I enjoyed your work on “Black Cat,” so seeing that you were doing a book with Jed was pretty exciting, and realizing that book was “Avengers” was even more exciting. How did this opportunity come to be, and how exciting was it to work on a book of this magnitude?
C.F. Villa: It was pretty surprising for me as well because we’ve been encouraged by Rickey Purdin, our talent manager at Marvel, to seek out projects and be vocal about what would we like to do with certain writers. After the “Black Cat” project, I liked working with Jed, and I reached out to Rickey and told him that anything Jed-related, I would like to be considered to work for in the future. I never thought that would be “Avengers.” [Editor] Tom Brevoort asked if I would like to be in “Avengers” — it was a pretty good surprise …
It was great because Jed gave Felicia … [He] fleshed out her character a bit more than any other book has done before. It was fun to go deep down in character and get some deep cuts over her history — mostly on the third issue on the “Winning Black” series. That was a cool book to work on because there were a lot of callbacks from Felicia, from the past. I enjoyed that one because we went deep down on her character. [Jed and I] did a lot of cool back-and-forth communicating for what we wanted to do on that book.
He had cool ideas to make it more psychedelic. I see now he’s working on “Doctor Strange,” and he has a lot of cool ideas for that one. It was awesome because we had a cool back-and-forth. We communicated a lot, and I really enjoyed that one. When I reached out and said that I wanted to work with him again, working on “Avengers” was surprising. I didn’t expect to be working on that one because he’s going up and in the writer’s rank a lot. This is the one that’s going to propel them to the forefront of the Marvel books. It’s cool.
Is it daunting to take on a book as big as The Avengers?
Villa: A little bit, but I feel confident because I’ve worked with some of the characters before, and it’s a cool challenge. I enjoy drawing these characters. These versions of the characters are fun to work with. It is daunting, but I enjoy it because I haven’t worked with Captain Marvel before, and I wanted to draw her. I was being considered for a series with her a while back, but that then didn’t come to fruition, and I was a little bummed that I didn’t get to work with her. Now that I get to do an “Avengers” book with her on the leader seat, I was like, “Wow.” I feel that this was better. This is better for me.
While the story is grand, was there a concerted effort to put a renewed focus on the Avengers team with this book following the recent Multiversal/God Quarry storyline preceding this one?
Jed MacKay: That’s the goal of a first issue, to be a thesis statement for a series. “Here’s what we’re doing, here’s how it’s different from what came before,” that sort of thing. We’re trying to establish an identity for our new volume of “Avengers.” That’s what this first issue is about.