Luke Cage is already a powerful hero, but what if he also had the powers of the most destructive forces in the Marvel Universe? Fans got a glimpse of this in the 2023 end-of-the-year one-shot Timeless, featuring a Power Man from a dark future caused by Luke’s former Heroes for Hire buddy, Danny Rand. Timeless gives a look at what the next year of Marvel publishing will look like, but this edition also pitted friend against friend as Luke Cage and Danny Rand clashed, all while displaying stolen and borrowed powersets from Hulk, Iron Fist, Sentry, Iron Man, and Moon Knight. The story was so popular that Marvel asked writers Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing to revisit this version of Luke Cage in a new Power Man series.
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ComicBook spoke to Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing about the upcoming Power Man: Timeless limited series. The writing duo known as the Hivemind dished on the genesis of last year’s Timeless, which of Power Man’s powers (Hulk, Sentry, Iron Fist) they enjoyed the most, expanding the cosmic side of the Marvel Universe, their love of Luke Cage, and the new villain they’re introducing, Aeon the Knife. We can also exclusively reveal five pages from Power Man: Timeless #1 and a design sheet for Aeon the Knife by artist Bernard Chang, as well as the cover and solicitation for the second issue.
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The solicitation for Power Man: Timeless #2 reads, “He is unstoppable. Indestructible. Incorruptible. Immortal. Our solar system has never known a being as mighty as POWER MAN before, but another has just arrived. What has brought AEON THE KNIFE to the Milky Way? Can Power Man stop him without letting the VOID loose? And if Luke won’t risk that, will the acid clouds of Venus be his tomb?”
ComicBook: Out of all the Timeless issues we’ve gotten so far, the Luke Cage/Danny Rand one was definitely the most intriguing and also the most heartbreaking of all of them so far. Was this a story that both of you pitched or was the idea of pitting Luke and Danny against each other already something that was in place?
Jackson Lanzing: Tom Breevort invited us to the table effectively and gave us very little by way of guardrails. What he said was, “Look, it’s a chance to showcase the next year of Marvel Comics. We would love to do that without Kang because we’ve used Kang previously and he’s really being used a lot in Avengers right now. So we’d love to do something other than Kang.” I think his term was, “Can you make your own Cosmic Ghost Rider? Can you all build a cool interesting portmanteau character that’s taken from across the Marvel Universe and find somebody who can be a little bit of this character and a little bit of that character, and really make something new out of the toy box?”
So that created a really interesting challenge for Collin and I, which was we just went around and built a half a dozen sort of potential Marvel portmanteau characters
Collin Kelly: And many of them seemed like the old Amalgam Comics where you’re literally just smashing things together and you’re like that’s neat but dorky, right? Ultimately the danger is creating action figures. And while we all love action figures, what we are really trying to do is something that would have thematic resonance and character resonance that could stand the test of time.
And then we settled on realizing Luke Cage is such a robust character. One of our seminal books that we were falling in love with was New Avengers, right where he’s stepping in as this lead character. He has so much potential and then we realized, Power Man right? What you start looking at is how you can expand on that name and start bringing in the powers of these, what we like to think of as the living weapons, that all need what Luke Cage offers which is discipline, right? Strength, empathy, right? These are the things that he can bring to the table. And so what powers can really be highlighted by that particular strength of his.
Jackson Lanzing: How can we take this character we love and who we came up with and who means a lot to us and give him totally new story territory. I think about him very similar to the way that we approached Bucky Barnes when we started on that character or to some degree the way that we approached the Guardians when we came onto that team, which is to say let’s do something totally different than what’s come before.
Let’s really open up new territory and see what exciting, strange, cool sort of action and spectacle opportunities are underneath it. But more importantly, let’s figure out what heartbreak is underneath it. And that’s why we set him against Danny in that story. That story was very much about this final confrontation between two best friends, both of whom were Marvel Portmans.
There’s Moon Knight unending, this eternal Moon Knight character who has the eye of Agamotto. So he’s got Doctor Strange. He’s got a sort of Iron Man suit, so he has the Stark Tech plus he’s got Eternals technology plus he’s got Moon Knight, right? He’s all of these things together. But that’s just a tragedy. That’s a guy who’s put all of that on himself and has embraced the tragedy of all of that. As opposed to Luke who has taken the Hulk, and he has taken the Iron Fist from Danny, and he has taken the powers of the Void, and he is channeling all of that through discipline and trying to hold all of that together. So that conflict really made, I think, for a really exciting Timeless issue but that was the end.
