If you’ve been reading enough DC titles lately, you may already be familiar with The Vigil. The India-based squad of altered individuals has popped up in Lazarus Planet: Next Evolution as well as issues of Detective Comics. And in those appearances, the members — Arclight, Saya, Dodge, and Castle — have shown big promise as a compelling new force in the DCU.
But who are they really, and what are The Vigil’s ultimate end goals? We’ll find that out (and likely much more) as the team’s titular book debuts this week (May 16) from creator/writer Ram V and artist Lalit Kumar Sharma. (The pair are joined by colorist Rain Beredo.) The Vigil, a centerpiece of DC’s ongoing “We Are Legends” line of AAPI heroes, finds the team investing and removing “weaponized illegal technology” from would-be world conquerors and bad actors in general. In the first issue, that means confronting pirates on a shipping vessel, which quickly sets the tone for this book’s focus on DC’s evolving metahuman situation, conspiracy theories, and global politics. So, who are The Vigil? Maybe your new favorite superheroes, that’s who.
Ahead of issue #1, we took part in a roundtable discussion with Ram V. There, we discussed the team’s development, their respective powers and personal backgrounds, his long-term goals and some future storyline possibilities, and the team’s place in the DCU, among many other topics and tidbits.
Main cover by Sumit Kumar. Courtesy of DC Comics.
Ram V on the The Vigil’s birth and primary inspirations
The concept for The Vigil has been around in my head for a very long time. I’ve wanted to introduce Indian superheroes/characters into the mainstream comics narrative for quite some time.
But in terms of the characters, I thought, ‘What would be my take on doing a superhero team set in India? What makes them interesting?’ And I think just the concept of vigilantism being examined in the context of a society like India, which isn’t as black and white. You can’t really point to people and go, ‘OK, [you’re] good guys, [and you’re] bad guys.’ When that happens, when you don’t know what side you’re working for, how does that change you as characters?
And in terms of influences, I think they come from a lot of different places. Obviously, in terms of DC influences, there’s Planetary, The Authority, WildStorm stuff, Global Frequency. All of those sort of conspiracy theories and spies-and-superheroes — that space was really influential. Doom Patrol has [been] a huge influence just in terms of having broken people as characters that you’re concerned with, and you’re hoping they will somehow come together to save the day. In terms of contemporary influences, there’s a lot of anime influences in there. Darker than Black, which most people might have heard of; it’s a very cool anime. So I picked up influences from a lot of different places since this has had time to marinate for quite some time.
Ram V on the Red Hood connection
Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the motivations behind this was certainly to have The Vigil be very much a part of the mainstream DCU. Even in the first couple of issues, we start seeing little links and connections to the mainstream DCU. LexCorp is mentioned in the first issue, and it features heavily in the second one. And then as we go further down the narrative, because The Vigil becomes more active and more proactive in what it’s doing, it starts running into other metahumans. So Red Hood is certainly someone who’s in the same framework. And then the concept for The Vigil is so overarching that it could span pretty much the entirety of the DCU. As it goes on, hopefully beyond these six issues, we’ll start seeing them jump into DC-related conspiracy theories and DC-related dangerous technologies.
Interior page from issue #1. Courtesy of DC Comics.
Ram V on what makes The Vigil truly unique
A lot of this we’ll discover as the story goes on. But these are not superheroes in the classic sense. They weren’t bestowed with godly powers. These are human beings that have anomalous conditions. One of the characters has conductive skin, and that let’s him, since he’s essentially insulated from electricity, store and use electricity via his own body for all practical purposes. And this is a real condition. There’s a person out there who got hit by lightning seven times and survived. And the reason they survived is because they have this medical condition.
So all of the characters kind of suffer from this kind of a condition and then have had augmentations in technology fitted in with them to kind of turn them into superheroes. And then as the story goes on, we’ll realize that this wasn’t chance. They didn’t end up with these conditions by chance. There’s a bigger conspiracy behind it all. There’s a bigger reason they exist. And that kind of tends into the absurdist kind of Planetary, Doom Patrol side of things, where you’re now turning into a metafictional narrative and such.
Ram V on the depth of his world-building
Quite a bit, obviously. I believe in the iceberg principle, so whatever you see on the page is maybe 20% of what I’ve thought up in my head. Which is the way it should be, But within these first six issues, I think we will see the biggest core concept play out. And for where the book starts, which is kind of an international spy espionage or black ops group, to where it goes in the end, it’s such a conceptual leap. By the time we get to the sixth issue, there’s an idea,,,where if you have an idea in this space, it populates the main world, and the more absurd the idea, the more short-lived it is. It just goes into full-on Doom Patrol [Grant] Morrison territory, if you will.
