She’s the most dangerous woman in the world. Elektra Natchios was once the daughter of a wealthy Greek ambassador. After her father was killed in a tragic accident, a road of events transformed Elektra into a deadly trained ninja, an assassin and bounty hunter for hire whose skills are sold to the highest bidder.
Initially created by Frank Miller (Sin City, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns), Elektra has become a formidable character in her own right that has shaken up the Marvel universe as a former villain and morally questionable anti-hero. The latest writer to send Elektra on her biggest journey yet is Haden Blackman and he talks to me about what it’s like being inside the mind of one of the most interesting and deadliest characters in Marvel’s history.
For someone who loves a good story but has never been introduced to the character Elektra before, what would you tell them about her?
When the series begins, Elektra herself isn’t really sure who she is. She has been an obedient daughter, an assassin, a villain, an anti-hero, Daredevil’s lover, a member of the Thunderbolts, the leader of The Hand…
She’s basically had so many different identities and roles that I decided she wouldn’t know exactly who she is and what she wants anymore. This is exacerbated by the fact that Daredevil has recently left Manhattan, leaving Elektra with no real anchor to that city. So, she decides she needs to just get away from New York, and she does that by taking a contract…
Art by Mike Del Mundo, from Haden Blackman’s Elektra #1
Take us back to when you first decided to write Elektra, what attracted you about the character?
Two things. First, I’ve always been a fan of the character because I viewed her as Daredevil’s equal in many ways, and very strong but flawed. To me, that’s an extremely interesting combination. Second, I thought it would be a great challenge. Elektra has rarely been used as more than Daredevil’s sidekick or as a supporting character, but I felt very strongly that she has enough depth to carry a book on her own, and I wanted to prove that.
Taken from Daredevil: The Man Without Fear by Brian Michael Bendis, art by Alex Maleev
What did you love exploring about Elektra the most?
I just really loved getting into her head. Honestly, I didn’t always know what I was going to find, so it was really rewarding to just go for broke in some of those scenes. When I started the series, I had hoped to explore her feelings towards her dead parents, Daredevil, her allies and rivals, and, most importantly, herself, and I feel like I did that.
What was the vision you and artist Mike Del Mundo shared about bringing Elektra to life?
From the outset, we both agreed that we wanted to draw parallels between Elektra’s training as a dancer and her training as a fighter. Mike did a really beautiful job showing Elektra’s grace in all of her movements…
I love all of the big spreads, but I think I like some of the tight fight sequences even more — the first fight between Elektra and Lady Bullseye is a series of small panels in which they trade attacks and blocks. And of course, Mike is great with the quiet moments as well. Seeing Elektra confronting the ghost of her dead mother was very powerful for me.
If I were Elektra’s creator Frank Miller I would pat you on the back and shake your hand for what you’ve achieved with her, which I think is very loyal to her original conception. I’d even say your work is on par with Miller’s Daredevil and Elektra: Assassin. I know you’ve tried carefully not to do what has already been done before, but has Frank Miller’s original interpretation of Elektra been a strong influence for you?
Well, that’s about the best compliment I could ever hope to receive… When I first started this series, I looked to three works for inspiration: the Elektra appearances in Miller’s Daredevil run; Miller’s Elektra: Assassin; and Zeb Wells’ Dark Reign series. I also appreciate the way Bendis has handled her. In all of these, Elektra is extremely competent and physical, but Miller’s stories have a strong psychological component as well — we can see that Elektra’s past has really impacted her mental state. In Wells’ series, Elektra is almost stoic and incredibly resourceful — those are traits that I also wanted to capture, but without losing the ability to show her emotional state of mind, which is why so much of the narration comes directly from Elektra herself. Ultimately, I just hope that I added depth to Elektra while still staying true to the core of the character.
Taken from Frank Miller’s Elektra: Assassin, art by Bill Sienkiewicz
What were some of the challenges you faced trying to write a character with so much context and backstory?