Then at the end of that, he saves the day. He’s thrown through time. And the last glimpse we have of him is him reappearing sort of Dr. Manhattan style, like regrowing out there in space as he reemerges into our ecosystem. And we had hoped that this character, who by that point we’d really fallen in love with writing, would have something that people wanted to see more. Similarly, to what we did over at DC with the Final Knight where we had this Batman version of Duke Thomas that we were able to bring back into Outsiders and they made action figures and all this stuff. I was like, “That’s really fun. This character kind of emerged and felt like he had a real life.” So, we were hoping for the same thing out of Luke, but you never know what people are going to respond to, what people are going to hit on. And fortunately, Marvel saw a lot of love coming Luke’s way and coming Power Man’s way.
So they came back to us and said, “Hey, what would you do with this if you got five issues to blow this out and really do something new?” And that’s where Power Man: Timeless really comes from.
Which of the different power sets were you guys most excited for Luke to show off, between The Void and Sentry and the gamma powers of the Hulk and the Immortal Iron Fist?
Collin Kelly: We love using them all. I think one of the touchstones that I really came into this, and I think we kind of brought to the table, we all got really excited is Dragon Ball Z, right? We realize that this is in a lot of ways a fight comic. Primarily because one of the last things that Luke Cage ever wants to do is fight. That is never his first instinct. But when he is pushed to that extreme, he is absolutely going to throw down. So along those lines, I mean, come on, baby. You give him the power of the Hulk, that’s how you smash through asteroids, that is some primo stuff.
But I think fans are really going to discover that the heart of this story is the conflict between Luke and the Void. I think Sentry, but not just Sentry, it’s everything that Luke brings to that and at the same time struggling with that raw force of darkness. It’s not only awesome visually, but thematically and emotionally. That is where we are going to get our hooks in you.
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Jackson Lanzing: The thing that they all have in common is that they have a root monster at the core of them. For the Iron Fist, it’s the Dragon Shou-Lao. It’s this primal force that is sort of pushing that power through you. But that force doesn’t have human morals and human emotions. It is just a force of nature. The Hulk has the One Above All. It’s the Green Door, all this dark primal fundamental god energy. We very much embrace Al Ewing’s interpretation of that character. Al is a friend and a huge influence on us and we really wanted to make sure that we were really using that territory here. So I think you’re going to see in the Hulk that sense of this primal anger that generally Luke has a pretty good beat on.
He’s actually pretty good at controlling the Hulk. The Hulk is maybe the thing he’s the most disciplined with. He doesn’t Hulk out the way that Banner does. He’s able to channel that strength into individual muscle groups, into individual places in his body so that he can achieve things in a more disciplined way. But the Sentry and the Void are different because the Sentry and the Void are not some big external conflict idea. The Void just exists inside of you. And the power of the Sentry, that power of a million exploding suns seems to also open up that part of you and expand that blind side that you have, to your own darkness, your own problems, your own fears, your own anger, and that can kind of festers.
So something that we do in throughout Power Man: Timeless is that rather than having this story be told from Luke’s internal system, rather than having Luke be the narrator of the story or having some kind of third person narrator, the Void is your narrator. The Void is the one who is talking through this. And over the course of the book, you’re going to start to understand that that’s not just happening to the reader. That’s happening to Luke. That what the Void is saying to the reader is what Luke is saying to himself. And that it starts to be able to express his own insecurities, his own fears, his own anger, his own need to explode.
All of that undercurrent is going to be the thing that Luke is wrestling with the entire time. Even though he is going to have a villain of epic proportions to deal with that’s right in front of him, perhaps the more terrifying villain is sitting underneath his soul.
When readers pick up the first issue, where do they find Power Man? Does it take place right after he’s thrown back through time?
Collin Kelly: We pick up effectively moments when we left him and he was starting to reconstitute himself through the powers of the Hulk.