Ram V on The Vigil’s harder-edged approach
I didn’t want to make them absolutely black and white. They kill, which is certainly a no-no when it comes to most of these positive superhero characters in the DC universe. They have differing opinions about all of them, but they will do whatever it takes to achieve their goal. That makes them sit on that edge between being good guy superheroes and being technically what a vigilante means: someone who operates outside of the laws. So it puts them on the good side with people who they may not want to be on the good side, and puts them on the bad side with other superheroes in DCU. I thought that was a really interesting thing to bring to the mix.
Also, because I’ve only really written one team book at DC before, which was Justice League Dark, I quite enjoy the idea that everyone on the team doesn’t really get along there because they are forced by circumstances to work with each other. And I think as the narrative develops, we will see that and we’ll see those differing opinions about how hard and edgy they should be.
Interior page from issue #1. Courtesy of DC Comics.
Ram V on the four main characters’ backgrounds and motivations
I’m going to give you very top line information.
The team’s led by a character called Arclight, who’s actually an ex-Indian soldier who loses his family in a chemical plant accident in India, and then later discovers that the accident might’ve been a conspiracy, and there might’ve been motivations behind it and it might’ve not been an accident. So he becomes obsessed with unraveling conspiracies, and in the course of that, comes across Dr. Sankaran, who’s the guy who’s forming this team. [Arclight] clearly has rage issues, and he feels betrayed by the very country he was trying to protect; again, straddling that line between what’s good and what’s bad. He was a soldier, but now he hates the fact that he has to protect people that led to the death of his family. So there’s a lot of interesting character beats there to explore.
The second team member is a character called Saya, who suffers from a condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, where his skin doesn’t really attach to the rest of his body. He has a technology that’s built into him now that lets him configure the way his skin sits on his body. And so he can take on the appearance of pretty much anyone he comes across for a finite period of time. But that also means that he has done that so many times that he doesn’t remember who he was in the first place. He has no sense of identity. He has no sense of where he came from, what his original name is. And he is obsessed with finding that out. And there’s a conspiracy behind that. And I thought that was a really interesting thing to do, especially with Indian society, because it’s such a diverse society with such a huge population that it becomes very difficult to define your identity of who you are, where you come from, and what that means to you.
The third team member is a character called Dodge, who has an extraordinary amount of fast-twitch muscle fiber in her body, which is a real thing and a lot of very, very good sports people have that. So it makes our hand eye coordination very, very good. In her case, it makes it absurdly good, to the point where she can dodge bullets if she wants to; hence the name, Dodge. But she’s also a boxer from Northeast India, and there are questions of sectarianism and racism there, where people from the northeast are often treated as people who are not part of India. And I wanted to explore some of that. Also, her fast-twitch muscle fiber makes her twitch so fast that she can be in two places at the same time, and that has physics-related implications that is never quite covered in comics. So we can do interesting things with uncertainty principles and multiple dimensions and all of that.
Then the fourth character is a 12-year-old kid called Castle, who has no outwardly superpowers other than the fact that he is an absolute genius. He’s better at pattern recognition than most AIs currently are, and is entirely a sociopath. Had t not been for the fact that he met the guy leading this team and became interested in Dr. Sankaran’s philosophy, he could have just as easily been a supervillain. And so I thought that was really interesting as well to have a child, a character who’s on your team, who might just be the most dangerous person on the team. And yet he’s only kept on a relatively good side by complete whim. If he decides one day to go against everything he’s done so far, then he might and it would be near impossible to stop.
Interior page from issue #1. Courtesy of DC Comics.
Ram V on writing new characters
I mean, it’s always fun. I don’t think fun and challenging are mutually exclusive things. I certainly enjoy doing challenging things. It’s challenging in that they don’t have the history that a lot of the other characters have. So I can’t just say, ‘Oh yeah, Hal Jordan shows up and everyone celebrates.’ That’s not the case here. But what that also means is a place for people to rekindle that feeling of becoming interested in a new character, and falling in love with a new character all over again. Frankly, ‘ve missed that in comics for a very long time in my [own] reading. Everything seems to be born out of something that happened 30 or 40 years ago, and it’s kind of nice to just say, ‘Nope. These people exist now because of something that happened now.’ And you will find out everything as you go on from here. There’s no homework you have to do to start off with #1. Hopefully that brings in a certain kind of reader that might have not otherwise come to this book.
Ram V on the team’s extra relevant mission to destroy otherworldly technology
You know, certainly the sense of the world moving forward with technology without thought for its repercussions or consequences. This kind of accelerationist idea that technology will save everything as long as we push ahead with it is an interesting idea to explore. It is dangerous in a lot of ways, but it’s also interesting to explore what it’s like to stand against that and oppose that idea. Are you a Luddite? Do you absolve yourself of views of all technology, or do you decide what technology is good and what is bad? Who gave you that right? I think these are all interesting questions to explore with these characters.