Initially, I tried to just get away from it all — but to make that Elektra’s choice. The first issue acknowledges her backstory, but then establishes that Elektra wants to get away from her past. The rest of that first arc establishes a new mission for Elektra, introduces new allies and other characters, pits her against some rivals she hasn’t fought before and, maybe most importantly, puts her into locations and situations that feel new and present new challenges for her. I don’t think we’ve ever seen Elektra fighting against (or with) a dragon…
Let’s talk about Elektra’s supporting cast. You’ve brought in some familiar faces, such as Lady Bullseye, but there’s also a range of characters we’ve never seen before, like Matchmaker and Bloody Lips. How did you create characters that seem to compliment her story so well?
I felt that Elektra has always been relegated to being a member of someone else’s supporting cast, so I thought that one way to rectify that was to give her a supporting cast of her own. Matchmaker just came about organically — I needed someone to give Elektra her first mission. Initially, I was going use Taskmaster in this role, but I didn’t want to be beholden to any other series and wanted to keep the character around for as long as possible. Matchmaker was meant to serve as a reminder to the reader and Elektra herself that Elektra is an assassin who hunts and kills for money. Her moral compass starts pretty fixed, and she’s able to challenge Elektra’s decisions — but she also changes even in a few short issues. I had big plans for Matchmaker, but when we learned that the series was going to end, I thought it was best to give her a somewhat-meaningful exit.
I absolutely adore Matchmaker! Bloody Lips was terrifying in his ability to steal the skills, powers and memories of those he cannibalised. How did you bring him into your story?
For the first arc, I knew we needed a new enemy. I didn’t want to rehash fights from the past, and I wanted a rival that felt like he could be a real threat to Elektra, but could also show what she could become if she’s not careful. Bloody Lips started with concept art from Mike Del Mundo. The name and his powers I pulled from a character concept I came up with a few years ago for a creator-owned project that never went anywhere (like a lot of writers, I never throw out anything). Bloody Lips was really fun to write because he’s so bizarre, but I was really most excited about the fact that I was able to compare and contrast him with Elektra to further develop her.
I think you really gave Elektra a trial by fire by throwing the deadliest people in the world at her (at one point they’re quite literally in the same room as her – that was mean). How important was it for you to find the right challenges for her?
I feel like a protagonist really needs interesting challenges to remain interesting herself. So, we started with a hunt for one of the world’s deadliest assassins (Cape Crow), with a bunch of rivals hot on her heels, and that evolved into a mission to protect Cape Crow and his son, and then that evolved into a quest to take down the Assassin’s Guild. It was my intent to keep going with this — keep showing how one mission can continue to snowball into bigger and bigger things. I wasn’t planning to have Bullseye or even the Hand show up so early, but again, as soon as we got word that the book would end with Issue 11, I fast-tracked that stuff.
Elektra, in fighting ability alone, is obviously very formidable. In the past, other writers have explored a mysterious ‘power set’ she has, including a telepathic ability, but it’s never really been clear. Is there any way you could possibly clarify?
Honestly, I largely ignored some of that stuff… In my mind, Elektra’s “power” is her indomitable will. We see this in some athletes today — an insane ability to train to exhaustion, and overcome ridiculous physical pain and fatigue. It’s almost mind over matter on some level. I don’t think it’s anything supernatural or “super” — but her strength of will makes her incredibly powerful nonetheless. Thanks to this, she’s been able to train to become (in my opinion) one of the Marvel Universe’s top 3 martial artists (I’d probably put Shang-Chi and Iron Fist as the other two, but I don’t decide this stuff…). I also think that it allows her to keep telepaths out of her head — when she’s prepared for it.
The new Netflix reboot of Marvel’s Daredevil comes out soon. Let’s say you got to write Elektra’s introduction, how would you do it?
Oh man… That’s would be a dream assignment. It’s tough because some large number of viewers are already going to know who Elektra is, her role in Daredevil’s life, her fate… I know virtually nothing about the series, but I’d probably approach it as her origin story in some way. I’d keep her very early backstory — dead mother, father who encouraged her to train to protect herself — but ditch the stuff about her meeting Matt in college. When we first meet her, she’s actually so well-trained that she has become her father’s chief of security. She’s in command and protective of her pops, who is an important financial or political figure.
