The interesting thing to me about getting older — or, as I prefer to think of it, “gaining life experience” — is the perspective it brings to my life and, by extension, how that perspective is reflected in what I write.

The other day, I was being interviewed for an article about Robotman and the Doom Patrol, a DC Comics’ character I first wrote in 1977 when I was twenty-two years old. The interviewer was asking me all sorts of questions about characterization and motivations, expecting, I guess, some sort of analysis of the character’s relation to the zeitgeist of its day … but which left me with the (not, in retrospect, surprising) realization that, at twenty-two, barely three years into a career as a comic book writer, I hadn’t actually had anything to say. I was writing a character who had lost everything, from his physical body to his best friends and comrades, and I had absolutely not clue one what loss of any kind felt like. I wrote what was, I hope (I’m afraid to go back and reread it to find out, knowing it’s probably going to be even worse than I remember) an adequate simulacrum of emotion, but the real deal? Naw. Wouldn’t have known how.

Just a few weeks back, I typed “end” at the bottom of “A Clockwork God,” my contribution to ReDeus: Beyond Borders, and after giving it a day or two to rest and settle, went back in to do final revisions and fixes before sending it out to my partners-in-theological-crime, Bob Greenberger and Aaron Rosenberg. My process involves starting a writing session by revisiting and rewriting previous sections or chapters as a run-up to the new words I’ll be throwing at the paper that day, so I get this very tunnel-visioned view of a piece until I get to the end and go back in to look at it as a whole.

To me, it’s just plain commonsense that there’s a part of the author in every character they write. Man, woman, child, adult, good guy, bad guy, man or god, whatever they are, some aspect of the writer — even aspects you don’t want to admit to or even think about — is in them. I mean, who else is a writer going to write about? You can only be you, no matter whose voice you’re pretending to speak in, and while the job is to extrapolate how characters will act or react under certain circumstances, your jumping off point for those reactions is yourself. Your character may be a planet-sized amoeba with a genius I.Q. that shoots laser beams out its ass as it tries to conquer the universe … but you are in there. Last year, I wrote Kevin (now available in finer bookstores everywhere!), a young adult novel about the Archie Comics character Kevin Keller, the company’s first gay character. In the book, Kevin is a nerdy overweight middle school student with braces and bad skin who hangs out with a small group of fellow nerdy comic book fans, faces bullying, and is just coming to terms with his sexuality and his place in the world.

I never wore braces and I’m not gay, but other than that, I knew exactly what Kevin was going through in the story. I’d had pretty much the same life, only in Brooklyn circa-1970, not fictionalized Medford in the 21^st century. His reactions were my adolescent reactions…and the best part about fictionalizing myself in service of Kevin’s story was that I was able to make Kevin the hero of his own struggle as he stood up to the bullies and accepted who he was, while I, of course, stuck in real life, had to wait a few decades before I was confident enough in myself to take my own stands.

So, you can imagine how much of me, a divorced, middle-aged atheistic Jew who grew up in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, might have found its way into a character like Irwin Benjamin … a divorced, middle-aged atheistic Jew who grew up in East Flatbush, Brooklyn! Rereading “A Clockwork God” through in one sitting, I kept coming across myself in the most unlikely places, enough so that I even started editing “me” out of Irwin because I wasn’t comfortable with how real some of it felt.

And that’s when 1977’s The New Doom Patrol and 2013’s “A Clockwork God” kind of converged into my yin & yang of creativity. In other interviews I’ve given over the three years I’ve been writing the critically acclaimed Life With Archie magazine (featuring the Archie characters as twenty-somethings in two separate “what if?” story lines, one in which he’s married to Betty, the other where he’s wed Veronica), I’m often asked why I think the book has been so popular and successful. The answer I always give is, “Truth. I try to write the characters in as real and as truthful a way as I can.”

In The New Doom Patrol, I hadn’t yet learned the truth so I wasn’t able to write it. But “A Clockwork God” was about as truthful and honest as I could be in a fictionalized, fantastical setting … why was I trying to bowdlerize the very thing I was so proud of accomplishing in Life With Archie and Kevin just because my protagonist happened to be more like me than, say, a twenty-something Archie Andrews or Kevin Keller?

