daredevil and Miles Morales and, more recently, Wolverine, This month, however, he’s heading to Third Earth for a new chapter in Dynamite’s ThunderCats saga.
Launching <a href="https://comicvibe.com/netflix-adds-68-new-movies-and-series-for-september-1st/” title=”Netflix Adds 68 New Movies and Series for September 1st”>September 9, ThunderCats: Cheetara teams the Eisner Award-winning writer with artist Andrea Arcari for a new ongoing series that puts one of the franchise’s most mysterious heroes front and center. Cheetara has always possessed a connection to forces her fellow ThunderCats can’t perceive, but her latest visions are considerably more troubling. The voices she hears contradict the Book of Omens, praise the Mu’Tants, and threaten to upend what she thought she knew about her people.
Recently, I spoke with Ahmed about turning Cheetara’s visions into the engine of an ongoing series. Plus, we talk about challenging ThunderCats mythology, working with Arcari, finding Cheetara’s voice, the freedom he’s found at Dynamite, and much more.
Read the full interview below.
Main cover by Mark Spears. Courtesy of Dynamite.
AIPT: Cheetara has always been one of the more mysterious ThunderCats because of her visions. What excited you about making those visions the engine of an ongoing series?
Saladin Ahmed: Yeah, I mean, I love Cheetara. First of all, I think I experienced the first time Cheetara ever dealt with the sixth sense along with the rest of the world, with those first airings in the ’80s, because I am ancient, right? So I’ve been a ThunderCats dork for literally decades.
Cheetara was always cool to me. First of all, there were not a lot of tough female characters in cartoons of those days. But it was that toughness, and then it’s been developed in the comics more recently, that she’s like a military officer, essentially.
She’s a general, very pragmatic, had a hand in the hard-nosed part of raising Lion-O, but then there’s this eerie other world that speaks to her and only to her. It’s a cool contrast.
AIPT: The solicitation mentions voices that contradict the Book of Omens and even praise the Mu’Tants. Were you interested in exploring how faith or certainty can be challenged when someone suddenly has conflicting truths?
SA: Yeah, absolutely. This is really Cheetara’s prophetess story. Prophets are often speaking truths, or at least their truths, that are uncomfortable for the people in their communities.
Cheetara is a little bit at odds with the ThunderCats as she starts to experience these visions. I don’t want to get too much into spoilers because they are a breadcrumb reveal where we find out more and more shocking stuff about the origins of the ThunderCats and things. I was given a lot of license to play around with that, which is really a lot of fun.
Because this is an ongoing rather than just a little five-issue mini, we really have some runway to develop that. The nature of the visions, the way they transform, the way they start to mean other things, and the implications they have for not just her, but all the ThunderCats, is something we’re really getting into.
AIPT: Would it be smart for someone to read Soo Lee’s Cheetara series before jumping onto this one?
SA: I think all of the Cheetara comics I’ve read recently have been just fantastic, so certainly people should read them. I think this was intended as a fresh start for the character, especially folks who may remember the animated series but not have gotten into the comics yet.
Really, it’s to introduce her to people and celebrate her for people who already dig her. The first issue is very much intended as a standalone, and it tells its own story as an ongoing, but it does happen hand-in-hand, lightly hand-in-hand, with Greg Pak’s series that’s going to launch the following month with a new ThunderCats #1. So we’re cooking some stew together a little bit.
Variant cover by Will Robson. Courtesy of Dynamite.
AIPT: So the two ongoings will coincide?
SA: Right. Ideally, you’ll be able to read either book and enjoy it totally on its own, but you get something extra reading them together in the way they affect each other.
AIPT: Cheetara is often the calmest person in the room while everyone else is reacting emotionally. How did you approach crafting an internal journey for her that still feels true to her personality?
SA: She’s a tactician, right? And she’s also developed, in the comics continuity, as an aristocrat on Thundera. So she is very practiced at holding herself back. Restraint, stoicism, and not revealing too much.
This cracks her world open a little bit. So much so that she actually kind of has to get away from the other ThunderCats because of it.
