Metamorpho: The Element Man hits comic shops just in time for Christmas on December 25th, 2024. Focused on everyone’s favorite fab freak of a thousand changes, the story is a whacky, hilarious situational comedy made with heart and passion, crafted with care by writer Al Ewing alongside artist Steve Lieber.
Known for his critically acclaimed work on titles such as Loki: Agent of Asgard, X-Men: Red and When You Find This, We’re Already Dead, Ewing is taking a bold swing with his first titles at DC Comics. The Beat decided to reach out and interview him on Metamorpho: The Element Man as well as the hugely anticipated Absolute Green Lantern.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
JARED BIRD: Metamorpho: The Element Man #1 comes out December 25th, 2024 from DC Comics. I think a lot of readers might be shocked to hear about Metamorpho getting his own series, even though he had one in the 1960s. Could you give a brief elevator pitch for the series?
AL EWING: It’s fun Metamorpho comics. Metamorpho is the fab freak of a thousand changes, and his deal is that he can turn himself into any element within the human body, which is a lot of them. He can also change his shape into pretty much anything. He’s surrounded by a whacky cast of supporting characters, like his fiancee Sapphire Stagg, daughter of megalomaniacal billionaire ‘genius’ Simon Stagg, who has his man-servant Java who is a defrosted neanderthal from prehistoric times and is generally very annoyed with Metamorpho and everyone else. It’s a sitcom. It’s where people can go to forget their troubles for twenty minutes, and read a really fun comic about a bunch of wild characters. It’s not one of my big, deep esoteric comics.
It’s a love-letter to superheroes as a concept but a particular version of superheroes from the 1960s, who are slightly comedic and fun characters. It’s also a love letter to Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon, the original creators of Metamorpho, who I’d like to believe we are going to honor as much as possible in the pages of this book by calling back to some of their other classic characters and keeping that air of ‘anything goes’, wild, fun energy. I want to say goofiness, but we don’t wink at the camera. We just go in, have fun, and get out.
BIRD: You’ve kind of touched on it already, but what inspired the concept for the book?
EWING: When I was sitting down with DC Comics as a sort of preliminary discussion to come work with them, they asked me who I wanted to write. I responded ‘Well, who have you got?’. The Jack Kirby inspiration made me want to write someone like Jimmy Olsen, and while I didn’t get him I got Steve Lieber, who is the great Jimmy Olsen artist of our time, and also now the great Metamorpho artist of our time. Katie Kubert suggested Metamorpho, and I was immediately like ‘Oo, Metamorpho. I didn’t know he was available.’ Metamorpho is going to be in the new Superman movie next year, so that gives us permission to do some classic Metamorpho. We have to tidy up the continuity a bit. If you’re a huge fan and have read all of his appearances, you might be wondering why certain people are alive. Why the status quo is what it is. We wanted to fix that and give you reasons down the line. There are reasons for the back-to-factory settings approach.
BIRD: I mean, historically in your work you’ve handled continuity very well while putting your own spin on characters’ histories as well. I’m sure Metamorpho fans won’t be too displeased.
EWING: I hope the classic Metamorpho action will be a big treat for all the metamaniacs in the world. We are hoping to inaugurate a new age of Metamorpho with this book.
BIRD: Was it freeing to write a character like Metamorpho, who may lack some of the expectations carried by characters like Hulk or Venom?
EWING: Metamorpho comes with his own expectations. You have to make some decisions before you even start with him. How tortured is he going to be? You could do a version of Metamorpho that’s a really grim, dark, difficult book focused on body horror, which I think is what people were expecting from me to begin with. But I think it’s important to let the freak flag fly. I’m a big fan of that. I like giving him the freedom to be groovy. If he’s another case of ‘Oh, I’ve been turned into a monster, I’m hideous’ , that’s leaving a lot of the classic Metamorpho vibe on the table. Leaving a lot of good stuff by the wayside. I’m taking a more nuanced approach, where there are a lot of groovy vibes and love of life and joy in there. There’s a debate set up right at the start – Does Metamorpho even want to be cured?
A character in the book that I haven’t mentioned is Urania Blackwell, the Element Girl. We’ve made her a swinging Agent of SHADE, who has joined the cast because of the machinations of a new / old villain called Cyclops. She’s on the case to deal with the menace of Cyclops, and all we know about them is that they want to kill Metamorpho. That’s step one of their mysterious plan. The way we’re playing her is the exact opposite of her appearance in The Sandman. She loves being an element person, she loves being a metamorph. She’s really into it, and she’s kind of an adrenaline junkie, so being a metamorph is the greatest adventure. We’re doing a classic love triangle from the 1960s, but we’re focusing on what Rex Mason wants. Does he want to be cured, or does he want to be the fab freak?
BIRD: These are two of your first high profile books with DC Comics. What’s your working relationship been like with them so far?