Jackson Lanzing: And what he finds as he comes home, how he engages with Earth, that’s all going to be answered by pages two and three. And he’s going to discover a world that’s very different than the one he expects. Luke is from a dark future. He knows the way that the world goes. And he thinks that the world begins, the end of the world that he seeks to stop, begins with Danny Rand going bad. But anybody who’s been reading Marvel comics for the last little bit is well aware Danny Rand is dead. Danny Rand just died. This is not Luke’s past. This is something else. The core Marvel Universe is a timeline that exists separate to Luke’s.
And so in coming back and encountering that and experiencing that, he is going to pretty rapidly discover that there is not a place on Earth for him. This is a place that already has a Luke Cage and that Luke Cage has a family and responsibilities. He’s Mayor of New York. There are too many things happening to Luke for Power Man to insert himself into this world in any kind of way that wouldn’t blow it up. And so he exiles himself into space and heads off into our solar system to try to find purpose. And little does he know that purpose has already earmarked him and will find him very directly in both new allies and new enemies out there in the solar system. And this is the thing I’m really the most excited about in terms of Power Man is at least in the first two issues, he’s the closest thing we have to a mainstay Marvel character and everybody else in this book are brand new characters.
You’re gonna meet a new supervillain who was designed as a counterpoint and a counteraction to a character that we came up with back when we came up with Timeless the first time. Just a cool idea that we came to and we were like, we’d really love to play with this someday. And then eventually he found himself in this story. It also takes some stuff that we’ve been looking at working on that we’ve been looking at just in our own lives in terms of the solar system and how it operates.
Collin Kelly: Celestial secrets that have been buried in the solar system for a million years. As well as some new allies. And by issue three we do have some truly excellent cameos as he continues to traverse the solar system.
Jackson Lanzing: Earth is not the only inhabited system in our solar system, or only inhabited planet in our solar system.
What can you tell us about this new villain?
Jackson Lanzing: So he’s an all new character. Luke is going to discover that somebody has rolled into our solar system with goals of his own and he’s disinterested entirely in explaining himself. He is simply going for what he wants and what he wants is the annihilation of everything that cannot stand against him. He is the fulfillment of a millennia of the Inhumans promising that they were going to go through enough breeding and enough Terrigen mist that eventually you’ll have the ultimate superpowered warrior. You’ll have this thing that nothing can stand against. Bad news. They did it. His name is Aeon the Knife. And Aeon is quite literally the knife that cuts through all things. He is something of a knight. He is something of a knife.
He is something of a wandering samurai. He is in many ways the equal and opposite to Luke’s discipline and power.
Collin Kelly: As Luke can hold all things together, Aeon cuts all things apart.
Jackson Lanzing: Bernard Chang designed this brand new character for the Marvel Universe. That sword that he carries in his hand, that thing is the actual expression of his power. That suit he’s wearing, it holds him together. Because to even touch any part of Aeon is to be sundered and severed and cut to ribbons. So he channels his power through that sword which can get infinitely large. You will see that sword get moon-sized within the frame of issue one. Nothing can really stand against it. And within meeting Luke or moments of meeting Aeon the knife, Power Man is going to understand that this is not going to be a fight he can win just by being the most powerful guy in any room. He’s going to need a lot more than that. It is going to take all of his discipline. It is going to take all of his strength and all of his empathy to get him through that frame.
Collin Kelly: And as an aside, we mentioned Bernard’s art, which is just absolutely killer. We sat down with him a few months back to really dive into the exciting opportunities with this character. And one of the things that he is bringing stylistically is Aeon’s ability to cut through pages themselves. There’s this really exciting opportunity for us to get a little less literal and a little bit more poetic and stylistic in the design itself and in the way that these stories are deployed in a way that a lot of Marvel comics aren’t able to touch. But we really wanted to emphasize that power of Aeon to be able to slice through all things including the fourth wall to a certain degree.
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Jackson Lanzing: Celestial, Eternal, Inhuman secrets that exist inside of the Marvel solar system and treat it with the kind of gravity and the kind of intensity that Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman did on Venom with the King in Black. That’s a really great touchstone for us in terms of how do you turn up a story and how do we make this somebody who you want to see back? How do you create a villain who is going to challenge your characters and is going to open up formal territory for your artist?
We’re really excited to see what this character brings to the table and how people react to Aeon because we’re having a blast writing it.