But he’s not squeaky clean — he’s a shady character, someone who skirts the legal line a lot. As a result, he has legal needs of some sort, which is how he and Elektra meet Matt. I’d let this relationship develop, let Matt question her loyalty to a man who might be guilty, show her protecting her father from attempts on his life, really let the viewers fall in love with her before something horrible happens. And, that horrible thing is that her father does get killed — probably as part of some scheme orchestrated by the Kingpin. For the sake of argument, let’s say Dad was suspected of drug trafficking (though never convicted), and the guys who kill him are corrupt cops on the Kingpin’s payroll. Distraught over her inability to protect her father, and unaware that the Kingpin was involved, she accepts his help to go to war with the cops, which then puts her at odds with Daredevil. Something like that. [As for who would play Elektra,] casting is such an art form… What’s really important is that it is someone who we believe can steal a scene from Vincent D’Onofrio, which I think is a huge challenge…
You and Mike Del Mundo have done so well to bring Elektra to life, but suddenly this series was stopped in it’s eleventh issue. What happened there?
From my understanding, it all came down to sales. The series just didn’t sell as well as necessary to justify the cost of continuing. I don’t know who knew what when, but I had enough notice to wrap up the series in a way that I thought worked best.
I hope you don’t mind but I’d like to take a moment to be honest with you. I think a lot of female-led comic books get a bad deal and their run is cut short, like She-Hulk and Batwoman (which I know you also wrote for), despite these titles having very loyal readers.
Where do you think the problem lies?
Honestly, I don’t know. It’s something that I’ve been wrestling with too. Ultimately, I’d like to be able to say that it all just boils down to telling a great story with great characters who are human — flawed and special at the same time, just like the rest of us. But, I really don’t know if that’s enough… I think it’s a problem that goes well beyond comic books, and actually trickles down into comics from other media.
I would have thought that the outdated conventional wisdom that “you can’t build a film / franchise around a female lead” would have died after the success of The Hunger Games, and yet Warner Bros. still feels it has to shoehorn Wonder Woman — possibly one of the most iconic female characters ever — into someone else’s movie instead of giving her a feature of her own.
What do you think is the way forward for the comic book industry?
With comics, I don’t know if the problem is solely related to the gender of the main character. It’s a rough business in general, and many great books die regardless of whether or not there’s a male protagonist. The economics are just tough.
There are hundreds of books vying for attention from a small and relatively fixed audience, and the cost of buying a single issue is so high that readers don’t take a lot of risks. So as an industry, I think we have to both reduce risk to the reader (by reducing costs of the titles or offering more value for every dollar spent) and expand the audience so that more books survive. I’m very hopeful that digital distribution is going to help with both, but only if the industry starts experimenting with more reader-friendly pricing and models.
I also think that the publishers have to get more creative about how readers discover the various characters. I would love to see more anthologies, for example, or a return to back-up features if the value proposition seems worth it (i.e., buying a book with three stories for $4.99 seems like a better value than taking a chance on a new series at $2.99).
Still, even with lower pricing and digital distribution, you have to get people in the door — and that means investing in a wider variety of content to get people interested in the first place, and getting much, much more creative with marketing, especially in terms of the channels that are used. When a publisher advertises a series solely in its other books, it’s only speaking to a subset of a subset of an already small group of potential readers.
But maybe most importantly, we need more genres beyond just superheroes, more diversity of characters and creators, more stuff for younger readers that parents feel good about buying… Just more variety across the board.
Because there are going to be a lot of people who are going to miss your writing with Elektra, could you perhaps give us a “deleted scene” from the series that never made it to print?
The one regret I have with the series ending is that I never got to do a story with both Elektra and Psylocke, I think that could have been an amazing arc. Other than that, I’ll reveal that the original pitch for this series essentially sent Elektra into space — she would have been hand-picked by an alien race to hunt down their worst offenders, and in the hopes of getting away from Earth and her past, she accepts. We changed it up after it we learned that a number of other titles were also taking their characters into space…
Betsy Braddock, the telepathic ninja known as ‘Psylocke’
After your work with Elektra, where can our readers find your work next?
I’ll be writing Master of Kung Fu for Marvel, and I have a few creator-owned things in the works that haven’t been announced yet.