EWING: It’s been great. They really value the art and the craft, and I’m able to take some big swings. Being able to write Metamorpho in the tone and style I want is itself a big swing in some ways. If you open up a Metamorpho comic from the 1960s, you see a list of the cast with little blurbs about them. We’re doing that again. We’re addressing the readers and doing captions with ‘Hey metamaniacs!’. Steve gets to put fun little gags in there as well. I get to take some really big swings with this book and Absolute Green Lantern, and there’s a level of trust I really appreciate.
BIRD: What was it like to work with Steve Lieber?
EWING: Steve’s great. He’s fantastic, I love him. He’s a legend in many ways, and I kind of introduced myself by asking how much control he wanted to take of things. He just asked me to tell him what to draw. Within that structure, I end up thinking of how best to utilize this artistic genius, but he also comes up with a lot of stuff. If something’s funny, he will chuck it in there. Little sight gags. His expression work is out of this world. He’s a great guy to do comedy with. I can’t say enough what a professional he is, what a comedic genius he is, how good he is at layouts and storytelling. He’s a great guy to work with.
BIRD: Now, I’d love to talk about Absolute Green Lantern for a bit. What inspired your pitch for the series? So far, the Absolute Universe seems to be based around removing a key aspect from legendary DC characters.
Removing some of the support structure, I guess. My original pitch included a ‘No rings, no lanterns’ policy.
BIRD: Ahaha!
EWING: There is a ring in there, but it’s not a Green Lantern ring. Part of my thinking was ‘If I was launching Green Lantern today, how would I do it?’. I tried to break it down to its core elements, and to me the core element is an alien force coming to earth. I’m going to be extremely cagey, because the less you know going in the better. Part of the cosmic horror I’m trying to instill in the book is the unknowability of this alien force. The Green Lantern is not referred to as anything else but a gigantic object the size of a small town. It’s fallen on a small town and destroyed it. Nobody knows what the hell it is, but there’s people running around with abilities connected to it. We are going to learn more about it over time. We will learn who The Abin Sur is, why he came to earth and what he’s been doing, but I feel like the less you know going in the better. I’m being very careful not to serve the wine before its time.
BIRD: One of the series protagonists is Jo Mullein, who first appeared in Far Sector by NK Jemisin and Jamal Campbell. What drew you to her character?
EWING: I just think she’s neat. Originally I wanted John Stewart to be the main protagonist, and I wanted him to be around forty-five. I sat down one day and thought to myself ‘Do I want to do another haunted old man comic? Do I want to do another comic about an older man?’ A lot of my comics seem to be about old men. I was getting notes about how passive John was in the book as well. I was searching for who else could be the protagonist after that, and I had plans for Hal, and I needed somebody who cuts through really well. That’s Jo Mullein. She was the ideal character to fill the gap in the original pitch. The original idea was quite a slow burning story, but her inclusion turned it into something that can stand against Absolute Batman or Absolute Superman. We needed somebody younger, more active who could be a reader surrogate. This was very early on in the pitch, she wasn’t a last minute addition. She was the final piece that turned it into something that works.
BIRD: Does Absolute Green Lantern share DNA with any other series you’ve worked on?
EWING: I’m not saying it to goose it, but probably Immortal Hulk. There’s a lot of that biblical stuff in there. I told someone else it was one of my comics where I try to solve God. I have an ongoing relationship with religion in my work, from a very agnostic perspective, but I work a lot of that out on the page. Absolute Green Lantern has parts of that. I was inspired by times in the Old Testament where something comes down from heaven, and you don’t know what it is but it does some stuff. I didn’t go as far as making a burning wheel of eyes, but it has this biblical angel sort of quality where you look at these things and they’re terrifying. The main universe Green Lantern is the cherubic, popular culture angel who uses an easily understood power, whereas the Absolute Green Lantern is the burning wheel of eyes. You don’t know what the hell it wants, but it’s coming for you.
BIRD: I’m so excited for this book now. You’re writing Immortal Thor and Venom for Marvel, plus two upcoming projects for DC. Do you like to keep yourself busy?
EWING: I’m not good at saying no. I’m better now because I’ve got four books on the go, so I have to say no. Increasingly, editors don’t bring me stuff because they know that I’m swamped. Occasionally I’ll get offers to do a little thing, and often I can’t even do that. I recently did a 6 page story for Young Men in Love: New Romance, with art by Luciano Vecchio and Patricio Oliver, and that kind of thing I’m always open for. I did it on my day off, and it was based on a trip to the supermarket I had. I figured a meet-cute there might be fun.
BIRD: Across your career, there’s been a lot of recurrent themes such as empathy, human nature, philosophy and religion. A big one has been our relationship to the unknowable. Is this a theme you find interesting?