So I undid all those edits and left “me” in there. Of course, none of this should have any bearing on your reading of “A Clockwork God.” Whether Irwin is based on me or someone else is fundamentally irrelevant to what you take from the story. But life has taught me that truth really is stranger than fiction, even when that fiction involves the return of the gods and the remaking of the world in their images. Yes, the setting we’ve contrived for the ReDeus stories is a total lie, but that’s okay; readers will accept any set-up, any far-fetched or ridiculous situation the writer cares to throw their way, just as long as the characters in those situiations tell the truth about themselves.

When I was twenty-two, I thought fiction was the art of telling lies. At fifty-eight, I’ve learned that it’s actually the art of telling the truth with lies. And that’s a realization that takes some of the sting out of getting older.

I mean, “gaining life experience.”

ReDeus: Beyond Borders will be available in print and digital formats next week.

One of the things we found most interesting about bringing the gods back in the ReDeus universe was their interaction with man. As seen in Divine Tales, gods and goddesses deal with mortals but we also hear that some have cut off the Internet or curtailed various types of technology. Some, though, embrace it, leaving some countries in better shape than others, which has certainly changed the global economy.

But, I wondered, exactly how did some of the gods actually conclude what was kosher and what was treif?

Growing up, I admit to being drawn to the Norse myths thanks to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Thor. For the Tales of Asgard backup feature, as I understand it, Jack would thumb through a paperback he had of the Norse myths and adapt them into adventures for young Thor and the Warriors Three to engage in. While elementary and middle school mentioned the Norse, we were force fed the similar Greek and Roman myths, with few teachers acknowledging the breadth of mythology informing every culture.

All of this ran through my head when it also occurred to me that the origins of Santa Claus and many of the traditional Christmas traditions can be traced back to Odin and the Aesir. In fact, Father Christmas has been linked to both Odin and his son Thor. We had already established that Odin was among those who were among the more forceful in bringing his worshippers back to Scandinavia and Germany, where he once more rules.

This all swirled in my mind for a while which resulted in “The Wanderer”. In the story, we follow Odin essentially going walkabout in the first four months after The Return. He wants to feel the earth beneath his feet, see what has happened to man and to the lands he seeks to rule once more. What he discovers is not necessarily to his taste and his displeasure is made manifest.

It was trickier to write than I expected given the deadline overlapping my relocation from Connecticut to Maryland but thanks to input and support from co-editor Aaron Rosenberg and good pal Kathleen David, it all came together.

Odin is a fascinating mass of contradictions, both god of battle and poetry, and a figure I look forward to exploring in the future.

ReDeus: Beyond Borders will be available in digital and print formats later this month.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words or in the case of ReDeus: Beyond Borders over 100,000 words. Artist Lorraine Schleter was recruited to execute the book’s cover and read the story outlines before digging into her research. What she delivered thrilled the collective and is worthy of a little worship on its own.

We asked Lorraine to talk a little about the process.

By Lorraine Schleter

I wanted to portray all the gods as abstractly as I could, rather than getting caught up in the physical details of how they would look rendered out in flesh. I tried to be very careful and respectful so as to not offend anyone, because that would make people overlook the real point of the book, which is (from what was described to me) how these deities relate to humanity and what they mean to us. I made a strong effort to design them from representations already depicted in ancient work made by the people who actually worshiped these gods. As for the face in the middle, I wanted to paint it to be as ambiguous as I could to have it represent the minds of all people, sort of the collective consciousness of the world.

ReDeus: Beyond Borders will be available in print and digital editions later this month.

By Allyn Gibson

My first year in college I read Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. Armstrong, a Catholic nun, wrote a book that charted the development of monotheism among the three Abramahic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It was an intriguing book for a nineteen year-old, and I came away from the book feeling more secure about my atheism than I had before. An odd reaction, that. There were things in A History of God that I hadn’t known, that hadn’t been taught in the Methodist church when I was growing up. The most remarkable, for me, was the discovery that Judaism developed from a Canaanite polytheistic religion and that the monotheistic Jewish deity was the Canaanite’s god of war. “Really?” I thought. I filed away this piece of knowledge. It wasn’t particularly useful or helpful. It was, however, something that was nifty to know.

