Eric Andrew Heisserer, the screenplay writer for Arrival – based on Story of Your Life written by Ted Chiang – is working on his new comic series called Secret Weapons for Valiant Comics.
Secret Weapons is based on Harbinger, a best-selling comic about a team of teenage superheroes. In Secret Weapons, the team will band together under the leadership of Livewire to combat evil.
Heisserer has earlier written a couple of mini-series for Dark Horse Comics. He has also penned the screenplay for the upcoming film-adaption of Harbinger, and a movie script based on Valiant superhero Bloodshot. Harbinger is about a team of young heroes with incredible abilities and Bloodshot is about a tormented soldier enhanced with technology which makes him unstoppable. Heisserer plans to create a cinematic universe of these superhero characters.
Secret Weapons follows the Valiant superhero ‘Livewire’ as she stumbles across a group of young “psiots” (super-powered individuals) with seemingly useless powers. One can talk to birds while another can make objects glow. They all come from different racial backgrounds. Their cultures influence the person they are, without defining them or making them one-dimensional. But Livewire, one of Valiant’s more hopeful and optimistic characters, doesn’t see failure. She sees a group of secret weapons.
What Heisserer loved about Livewire is her immovable moral compass. For example, when her teacher, Toyo Harada, turns out to be some sort of a supervillain, Livewire still knows what is inherently right and wrong. “Oh God, I love that about her. And I need more people like that in the world,” said the Oscar nominee.
The series is a collaboration between Heisserer, artist Raul Allen, and colourist Patricia Martin, with the first issue arriving on 28 June, 2017.
