TASK FORCE Z Jason Todd Brings A Zombie Team to DCs Main Continuity

TASK FORCE Z: Jason Todd Brings A Zombie Team to DC’s Main Continuity

Task Force Z writer Matthew Rosenberg breaks down Red Hood’s new team, and why a squad of undead villains is the perfect calling for Jason Todd.

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Jason Todd made history when he was killed by the Joker–and repeated the feat when he rose from the grave to start a new life as the Red Hood. That experience is surely going to help him in his new role, ushering more dead DC characters back to life as the leader of Task Force Z. Well, partly back to life.

After hundreds of Gotham villains and deranged inmates of Arkham Asylum were killed in the A-Day attack, the board seemed to have been wiped clean for Gotham City. But now a mysterious organization is using “Lazarus Resin” to resurrect the dead as undead, nearly un-killable operatives. But to control a team of half-dead villains, the creators of ‘Task Force Z’ need a different kind of leader. No wonder, then, that Jason Todd has landed that duty in Matthew Rosenberg and Eddy Barrows’ new series. Screen Rant got the chance to speak with Rosenberg about how this book came to be (an idea he was NOT originally on board with), what it means for Jason’s story… and how worried the Bat-Family should be, considering this undead nightmare takes place in the canon DC Universe. Readers can enjoy our full interview, as well as a preview of Task Force Z #1, below.

So how did this book come about, with you on board as writer?

Paul Kaminski, our editor on the book, had just an inkling of an idea of a zombie team book. He called me and was like, “What do you think about this?” And I was like, “Yeah, I don’t really like it. It’s cool, but it’s not for me.” And he was like, “Well, what would make it for you?”

We ended up talking for a long time about how I would do the book. And Paul’s a great editor, because he can trick you into getting excited about things and really running with them. We ended up on the phone for a couple hours, spit balling how I would do the book if I were going to do the book that I’d already passed on. And at the end of it, I was like, “Man, I really love this idea now,” and he was like, “Let’s go.”

But it started from Paul just having this idea for zombies in a book and, from there, I said that it should be a sort of Suicide Squad idea. But instead of the Suicide Squad, who are fighting for their lives, the task force is fighting to get their lives back – literally. And so that’s sort of the initial pitch premise that I ran with – they’re zombies, but there’s a glint of humanity in them. They are fighting to get more and more of it, and it’s given out to them as a reward.

When the Task Force Z news came out, I immediately thought this team was so cool. Did you immediately have this lineup of characters on the team, or did it take some guesswork?

Matthew Rosenberg: It’s funny, there was a lot of back and forth with Paul and Dave Wielgosz, our other editor on the book, because I said from go, “You need big names. This isn’t gonna work if it’s just random characters who have died recently.” And I said, “We need a field leader. We need someone who will sell books on their own.” They said, “Who would you want?” and the first name I said was, “I want Jason Todd.” When you’re dealing with rebirth and people who have died and come back, he should be the Sherpa for the team. And they were like, “You got him, it’s done.”

From there, everything sort of clicked into place pretty easily. Bane and Man-Bat were two that I really wanted, and they wanted me to have. It was funny, because it was unclear when Arkham Asylum was blown up, who died. They kept it ambiguous on purpose of who died, who escaped, who’s still in lockdown. They were like, “You can kind of pick people who died, and we can just say later that they died in Arkham.”

We had that for Man-Bat, and then we realized that another book had plans to use him. And so we’re like, “So, he’s not dead?” And then the other book was like, “Well, we were thinking about killing him.” And I was like, “This is absolutely perfect. It’s the dream; the synergy of everybody wanting to kill the same guy.”

We killed Man-Bat, and once those three were in place, it was a lot of just trial and error of putting people together and seeing who worked well; who looked good together. It was very funny, though, because Dan Waters has the Arkham City book that he’s working on, and there was times where me and Dan were talking, where he would be like, “I want this character. Is that okay?” And I’d be like, “Yeah, I want this character,” and literally, our interests never overlapped even a little. We never stepped on toes, but we were trying to be very careful for each other.

But yeah, I think that the big names up front of Bane, Man-Bat and Red Hood were the hard pieces to fit. And then after that, everything else was kind of easy and joy.

Jason got a “leadership role” with his recent Rebirth team, but some think of Jason Todd as not a typical leaders. What was it about him in that role that appealed to you?

Matthew Rosenberg: I like Jason, because there is a really good push and pull with him of who he is and who he wants to be. And a lot of that is defined [as] reactionary to Batman. I like the idea of him as a team leader because it’s a little different than what you’d expect from him, and it’s something that he’s not comfortable with. I think he works best when he’s sort of on unsure ground.

I love him with the Outlaws, but I think the why that I envisioned him in this book is he’s a reluctant leader. He has to do this to get something else. In the book, we sort of slow-feed you information, because we’re doing a weird book. We’re doing this book that’s not a usual team; it’s got more horror elements; it’s got some mystery to it. We don’t tell you everything upfront, but as the book goes on, I think people will start to realize that Jason is doing a lot of things behind the scenes, and also being manipulated behind the scenes in certain ways.

