ThunderCats Vol. 2, the Greg Pak and David Cousens Interview

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Dynamite’s new ThunderCats series began on 21 October. Before that first issue reached shelves, Egmond and Zack sat down with its writer and its artist. Greg Pak and David Cousens had been trading emails, and the call was the first time the two of them met face to face.

The book picks up on Third Earth, where the ThunderCats share the planet with the SilverHawks, a crowd of other societies and the cat-hating Mu’Tants, and the job in front of them is outreach and diplomacy. A mysterious omen from the sky then complicates that. We asked about their history with the cartoon, how the ThunderCats were redesigned, and which ThunderCat each of them likes best.

The cartoon came up first. Pak adores its hamminess and the moral it hands you at the end of an episode, and he explains why the comic takes a more serious tone while staying funny.

Cousens got the offer in a single email from editor Nate Cosby: covers and interiors on ThunderCats, with Pak, and the characters were his to redesign. He tells us what he did next, and how the fans took the new looks when they arrived.

Both have a favourite ThunderCat now, and one of the picks moved once the scripts arrived.

The creative team

Writer

Greg Pak

A Korean-American writer, filmmaker and photographer based in Brooklyn. His 2003 feature film Robot Stories won awards at festivals around the world and led to a meeting at Marvel, where he went on to write Planet Hulk, World War Hulk, Extreme X-Men and Darth Vader.

Elsewhere he has written Mech Cadet Yu and Ronin Island for BOOM! Studios, and Supernatural and Gaston for Dynamite. He started as a kid drawing comics, and he still sits down with children at conventions to draw with them.

Artist

David Cousens

A cartoonist, illustrator and author based in the UK, with an illustration career that has taken in clients from Adidas, Adobe and Apple to Nickelodeon and the BBC. He came to professional comics after years of putting it off, starting with Dry at Markosia once he decided he did not want to reach the end of his days without having tried.

At Dynamite he has worked on Gargoyles: Demona, The Terminator, Supernatural, SilverHawks and Cheetara: Worldbreaker, and drew covers for several of Pak's books before this one. Colors on ThunderCats are by Igor Monti, letters by Jeff Eckleberry, and the editor is Nate Cosby.

Two ways in

Pak was a teenager when the cartoon first aired and, in his words, too old to be a fan. Cousens grew up with it in the UK, where he saw only part of the run, and later imported the 2011 series on Blu-ray so he could watch it at home.

The series

Thanks

To Greg Pak and David Cousens, for giving us the time before the book was out.