Phil, were you familiar with the externals much at this point? Do you remember having to do a lot of research? Do you want to talk a little bit about your redesigns?

Yeah, like I was aware of them because I remember like the impetus of this plot of like, was Cannonball an external or not? And the resolution of that got lost in the years of when I was on and off of comics.

But getting a chance to go back and revisit all of these characters, I did a quick deep dive, mainly jumping back into Teenie Howard's Excalibur to see how that set up.

I think that was the Ten of Swords crossover was when a majority of the externals were sacrificed to create the gate for Apocalypse.

So yeah, I think from there, it was just looking at the document.

Steve Fox and Steve Orlando were the writers on that arc.

And then I was alternating art with Nick Roche.

It's smart.

What were your initial reactions to this story? Once you're reaching this point and you're like, okay...

yeah no i really loved it um i think you know you pulled steve gerber it was reminding me of early grant morrison like all uh their animal man run and kind of the existential meta narrative that buddy baker and grant morrison as a character in the comic have so it felt similar to that in which a character is meeting the person who has created them from a fictional construct into a real one And kind of that pull and play between this kid and his grandma.

And so I loved it.

I thought, you know, the way of him describing, like, basically, I created all of the Marvel Universe.

And this other entity is trying to uncreate what I've created.

I thought it was really, really cool.

Again, not something I had anticipated for Mark Grunewald to write this style.

What were your thoughts overall on the reveal on how he sort of did the right thing?

it?

Yeah, I think you pointed out in the beginning, and it's very accurate, like this issue, even though we're 12 issues into the series, is very episodic.

I would almost describe it as an and then issue because stuff's happening.

It's like this happens and then this happens and then this happens.

It's just lots of little things that aren't really like escalating in a way until you kind of get to those last couple of panels, which I think are really fantastic.

And Mark Grunewald's writing with Eon's reaction to his dad dead on the floor is actually really, really good.

There was things about it stylistically, both in the writing and the art that was reminding me of kind of concurrent DC titles at the time.

I think that's what you and the other creators on the Infinity comics do really well is really treat the fans, which I appreciate.