2013 Comic Book News Archives

December 16, 2013: Bryan Q. Miller Discusses "Smallville: Alien"

Smallville: Alien ComicBookResources.com caught up with Bryan Q. Miller to talk to him about the current "Alien" story currently taking place in the ongoing "Smallville" comic book series. Here's an excerpt from the interview...

    In "Smallville: Alien," Lex and Clark are investigating a Monitor. Unlike Batman, Wonder Woman or even previously lesser known properties like Green Arrow or Justice Society of America, the Monitor is fairly obscure DCU reference for non-comic book readers. When introducing a concept like the Monitor, how much backstory do you feel is necessary as many of your readers, I would guess, started as fans of the TV series?

    On the TV show, once you hit Season 5, which is when Brainiac showed up, that's when the fabric of the show started to change. You had these larger arcs with bag bads that were DC villains. You had Brainiac in Season 5, we had criminals from the Phantom Zone in Season 6 and that transitioned into Bizarro. In Season 7, we had a bunch of Krypton stuff, we had Zor-El, we had Brainiac again, we went into Doomsday territory in Season 8, Zod in Season 9 and then we did a valiant attempt at Darkseid in Season 10. We had all kinds of stuff. It's very much in the DNA of "Smallville" to spoonful of sugar larger DC villain concepts to the viewers and now the readers.

    With the Monitor, what we've done - and this goes back to the premiere, to "Guardian," which was, good lord, a year-and-a-half ago - is go back to the end of the first main arc to start planning it. We revisited it in "Haunted" when we showed Chloe from Earth 2. She wound up on our Earth and she died but Chloe found her memories and we saw what happened at the end of her world and there are Monitor ships in the sky so there were little bits and pieces, teases of the Monitor, for some time that we were Easter-egging for comic folk but at the same time, trying to create a larger threat that the reader can access without knowing too much.

    After "Alien," there will be a lot more and everybody will know what the Monitors are and what they do and why they do it, which is why we brought one down to Earth. We wanted Clark and Lex to get some face time.

Read the entire interview at the CBR website.



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