But the thing that’s very clear from go is that he’s not happy to be the team leader here. His end goal is not to run a team of zombies or not-zombies. His end goal is very different, and this is just the thing he has to do. And I think that’s when he’s at his best: when he’s sort of torn between different directions and put upon and struggling to figure out the right path.

Maybe not a good team leader, but that’s why he’s the best team leader for this book.

Because DCEASED is so fresh in people’s memory, one thing to distinguish here is that Jason has a mission in this book. There is an explicit goal, right?

Matthew Rosenberg: Oh, yeah, there’s a goal. He has an endgame, and the task force has an endgame, and they’re not necessarily the same endgame. And that’s something that will become more apparent as the book goes on. But yeah, it’s funny because people talk about DCEASED a lot – I love DCEASED, and it’s obviously a series that we looked at a lot in both this and DC Vs. Vampires. But the big difference is that we’re on the side of the zombies here. So, that’s a big one for us.

Also, this book is in the main DC continuity, which people keep thinking it’s not. And we have to constantly be like, “Oh, no. These people are dead, and it’s really screwed up.” How everyone reacts to that is going to be a big part of it.

You’re finally working with Eddy Barrows, and it feels like you two have come close to working together before. He’s one of DC’s big team book guys, so what is it you think he does really well when handling a large ensemble?

Matthew Rosenberg: Oh, man. It’s so funny, because I love Eddy’s stuff. I’ve always loved Eddy’s stuff, and I still don’t think I appreciated it. When I started working on this book, he was finishing the Red Hood book that he did with Chip Zdarsky. Chip texted me and was like, “Are you doing a book with Eddy after me?” I was like, “Yeah,” and he was like, “Congratulations, you’re so lucky.” And Chip is very careful with his praise for things like that, so I really was like, “Okay, I’m in for something here.”

As soon as Eddy started, I think the first thing he did was what ended up being the main cover for issue #1, which is just the team shot of them staring out. The level of detail in his work, but also just the way everything feels unique unto itself – he’s so good at dealing with scale and size. Bane is just frighteningly enormous, and Man-Bat is horrifying but in a different way. He just handles making everything feel important on a page, in a way that I think a lot of artists spend our whole career struggling to do.

I think it’s a huge challenge to make every character feel unique and cool but work together, and he just combines everything seamlessly. I don’t think there’s a character we could throw into the book that wouldn’t look perfect if I gave it to Eddy.

Eddy’s layouts are insane. There’s one in the first issue where Mr. Freeze is literally made up of panels. Was that design in the script at all?

Matthew Rosenberg: No, no. I’m very detailed in my scripts. I am a very visual thinker when I write, and I like to give it to artists in case they want a sense of what I’m thinking. But I always tell artists, “This is just how I see it. Now it’s yours, do what you want.” I’m done. I’m hands off. I’m excited to see what you do. If you’re having a lazy day, and you feel like not thinking about layout too much, here’s a layout for you.

Eddy came back and was just running with stuff, and I very quickly realized, “I don’t need to hold his hand as much as I do on other scripts.” My default is to give people more information than they need, and I just realized I’m wasting my time and his time by doing that. He’s gonna come up with pages and panels that are so good and so fluid and exciting. It really has changed the way I’m writing, not just for him but actually the whole composition of the book. We’re trying to be more dynamic and have more energy in there.

But he’s also great at just the conversational stuff. He’s just such a powerhouse. I constantly feel like – he’s got a huge fan base and people love him – but my hope of anything from this book is that people realize that he is one of the top people in the industry drawing comics today.

Because you mentioned very detailed descriptions, was it you or Eddy who is coming for Dick Grayson in one particular page of the first issue?

Matthew Rosenberg: That was me, and actually it says it in the script. It says, “Let’s get a little sexy with Red Hood here. Let’s get a little sexy with Jason here.” I called out Nightwing and I was like, “He’s not the only stud in Gotham. Let’s show them what we have.”

That was me, but Eddy absolutely crushed it. I’m hoping that people, when the book comes out, are swooning over Jason in the same way. He’s a little scarier than Dick, but that’s exciting, right? People like that.

Working with vampires [in DC vs. Vampires] and zombies, there are different rules for these kinds of things. Did you come up with specific rules?

Matthew Rosenberg: The vampires have their own rules in the DC Universe, and we didn’t really need to define that. People sort of get them. Zombies is a funny thing, though, because that one is very different across. I feel like with most vampire stuff, you get somewhat the same rules – maybe there’s tweaks, but DC had those well-bound for us.

But zombies are fascinating, because they’re not traditional zombies, exactly. They’re people who’ve died, and they could be brought back to life. There’s a substance called the Lazarus Resin that is in the DC Universe, and it can bring people back to life. But if you give it to them in pieces, it doesn’t bring them fully back to life. It creates this problem, and that’s something we came up with to explain how they’re dead and not dead.

