With the first issue dropping last month, Undertow quickly emerged as one of Image‘s best new comics of the year, with creators Steve Orlando and Artyom Trakhanov showing great talent with what is their first big published project. Atlantis has never been more interesting than with Orlando and Trakhanov as its builders. Issue two just released and writer Steve Orlando was kind enough to talk about how Undertow came to be, building a society from the ground up, how humanity fairs in an Atlantean world, and much more. 
Leo Johnson: How did Undertow initially come to be and eventually come to Image?
Steve Orlando: Undertow came to be when I decided to take a society, remove every obvious thing that makes us human, and then take a look at what’s left. From there, I wanted to build it back up, and give readers a mirror on what really makes them persons. Not humans, that’s biology, but persons. With scientists pushing for Dolphins to be classified as non-human persons, I took it as a challenge to look at a world where someone else evolved, a different series of persons, with different biology. What would come along for the ride? The reasons for actions. The passions. And if I was going to take a look at that, there are few ways quicker to take a society and make it alien than taking away the very air we breathe and replacing it with something else. That was the core of the idea, and then we wrapped it up on science fiction and lasers and sea beasts. But the idea was to do a human drama without humans, and story of human pioneering, like in the 1800s, but with a new frontier, and new persons pioneering. Undertow came to Image when I was introduced by my friends at Man of Action at New York City Comicon, as I just happened to have a rough cut of the first issue in hand. From there, Artyom’s singular work did the heavy lifting. Believe it or not that was a year and a half ago! So it’s great to have people see the book at last.
LJ: Atlantis is a popular idea in many stories and has been for many years. Undertow obviously takes it a little differently than most, but what about the concept was there to build the story around?
SO: The sense of the alien, and the sense of the other, which I think is what Atlantis stories are really about, is the DNA that connects our story to those others. All those medieval stories of Atlantean kings happened in Undertow too, but like with our actual world, they’re ancient history, or even pre-history in the case of Atlantis sorcery tales like the late, great Arion, Lord of Atlantis or Robert E Howard’s KULL. I think Atlantis stories are often about invasion because they’re the ultimate intruder for us as humans. They’re living in our planet and we don’t even know it. So there’s a gut fear of something just out of site, and that’s where those stories come from. Undertow takes that further by turning it on its head, making THEM the establishment and US the alien, primitive but dangerous race. By making Atlantis modern, we can really take a look at ourselves in their actions, and hopefully be unsettled as these inhuman creatures and their grave deeds remind us more of ourselves than we like to admit. And hopefully seeing humans tear at raw scraps of animal with their bare hands, copulate in the open like beasts, and worship heathen, primordial gods, will be a gut check as well.
LJ: Undertow, unlike many Atlantis stories, isn’t set in the distant past, but rather the (more or less) present where the sea fostered intelligent life rather than it evolving on land. What does this mean for the world at large and humans in particular?
SO: The setting for Undertow is beautifully ambiguous, and that’s part of the fun. I know where it’s set, and the clues are there. But also what I’ve discovered as this story comes out is the disconnect between authorial intent and the result with the readership. I don’t believe in a “right’ and a “wrong” way to read something, every person’s reading comes from their own baggage and suppositions. So yes, the book seems to be set in the present, with evolution leapfrogging humans for someone else. And it can be read that way. But some people have taken it as the subjective present, the present for this Atlantean race that MAYBE isn’t our own. So maybe humans have a place in the future yet. And I like that. “The present” is really a meaningless notion except when it comes to perspective, the reader’s present, the reader’s “today” or the characters’ “today. But what does Atlantis being the world power mean for humans? it means they get to become something else. They’re the lions, the bears, the great white sharks. They’re not as smart as Atlanteans, but they’re the world’s natural apex predator. They’re just a bit smarter than other animals, so right now they’re evolving in a different way. And maybe Atlantis is feeling safe with that, but they should rethink that position, what with needing watertight suits to survive on land, unless they can hold their breath for a long time. There’s more to uncover there, and some, like Bau Zikia, are working to uncover it. Atlantis does not study the humans at all. But on The Deliverer, human anatomy and xenobiology are mandatory learning for younger students.
