COMICS: Matt Fraction Reveals More "Fear Itself" Details!

Many thanks to Newsarama for the following excerpts. To read the full, and much longer, interview with both Matt Fraction AND Tom Bevoort about the upcoming epic comic book event be sure to follow the link at the bottom of this article. The seven issue series is set to start this coming April.

"What happened actually was that Tom contacted me and Ed Brubaker, saying, "We’ve got this Captain America and Thor thing happening this summer, so we’re wondering if maybe there’s a Cap/Thor series that could capitalize on that?" As Ed and I started to talk and I kind of got into it and he kind of got out of it, we came up with this story, but we kept having trouble figuring out, "how do you make this work for a movie audience? How do you start part one in May, and then have part three in July, and still have it make sense, and not have somebody have to go back, and buy two parts?"

"Just getting wrapped up in the logic of it all during a retreat. Joe Quesada just said, "[frick] it, what’s you story?" That kind of freed me to not worry about marketing and scheduling in my pitch — I had the core of the story, but I couldn’t figure out where it all fell. Once Joe said that, I was like, "Oh, great, well, here’s the story," and I started to tell what I thought was a good, interesting, satisfying, Cap and Thor story."

"There’s an alliance between Sin and this guy, the Serpent, the God of Fear — this fellow that Odin banished millennia ago. You’ve got a big nightmare for Thor, which is basically a monstrous problem of his dad’s, and then with Cap you’ve got the Red Skull’s daughter — she’s sort of like the ultimate trust fund kid, she’s earned nothing but been given everything, which makes her completely lethal and completely horrible to deal with. You’ve got Cap and Thor dealing with their worst nightmares come true simultaneously. It irradiates and touches everybody else outside of that, but it starts and ends with Cap and Thor."

"It’s not the role that people will expect. He is a part of the story, it’s very much about the big three and their relationship to one another, but Iron Man takes a path that I hope surprises people; that he thwarts your basic assumption. That’s the other thing, trying to find a front and center position for the X-Men in the middle of all this, too. They tend to take the sideline during these things for one reason or another — the opportunity to get them on the main stage is very exciting."