AIPT: With all the solo books you’ve written, do you ever find yourself wondering if you’re fully in Cheetara’s headspace, or if some Matt Murdock is sneaking into the dialogue?
SA: No, she’s definitely unique enough. Part of it is, I come to comics from novels, where you think a lot about the author voice and whether you’re using first-person, third-person, how you connect them to the reader.
I’m doing something I haven’t done really; I don’t know that I’ve done this since the Black Bolt thing years ago, which is the captions are third-person. We’re having Cheetara’s story narrated to us because I think she is a sort of epic heroine.
It’s not her deep in her own head captions. It’s an omniscient narrator telling us this story in the same way that I toyed with that in the Black Bolt series. You’re still in her head, but it’s a little bit more like you’re telling her tale in an epic sense rather than a modern psychological sense.
Variant cover by Karen S. Darboe. Courtesy of Dynamite.
AIPT: This is your first project with Dynamite, and your first time writing ThunderCats. What surprised you once you started digging into the mythology?
SA: As a kid, I’d gone pretty deep on the animated series, but there’s a pretty thick lore already that’s been developed in the comics. We’re trying not to be too weighed down by that and, again, be new-reader friendly, but there’s lots of cool stuff there to play with.
An aspect of that became a core element of the series. Cheetara’s co-star early on is a character named Bae, who’s a very mysterious character driven by Mu’Tant spirits. We don’t know a lot about her. She’s an assassin.
We’ve only seen her so far in a one-shot Cheetara story. I plucked that…and chose some elements from that and then from the animated series [and] stitched them together. I’m constantly digging into the lore because it is deep. It’s definitely deeper than I remember as a kid.
AIPT: Do you lean on editors to catch things you might not know when dealing with decades of continuity?
SA: There’s some of that, but it’s also been kind of refreshing to work with Dynamite. For good reason, Marvel is…every decision is scrutinized. There’s a committee to everything, for reasons of how the whole big machine manages to work.
Dynamite has been giving me a much freer hand in f**king with the canon and in developing the lore and thinking about this character. I hope it shows on the page. I hope people dig the chances that we’re taking.
AIPT: You’re working with Andrea Arcari, who may be relatively unknown to American readers. What has that collaboration been like?
SA: I’d only seen little bits of his work before this, but the most exciting thing in the world is when you’re working with somebody who’s blazing a name for themselves, and they really go all out on a book.
Looking at the first little bits of art that I’m getting so far, people are in for a treat. I think it’s just so dynamic, and it’s perfect for a speedster character like Cheetara.
Variant cover by John Amor. Courtesy of Dynamite.
AIPT: You’ve had some unusually long runs on licensed characters at this point. How valuable is having the runway of an ongoing series?
SA: That kind of tenure and runway is golden because you can really live with that character, grow them, put them through different kinds of paces, set up things that’ll pay off a year later. That’s been really cool to start to do with Cheetara here.
AIPT: You’ve now written everyone from Miles Morales and Wolverine to Daredevil and Cheetara. Is there still a dream character or franchise on your bucket list?
SA: It’s funny because once you’ve been in the industry for a few years, what you really realize is it’s less about the ideal story that you have in your head for this character and more about all sorts of corporate and other machinery that’s happening beyond your control.
I moved away from that kind of thing…when something comes across my desk, I go, “Can I make this cool?” Sometimes it’s something that just shouts to me immediately, but a lot of times I go, “Yeah, what’s my take on this?”
That said, I’ve done a bit of DC work here and there. I got done doing a Justice League Red series for them. Superman is somebody I worked on….[there’s] a Batman audio drama for Spotify a few years back, Batman Unburied. We got about two steps out the door with the idea of developing a Superman thing. For a bunch of different reasons, the machinery [is] bigger than any of us individual writers [and it] didn’t happen.
But Clark Kent and Superman, both sides of him, are somebody I think I’d like to take on someday.
ThunderCats: Cheetara is out September 9. For the full chat, which includes convos about Wolverine and Bishop, listen to the interview on the AIPT Comics podcast this Sunday, September 6th!
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