They are eating people and doing a lot of things that zombies do, and you don’t want to get their heads destroyed, but they can regenerate parts and things like that. Because they are hooked into a rejuvenation or rebirth serum. It’s funny, because I think when people say zombies, they think they know what it is. And we did have to be like, “There’s different ground rules for this, and you’re not going to fully understand them from the first issue.” But as we go, we lay it out.

Part of it is that we really want to play with what you could do with the metaphor of that. I think zombies is a very good metaphor; I think people have really explored it a lot. And we want to talk about different things: we wanted to talk about addiction and redemption and the choices that people make in their lives that they can’t shake and can’t lose and can’t get away from. We’re using the zombie thing to really talk much more about things like that, like people’s legacies and their addictions and things like that – which is hard to do with just traditional zombies.

You definitely made me think differently about edibles.

Matthew Rosenberg: Yeah, we had so many talks about how to do it. Are we doing it as hypodermic needles? Is Jason giving them shots? We talked about having machines hooked up to them, and I was like, “Let’s just do it as edibles.” It’s just gonna be pills; it’s just gonna be glowing little pills. Take that for what it is. I’m straight-edge, so maybe it’s a very harsh commentary from me on drug culture.

It’s not. It’s not harsh commentary on drug culture. I’m sure people will read the book and be like, “What is he talking about?” and jump to all sorts of conclusions that I’m definitely not talking about. But yeah, edibles are saving their lives – or killing them, depending on how you look at it.

I don’t know how much you want to spoil, but Jason does have an organization behind him. He does have people who have a sense of a bigger picture.

Matthew Rosenberg: Yes. Task Force Z work for an organization that’s a branch of the government, seemingly, that is very clandestine. It’s very much a black ops organization, and it’s run by a man named Crispin, who some people seem to know and some people don’t. But he gives the orders and he pulls the triggers. Then there’s characters who are called the Resurrection Twins, who manage a lot of the day-to-day science of keeping people alive – or someone alive; keeping people semi-alive.

But this character, Crispin, is the liaison between Jason, who’s the field leader, and the overarching organization that runs Task Force Z. Who Crispin is, what his motivations are or what the organization is trying to do, and what Jason wants are three things that will slowly on unravel and send the team down three different paths as we go.

In addition to doing a Jason Todd-centric book, you’re also doing a lot of work with Grifter. In a lot of ways, those guys are cut from the same cloth – and they both love guns and the color red, apparently. What is it about those cases that you find appealing as a storyteller? What draws you to those kinds of characters?

Matthew Rosenberg: On the surface, I think they’re pretty similar. I have a very different read on them. Grifter is a character who is, at the end of the day, kind of fun-loving and kind of a screw-up. And Jason is kind of the opposite; he’s kind of dour, and he’s not a screw-up. He makes bad choices, but they’re the choices he wants to make, if that makes sense. He’s a guy with bad judgment, but he’s very good at what he does.

I think for the most part, the thing that I like about them is not that they’re the hard cases or that they’re the gun-loving characters in Gotham right now. But I think the thing I like about them is that they’re very much characters who are presenting a facade. Nightwing and Dick Grayson are the same guy. They really are, like Bruce Wayne and Batman are the same person. But who Cole Cash and Jason Todd are is a lot more nuanced.

Nuanced isn’t the right word, because I don’t want to imply that the other characters are simple. But they’re pretending to be things that they aren’t, and I’m really drawn to that. I think Jason at his heart doesn’t quite know who he is and what he wants to be, and he spent his whole life trying to figure that out. That I think is very exciting to explore as a writer, but I think it’s also the kind of thing that certain people are really drawn to; the idea of that uncertainty in who they are.

Everyone is so sure of what they do in the DC Universe. You have Batman and Wonder Woman and Superman – and I really love the people who just aren’t quite sure how they fit into the world and aren’t quite sure what they’re doing is right, but they’re really committed to it. I think there’s something beautiful about that, and something really sweet and innocent in there. It’s hidden under this very dark determined facade, but I think they’re very vulnerable characters for that, and I like them a lot because of that.

Is it Task Force Z or Task Force Zed?

Matthew Rosenberg: I’m American, so it’s Task Force Z. But I don’t want to tell our friends overseas. Do Canadians say zed? [They do]

To an American, it’s weird. I don’t know what to tell you. I hope that people start calling it “Task Forcez,” and not realizing that the Z is a separate thing. And that we’re doing some real 90s, Street Sharkz kind of thing. I don’t know if Street Sharks had a z, but in my mind, it does. But I hope that people say Task Forcez, because that’s very wrong. And let’s go with that.

Since we’re talking pronunciation here, we should apologize for using the term zombie so carelessly. Do you have preferred nomenclature for the Lazarus Resin-imbued individuals?

Matthew Rosenberg: That’s interesting. In the book, Jason calls them zombies. And everyone else says, “Don’t call them that.” What they’re supposed to be called will be revealed – what the team calls them. What the organization will call them and what Crispin refers to them as is going to be brought in later. For the start of the book, they’re only called zombies.

Task Force Z #1 will be available October 26 wherever comic books are physically or digitally sold.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/task-force-z-jason-todd-red-hood-dc-comics/

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