Excellence #1 is free to read this month for Skybound Insiders! If you’re new to this brilliantly written and beautifully illustrated work of fantasy world-building, be sure to check out our 5 reasons to read it now. To learn about the making of Excellence, we sat down with its creator, writer Brandon Thomas. Here’s what Brandon had to tell us…

When did you discover comics, and what inspired you to first write about them and then write them? Who were your favorite writers when you were growing up?

The first comics I ever got my hands on was that awesome Untold Legend of the Batman ashcan series that you got from sending in the box tops (or UPCs?) from the Batman cereal they released near the movie. That was just a brief taste though, and a few years later, in the spring of 1992, my father took me to a comics store called The Fiction House, and from there, it was history. He was a big comics fan as a kid, and given my adolescent obsessions with storytelling, cartoons, and Star Wars, he thought it was something I’d be into, and fully introducing me to that world is one of the greatest gifts he’s ever given me.

I left that first trip with a middle issue of the Robin: Joker’s Wild mini-series, the first issue of Star Wars: Dark Empirefrom Dark Horse, and the first issue of Spawn, among many other things. I had no time limits and no spend limits, anything we collected and put on the counter went home with us, and this was a monthly ritual for years and years. Without it, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation, and it was definitely love at (almost) first sight.

As far as favorites, not sure if you meant favorite comics writers, but that’s what I’ll answer first. Chuck Dixon was my number one guy for several years, mostly because I got completely obsessed with Tim Drake and every single thing about him. Since Chuck was his main writer across both the regular Batman titles and his initial minis and ongoings, I was a willing and enthusiastic convert. He could literally do no wrong, and it was his “Ten Commandments of Comic Book Writing” panel at an old Chicago con that changed the entire course of my life. All it took was fifty mins to redirect me from what I thought would be a lifetime devoted to writing action/adventure novels over to comics. That was around the end of high school, and I’ve been on that mostly singular path ever since then.

Outside of comics, the writers that meant the most to me were George Lucas and Chris Carter, one of them providing the ultimate inspiration that started everything, and the other creating and writing the TV show that made me desperately want to have my own TV show one day.

How did you come to work with Skybound on Horizon?

Blame (or credit) goes to editor-in-chief Sean Mackiewicz for that. We’d briefly connected when he was an editor at DC, didn’t have a chance to work on anything there, but once he got over to Skybound, he reached out and the rest is history. Horizon was the first project that I pitched and given how much fun we had developing and making that for a couple years, I decided to really challenge them with something as highly personal and emotionally charged as Excellence, and thankfully, they accepted that challenge.

Your work often mixes genre escapism with real-world concerns. What’s your approach to balancing the two?

It really depends on the project, but I’m always looking for a personal emotional connection to the characters. Something they want and can’t get that easily plugs into my own history and experience—whether it’s a need for success, or validation, or forgiveness, etc. Once I have that down the story flows much easier, but without that it’s really hard to fully “lock in.”

If those emotions and hang-ups are missing, or not brought to the surface effectively, the escapism doesn’t have anything to hold onto, so even in the most fantastical situations, there’s a chance it all comes off as ultimately hollow.

That’s the worst-case scenario obviously, and what I’m always trying to build is something that

you can enjoy on the surface level, and if that's all that a book means to you, that's cool. But if you want to dig a little deeper, I want there to be more meat on the bone, and something that can potentially stay with people a long time.

How did Excellence come about? What sparked its story?

I’d been sitting on the very basic idea of “subverting the magical negro trope” for a long time, but what Excellenceultimately became is so much more complicated than just that. Things really took off when I started getting personal with it, injecting more and more of my actual family history and relationships and failings, etc. And the more that happened, the more vital and “real” the characters and world became. But there was a lot of fear there too, because I’d never put so much of myself into anything I’ve ever done, and it’s no accident that facing and overcoming fear is one of the book’s central themes.

But it’s not just that, and it was highly important that everything was emotionally complete, if that makes sense. There's anger, sadness, joy, and there's also triumph, and I wanted it to be a full expression of the human experience. And a love letter to comics and everything they’ve meant to me since ‘92. It felt like everything that I've done in comics and everything that I've experienced outside of comics led me to Excellence, and the more I embraced and welcomed that mindset, the better it became.

_{Brandon Thomas (second from left) alongside the Excellence creative team}

What is your collaboration with Khary Randolph like? How do the two of you develop an issue?

It begins in a very standard way—I write a script with the input and guidance of my editors, and once it’s been beaten into shape, it’s sent to him, and he illustrates it. But after it leaves my hands, that’s when the real magic happens, because the script changing hands is just the very beginning of a long conversation we’ll be having for the days and weeks it takes him to finish the issue.

Even though it’s down on the page in a certain away, that doesn’t mean he isn’t free to change, shift, or improve things with his own ideas and instincts. He sees things I don’t see, and there’s been tons of instances of layouts changing shape, new characters being introduced, and design elements being reworked on the fly. It’s awesome, it’s the greatest part of the overall process, as he’s always my first audience, and honestly, there’s always a little pressure there too. The script needs to convince him that it’s worth all the time he’ll spend drawing it, and hopefully that translates to the readers as well.

What else are you working on now?

This is always that sensitive question where you desperately want to reveal a bunch of cool, secret stuff, but it’s just not time yet. Soon though.

Is it too soon to say when Excellence may return?

The interesting thing is that I’d scripted all the way up to the penultimate issue of the series, and then Covid and some major life stuff (some good, some extremely tragic) got in the way, and the team all got pulled in different directions. Thankfully, all of that is in the past now, and I’m finishing the final scripts now, so we can officially restart production. Only problem is that the previous versions of #13-16 just aren’t good enough anymore, so I’m rewriting everything from scratch. Good news is that this final arc will be much, much better than it was when I initially wrote it, because I’ve clocked significantly more writing and life experience. We’ll make the long wait worth it.

Do you have any other favorite Skybound titles?

Invincible is the greatest superhero comic that ever was and is only one of a handful that believably and confidently pushed their characters forward, instead of spinning them in a never-ending circle for years and years. Thief of Thieveshelped show the world what smart people already knew—that Shawn Martinborough is an artistic force that comics often doesn’t deserve. Birthright has one of the greatest hooks in an original series, and produced some otherworldly artwork from the one-two punch that is Andrei Bressan and Adriano Lucas.

There’s more of course, but books like these are why I was so excited to work with Skybound in the first place.

What else do you nerd out over these days?

Severance and Poker Face are a couple new shows that I discovered recently that simply blew me away with brilliant writing and extremely clever storytelling. Can’t recommend them enough, and it’s the kind of work that makes you a little jealous.

I’m also a massive NFL fan, and training camp starts in a few days, so I’ll be obsessing over that very soon, and crossing my fingers there aren’t too many serious injuries before the games start.

Do you have any advice for someone considering a career in your field?

Settle in. Breaking into the biz is a damn near impossible task, and staying in is sometimes even harder. Your resilience and patience are continually tested, and you never know what’s coming next, which is equal parts exhilarating and terrifying.

That said, when you get the opportunity to be part of a small team of people that get to actually make a comic book, the feeling of accomplishment and comradery is off the charts. There’s nothing like seeing something that was only a random word document gradually come to life, as everyone takes turns doing their best to make a book that’s worth reading. When you get into that groove, and start to believe that what you’re all working on could be really special, that’s when you know that everything is (and was) worth it. That’s exactly what it felt like making Excellence, and we can’t wait to get back to it and give the story the conclusion it deserves.

Read Excellence #1 for free via Insiders today!