LJ: Issues one and two center around Ukinnu joining Redum Anshargal in his quest to find the mythical Amphibian, the key to living on land, and the start of that quest, ending with the group being in less than ideal circumstances. With issue 3 marking the end of the first half of the mini, where does the story go from there?
SO: As the teaser says, TRAMPLED BY HUMANITY. The back half of the miniseries goes in some directions that are hopefully surprising. The action is there, but its in some ways less mayhem and more surgical, tight, and horrific. The Amphibian is not what anyone expects, and his power really makes the back half of the miniseries more of a meeting with a god, and all that entails. But Anshargal’s the toughest bastard on the planet, so that’s not to say he doesn’t have a plan. Punching aside, we also really dig into the social drama of the Deliverer, a bit more of Anshargal’s past, and what type of man he was, before he became the man he is. And those answers might surprise not just readers, but Ukinnu Alal just the same.
LJ: There’s a lot of worldbuilding and deep history in Undertow. How much of this was planned before the story every really took to the page and how much was just a natural progression of the story?
SO: The metro landscape was always planned, from Day One of the story when it was an underwater police procedural. But the backstory, the tech and the look, was built around the characters as the story grew. A lot of the innovations come from Artyom and I posing questions to ourselves and then solving them. We needed to know how Atlanteans could survive on land without exploding, how they could control their buoyancy, how they could eat, have light, have weapons. All these problems, and the answers forced us to research and get creative. In many ways our creative process was formed around “that would be awesome!” and then taking a moment to say “okay, now how can we do that?” 
LJ: You’re pulling from a lot of different sources with this book; the obvious Atlantis idea, Apergy from Across the Zodiac, an 1800s sci-fi book, and many of the proper names being derived from Sumerian. What were some of the other influences on the story as it evolved?
SO: Besides the ones you mention, which loom huge, the main influence on the story is the idea of pioneering, like the pulp fiction of the early 1920s. The idea is to give characters a frontier again, with all the excitement and danger that comes with it. “Space, the final frontier” is an exciting lead-in because it by definition and form takes us out of our comfort zone. And the frontier, when we had one on earth, and everything wasn’t googlemapped, was also where people would go to live the way they want, away from society. BUT to do that, they had to accept an element of danger, a reduction in security, to living in the wild. The sacrifice for freedom is often safety, and we explore that in all the ways we can here. And also a huge influence is Philip Jose Farmer, a pulp writer known for stories that featured grotesque action, and heavy satire of sexual and gender roles, especially masculinity. Farmer understood the similar functions of action scenes and sex scenes in pulp, the combination of sex and death that makes Vampire fiction so alluring. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes a fight scene IS a sex scene, but it isn’t. Joe Casey is doing this in Sex too. You can’t really have one without the other. And that’s why in Undertow we explore the sex lives and social roles of characters in addition to their big action scenes. Because really, they’re all the same types of scenes, and that’s true whether characters are human or not. It’s just another way we make the inhuman human.
LJ: The world of Undertow is large in scope and there’s a lot more, seemingly, to be explored than the central story of these six issues. If sales and an audience are there, can we expect Undertow to pull a Five Ghosts and continue as an ongoing?
SO: Undertow could definitely return, but the most important thing is to deliver the book on time and awesome. Like I said, to peak behind the curtain, we’ve been working on the book a long time. So once its finished, we would certainly love to return, but likely with another miniseries once we have some lead time and can again deliver something monthly and great. Right now the process is not built for an ongoing, and the most important thing is to stay reliable and dependable for our readers. We would rather take some time off and come back with another story that is ready to go with no delays.
LJ: With at least three issues still ahead, what can readers look forward to as the quest for the Amphibian continues?
SO: Some key phrases: leg meat. ice roads. barbed sword history. revenge squad. mammoth bones. For any readers wanting to catch up on Undertow, let your shop owner know that the Final Order Cutoff for issue 3 is 3/31 and the issue can be ordered using the following codes: UNDERTOW #3 Cover A – FEB140641 OR UNDERTOW #3 Cover B – FEB140642.