Years passed. I read other books on religion. (Despite my absence of religious conviction, books on the topic are of great interest to me. As I write this, I’ve been reading Diarmid’s McCulloch’s massive and magnificent tome, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.) At roughly the same time that Bob Greenberger approached me about pitching stories for ReDeus: Beyond Borders, I was reading Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. Wright covers similar ground to Armstrong, and the idea of the Abrahamic monotheistic deity as a god of war came back to the fore. Could I explore that idea? How would I explore that? In the world of ReDeus where there are gods and demigods astride the Earth, with one notable exception — the Abrahamic monotheistic deity — it almost seemed like a dangerous idea, the kind of thing that Warren Ellis would write. But how to write it? Ah, that’s the tricky part for any writer. “The Soldier and the God” explores the idea through the style of a Little Golden Book. No, really. There are two reasons why I decided to write the story of Gavriela, a disenchanted soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces, and Hadad, the Canaanite god of storms, in this style. First, it was a challenge to maintain that tone throughout, even though there are some very dark moments in the story. I imagined that I was writing a book for children of eighty or a hundred years after the Day of Return (the day that the gods returned to Earth in ReDeus: Divine Tales), and this story, and others like it, would be the way they would understand how their world of gods and men came to be and what the world without gods was like before it. Second, the narrative distance between the events the story describes and the way the story describes them due to the form provided a way of exploring one of the underpinnings of the ReDeus world without breaking the playground equipment. There’s narrative plausible deniability here; did this actually happen, if it did happen then how reliable is it, or is this simply a story that’s told to children? I leave that to you to decide. “The Soldier and the God” may be more than a little strange and not at all Warren Ellis-esque, but I had fun writing a Little Golden Book from the end of the 21st-century. You can write interesting things when you set yourself a challenge.

ReDeus: Beyond Borders will be available in print and digital formats in late May.

By Steve Lyons

August, 2032. The biggest festival of the Aztec calendar is in full swing.

It’s the Day of the Dead, when the spirits of the dear-departed return to the world of the living… for real this time?

I’ve wanted to tell this story – or, at least, one like it – for over a decade. My inspiration was the computer adventure game, Grim Fandango. I don’t play a lot of computer games, but my brother introduced me to this one, and I fell in love with its depiction of the Aztec Land of the Dead and its inhabitants.

Since then, I’ve wanted to use the Mexican Day of the Dead as a backdrop to a story. I’ve just needed a story to tell – and, in the world of ReDeus, I finally found one.

So, the Aztec gods are back. They have rebuilt their pyramids and re-established their rule over the lands of South and Central America. They have returned the Day of the Dead to its rightful pre-Columbian place in the calendar, and the death goddess Mictecacihuatl herself presides over the celebrations.

So, the Land of the Dead must be a real place, right? The spirits of the dead – at least, the Aztec dead – must reside there. And they must be able to pop back home to visit every summer, because the gods wouldn’t lie to us about something like that.

They wouldn’t… would they?

My first ReDeus story is called Dia de los Muertos. It concerns a young lawyer by the name of Ruby Velez, whose newest client has an unusual tale to tell. He has been accused of murder, and the evidence against him is overwhelming. He claims, however, that someone else committed the crime: his long-dead wife.

Could such a thing be possible – even in this brave new world?

The spirits of the dead are invisible and intangible, undetectable by any conventional means. Somehow, they enjoy the offerings left for them by the living – their favourite books, music, clothes and even food – without disturbing those offerings in the process. Even so, in the Mexico of 2032, few doubt the spirits’ existence.

And belief, it seems, only makes the spirits stronger…

What if Ruby’s client is telling the truth? What if his girlfriend was murdered by a vengeful ghost? How can she hope to prove such a thing in court? And what would it mean for the whole concept of law and order if she did?

My favorite thing about ReDeus is that its world isn’t too dissimilar to our own. The gods’ return has changed some things, but others haven’t changed at all. Most people are just trying to get on with their lives, as we do today.

And even though this world has seen proof – absolute, incontrovertible proof – of the gods’ existence, some things are still a matter of faith…

ReDeus: Beyond Borders will be available in print and digital formats in late May.