EWING: Yeah, definitely. I’ve been wrestling with a desire for faith my whole life. When I was a kid, I had faith. There’s a hymn in school assembly, you’re expected to believe in the Church of England and God, and you’re just sort of programmed that way. As I got older, I kind of fell out of that. As I got even older, staring mortality in the face, I started getting a desire to regain some kind of faith. But I can’t just decide ‘Oh, I’m scared of death, I’m going to believe in God now’. It doesn’t work that way. It’s partly that and I find the unknown and the unknowable very interesting. My big problem with organized religion is the hubris of saying that you have an understanding of his unknowable thing, and you can speak for it. My favorite religions and religious people are the ones that do a lot of questioning, that don’t go ‘I know what it’s all about.’ That always puts me off massively.
You get a lot of people who use religion to discriminate, right now more than ever, so it all comes back to liking the unknowability and liking not being able to know. A higher power should be unknowable. You shouldn’t be going around saying you know all the answers. What does that make you? Some kind of proud, vain man. That’s why I like the Book of Job so much. God comes down at the end of it, and goes ‘You don’t know shit.’ ‘Where were you when I made this Leviathan? Where were you when I made thunder?.’ The whole Book of Job is people saying ‘God probably thinks this’, and then he comes down and goes ‘No, you’ll never know why. I just did it.’. God never gives Job an answer. That and the Song of Solomon, which is my other favorite book of the bible because you should take a break to have some erotic poetry. “We’ve all been working very hard, let’s read some erotic poetry then we’ll get back to it!’.
BIRD: I was raised Catholic, and I completely understand what you’re saying. When I was figuring out my queer identity as a teenager, it pushed me away from it, and away from following the sort of strict programming I was following until then. The older I got, the more I was grappling with the ideas that you’ve mentioned there. There’s a very human element to your work, and a lack of hubris. You’re not trying to give us all the answers, you’re just one of us, trying to figure it out.
EWING: It’s got to come from a humanist point of view. At the same time I was working all this out, which was while I was working on Immortal Hulk, Defenders and Guardians of the Galaxy, I had this big lightning moment of ‘Oh, straight people don’t actually feel this way.’ I spent six months wandering around in a sort of haze, looking back at years of comics I’d written questioning how I hadn’t looked in the mirror. I managed to go almost all the way through Pride Month without saying anything, but I needed to come out with it. That was all bound into it. Self-exploration and general exploration has done me a lot of good.
BIRD: When you publicly came out, it was important to me as a bisexual man myself, because there’s not many of us in known, high profile places.
EWING: There’s a few of us, and I feel like more and more are coming out. There’s an ongoing war on queerness, and it’s important that all of us stick together. ‘All the letters stand together’ is on the sign I’ve carried at the last few Pride events. Trans rights, always. Trans liberation now. Historically bisexual and trans folks have been allies, and people who say bisexuality is inherently against transgender identity are talking bullshit and ignoring history. I use bisexual because it’s a familiar term to me, but I don’t mind using bisexual or pansexual. Bisexuality is a label we can and should reclaim from people who try to tell us what it is.
BIRD: That was the most entertaining sidetrack I’ve been on in a while. Are there any other works of yours that you would recommend that readers check out?
EWING: I would like everyone to read Immortal Thor, my current book. I think it’s good. My Guardians of the Galaxy run is one of the things I’m proudest of, as is Loki: Agent of Asgard. We got to this place from Metamorpho, so I want to recommend some of my comedy work. The Ant-Man book I did is a good pick, because it harkens back to my love of old comics. The Fury special is another one. Tom Reilly is wonderful to work with, but I’m sure he’s sick of me by now, because I’m always telling him to travel in time to become an artist of old. On Ant-Man Issue #3 I told him to do whatever he wanted, it was all his, and then Issue #4, I wanted him to draw for me like he was an artist from hundreds of years in the future. Jordie Bellaire did amazing colors and got the whole brief.
I’d also recommend Defenders. Speaking of amazing artists, that was me working with Javier Rodriguez. I love him, he’s my favorite artist to work with, we have such a rapport in terms of being able to give him total freedom. I gave him a little too much freedom, and he asked for a few boundaries to bounce between. But by the time of our second Defenders book, we had it down to a science. Issue #4 of the first Defenders run, where he interpreted a plot where each description was a rambling summary of what was happening on a page and what people would likely be saying, and when I got the art back I got to polish off the dialogue. When you first come out, there’s a couple months where you’re just fizzing, and I was in that place of extreme queer energy, and wrote all the dialogue with that in mind. Defenders series 1, Issue #4 is the greatest comic I’ve ever had a hand in. I co-created it with Javier, so he will always be my favorite artist to work with. If you want to read one issue of mine, pick that up. It’s got my whole deal.
BIRD: Thank you so much for your time.
EWING: Thanks!
