'Arrival' screenwriter's next act after Oscar nomination? A comic book
Eric Heisserer is having a hell of a year.
The writer hit the big time with Arrival, which he produced and penned. Heisserer won both the Writer's Guild of America and Critics' Choice Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, and may have a pretty good Oscar night too.
Arrival started with a tale called Story of Your Life, written by Ted Chiang, which packed an emotional punch. Heisserer loved what it had to say about the importance of communication – but also said in a phone interview that he wanted to turn it into a screenplay so he "could pay it forward and make everybody else ugly cry the way that I did."
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Mission accomplished.
But in the midst of Arrival mania, Heisserer doesn't just have his head in Hollywood. He's also writing a new comic series called Secret Weapons. It's based on Harbinger, a best-selling comic about a team of teenage superheroes.
Secret Weapons follows Harbinger alum Livewire and her new band of heroes. Here's a taste:
This is not Heisserer's first comic – he also wrote a couple mini-series for Dark Horse Comics. He also penned a screenplay for a film adaptation of Harbinger, which is currently in preproduction, and a second movie script based on fellow Valiant superhero comic, Bloodshot. He also just sounds like a comic book writer, describing Arrival's Louise Banks as someone in "a position of incredible power and responsibility" – not a world away from the mantra of a certain web-slinging hero.
Secret Weapons has its origin story when Heisserer wrote the Harbinger movie script. "I had grown to admire and love Livewire as a character," he says. He wanted so badly to see more of this character that he created an all-new story for her.
What he loved about Livewire is her immovable moral compass. For example, when her teacher, Toyo Harada, turns out to be (spoiler alert) something of a supervillain, Livewire still knows what is inherently right and wrong.
Comic book characters often off the rails when their mentor or teacher proves to be something other that what they originally thought. But Livewire "still inherently knew what was right and wrong," Heisserer says. "She held on to that and, oh God, I love that about her. And I need more people like that in the world."
Livewire is joined by a band of other powerful youngsters. We follow Owen, Martin and Sunil, who all come from different racial backgrounds. Their cultures each influence the person they are, without defining them or making them one-dimensional.
And then there's Nikki, who can talk to birds. Like Livewire, like Louise in Arrival, she's another intelligent, powerful women with agency. And that's not a coincidence.
"Honestly, I feel like characters like this are not lauded and raised up enough in mainstream media or in popular culture," Heisserer says. "I see such a groundswell and a rising of fans who connect with them on such a deep level, in a way that I don't see very often with male counterparts.
"And that suggests to me that there is a deeper need for characters like this to be more in the spotlight – to have some more bandwidth given to them."
Secret Weapons is published by Valiant, and you can pick it up on June 28th.
Topics Oscars