Also, the nature of conspiracy theories. I was talking to someone earlier, and they said that, ‘Oh, conspiracy theories have suddenly become much more relevant.’ And I said, ‘No, conspiracy theories have existed as long as theories have existed.’ There have been conspiracy theories since the early 19th century even. We’re only seeing them now because technology has made it possible for us to have a reach and find other like-minded people to believe in them. And that is a concept. That is belief more important than the theory itself. How absurd a theory can you make as long as enough people believe in it? Then does it become reality?
Ram V on the book’s connection to the socio-political future for India
To an extent, I think it is very much about India’s place in the world, and about the power of being a fast-developing nation. A nation with access to more technology, power, intelligence, and education than it has had in decades prior. But it’s also about trying to arrive at or trying to question this idea of like, ‘OK, you are all of these great and wonderful and powerful things, but what is your soul?’ What do you have to bring to the world beyond profit, beyond a market, beyond consumers, [and] beyond technologies? There was a time where India had a lot of culture to bring to the world. And my question is, ‘Where is that?’ What does that mean in 2023? What does that look like? What do you want to stand for?
I think these are questions that people are asking within India itself. There’s been a lot of communal tensions, and the same sort of fundamentalist groups that have pulled countries elsewhere in the world or have pulled in its way in India. I feel like through the window of this country being more relevant and prevalent in the world, we’re also commenting on where the world is moving and what role India has to play in that.
Variant cover by Mukesh Singh. Courtesy of DC Comics.
Ram V on the book’s big surprises
I think the world has this picture of India because of its narrative, which looks at it as a place of spiritualism and finding yourself and learning to be a better you and part of this world and metaphysics and religion and all of that. Whereas contemporary India has interesting technologies and IT companies and it has better cell phone reach than most places in the world. So I wanted to bring that sense of contemporary India to the book. I think people will be surprised to see Indians and Indian society portrayed in a way that they haven’t before, even in my own books.
The second thing is, I kind of want people to fall in love with these characters. And yes, there’s the bigger picture concept. Yes, it’s crazy and wild and all of that. But I firmly believe people will stick with a book because they love the characters. I think over the course of these issues, we’re going to find reasons why you’re going to root for these characters, even if you don’t necessarily agree with some of their choices. And just how much fun you can have with an underpowered group of superheroes who are trying to stop overpowered people in the world.
Ram V on his favorite team members (and can we get more Rathi?!)
I do have favorite moments with these team members, but I don’t necessarily have a favorite team member. I will say this, Saya, just by virtue of his design with the mask, is just the most badass character. So I love writing Saya, even if he is by far the most emotionally stunted character I’ve written. And I don’t know, will we get more [of The Vigil’s former/recently-retired handler] Rathi? I think you will have to read on and find out.
Ram V on the group’s “benefactor,” Mr. Lightless
Ah, so he very much falls into that kind of absurdist conspiracy idea. So anything I tell you beyond this point would be giving too much away. But I think it would suffice to say that Mr. Lightless is not the person who employs the vigil. Dun dun dun. And you will find out why as the issues go on.
Variant cover by Pop Mhan. Courtesy of DC Comics.
Ram V on a Doom Patrol crossover?
Like I said, I think that the big picture concept behind this is big enough to span not only existing, mainstream DCU, but span the Multiverse. What happens if there’s technology that tries to pull multiple dimensions together? Do you get different versions of characters that are now coexisting in the same point in space and time? Does that mean The Vigil has to take one of them out? If so, who? So there’s the possibilities for The Vigil encountering characters out of the DCU [that’s] pretty much endless. It just depends on how crazy I go over the span of these six or 12 issues.
Ram V on the team’s long-term future
I think this is the kind of book that can pretty much go anywhere it wants to within the DCU. And, thankfully, I’ve had the experience of writing a book that extended its initial run because of [garnering] a readership and getting people who are really backing the book as they did with Swamp Thing. My hope is that this goes beyond its six issues. I have enough story planned for multiple arcs beyond there, but even if it is just six issues, I am thrilled with the idea that it introduces characters and people from a part of the world that haven’t really been as prevalent in the DCU so far. And it introduces them in a way that isn’t cliche, and that doesn’t stereotype them, and hopefully introduces readers to a part of the world that they will realize is more similar than they thought, but also more absurd than they could have imagined.
Ram V on any final teasers
Like I’d said, I think the biggest tease so far, the thing that always gets the response… is readers will enjoy just watching the escalation. It’ll ratchet up levels of absurdity by the time we get to issue six. So I’m quite excited for people to experience that. It’s very much the kind of comic that I fell in love with — things like Planetary or Doom Patrol. I’m just sort of rekindling that for a new generation of readers coming to the books — but also doing that from an Indian perspective is super exciting.
Join the AIPT Patreon
Want to take our relationship to the next level? Become a patron today to gain access to exclusive perks, such as:
- ❌ Remove all ads on the website
- 💬 Join our Discord community, where we chat about the latest news and releases from everything we cover on AIPT
- 📗 Access to our monthly book club
- 📦 Get a physical trade paperback shipped to you every month
- 💥 And more!
You must be logged in to post a comment.