Galactica.com - Javier Grillo-Marxuach To Tackle Classic Battlestar Galactica

By newsarama.com, on 10-10-2006

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Continuing the expansion of the comic book version of Battlestar Galactica, Dynamite today announced that Lost and Medium writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach will head to the Classic incarnation of the property early next year with a Classic Battlestar Galactica four-issue miniseries, Cylon Apocalypse.

Back the Viper up – who is this guy?

His bio: is an Emmy Award-winning television writer and producer whose credits include the Emmy, Golden Globe, Writers Guild and AFI Award-winning Lost, as well as Boomtown, The Pretender, The Chronicle, Charmed, Jake 2.0, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The Dead Zone, Dark Skies and seaQuest. He is also the writer of Marvel Comics’ Annihilation: Super Skrull and creator of Viper Comics' The Middleman. Javier Grillo-Marxuach was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and his name is pronounced "HA-VEE-AIR GREE-JOE MARX-WATCH."

So then – how’d he get here, and what’s he planning on doing? We caught up with him to find out…

Newsarama: First off Javier, what landed you on this project?

JG-M: It came out of a meeting between me and Nick at Dynamite. He read an interview I gave during the release of my indy comic, The Middleman, felt that I would be a good fit with Dynamite, and got in touch to see if there was anything we could do together. The moment he mentioned Classic Battlestar, I knew it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

NRAMA: So you were you a big fan of the original Battlestar Galactica?

JG-M: Huge. My first exposure to Galactica was the theatrical release of the pilot - in SENSURROUND - so I have a very specific, ingrained memory of Galactica as being something with a vast, epic scope and a cast of thousands.

NRAMA: Any favorite memories?

JG-M: The battle on the Ovion bridge in "Saga of a Star World," the arrival of the Pegasus and pretty much anything with Lloyd Bridges as Commander Cain in "The Living Legend," or with Fred Astaire as Starbuck's dad in "The Man With Nine Lives." Also, I was majorly freaked out by Count Iblis... almost as much as I was by the skimpy uniforms Starbuck and Apollo had to wear when they played Triad.

NRAMA: Hey – it was the ‘70s. So - in writing the classic BSG, what kind of freedom do you have that you might not if you were working with the current Battlestar? Can your stories say, be wider in scope than otherwise, or are there similar boundaries regardless of continuity?

JG-M: Whenever you are working in comics you have a wider range of visuals and set pieces because you don't have any budget constraints - and that was a huge reason why I took this project. There were things I wanted to see in the Galactica Universe - Cylon mainframe worlds, Basestars crashing into oceans, Galactica going to lightspeed - that the show could never truly explore. As far as the continuity, Universal obviously wanted to make sure I didn't write a series finale or some such thing - the trick was to write a story with real stakes, and some revelations that truly expand the Classic Universe, without conclusively altering the basic premise.

NRAMA: In your view, and aside from the obvious, what sets the classic BSG apart from the current? Looking at the two side by side, there almost seems to be an innocence in the classic that the current doesn’t quite…either share or express in the same manner…

JG-M: Ron Moore's Battlestar is one of, if not the best show on television. Part of its innovation has been to move away from the romantic, space opera aspects of the old in favor of a more naturalistic depiction of the human condition... so it's really apples and oranges at this point. One of them is a John Wayne western, the other is a Clint Eastwood western. There's considerable pleasure to be had from both, so I like to focus on how awesome it is that because of the new series, the entire spectrum of what Battlestar Galactica can be is getting attention and exploration - it's a really good time to be a fan of this franchise.

NRAMA: So – on to your story in particular - what gets the ball rolling in Cylon Apocalypse?

JG-M: The series was always very coy about the existence of Earth - at the end of the episode "The Hand of God," the crew just barely misses a transmission from the Apollo moon landing. One of the things I wanted to do was to give the crew a very specific indication that Earth is truly out there and see how that becomes a motivation. That's the flashpoint of Cylon Apocalypse - that and the discovery that standing between Galactica and a possible "short cut" to earth is a Cylon Mainframe Planet!

NRAMA: Who are the main characters?

JG-M: It took an ensemble approach. Obviously, Adama, Starbuck and Apollo are huge in it - and Starbuck's on and off romance with Cassiopeia gets a lot of play - but I wanted to give a sense that the series is about a fleet and not just two hotshot pilots and the guest star of the week. So Sheba and Bojay play a role, as do Doctors Salik and Wilker, and Greenbean and Omega - I even managed to find a scene for Boxey and Muffit, and, of course, Athena - 'cause, you know, who doesn't want to see Athena?

NRAMA: So no new cast members making their debut?

JG-M: No. There's a big temptation when you do a project like this to reinvent everything and make up all sorts of "new" and "exciting" characters, but I quickly realized that the series had established so many interesting and fun characters that never really got their due, that it would be truly fun to delve in and use them to fill out the world.

NRAMA: Back to the story, specifically, “Cylon Apocalypse” can obviously mean one of two things – it’s an apocalypse for the Cylons, or the Cylons are bnringing the apocalypse. Any hints as to which it is?

JG-M: This is an interesting question because there is a large Cylon angle to this story - part of the tale is that the rag-tag fleet develops a very ugly, very unstable weapon that could even the odds in the conflict against the Cylons. There is a significant amount of cutting to the Cylon world and seeing how they handle the developing threat, and that's where I got to create some new Cylon characters (I was a big fan of the bright red IL-series Cylons as well as the Cylon civilians) and delve into their conflicts and leadership.

NRAMA: Nice. Any teases for the remaining issues after the set up in #1?

JG-M: Zero-gee combat! Hordes of zombified Cylons! Vipers bombing cities! Raiders attacking their own basestars! Starbuck fighting with a fallen Centurion's broadsword! Seriously, they gave me all the toys, and I'm playing with them!