If you can recall 2020 at this point, there was a comic released called Heart Attack. The brainchild of Shawn Kittelsen, Eric Zawadzki, and some other collaborators, the book featured an America where life-saving gene therapies gave birth to super-powered “Variants.” Only these folks weren’t exactly heralded as heroes. And so the book follows two such teens, Charlie North and Jilly Kearney as they unlock their powers and ask “[not] how to use them — but how far they’re willing to go.”
Flash forward a few years, and the book’s ideas (a society uncertain about medicines, an uptick in people scapegoating others, etc.) seem more pertinent than ever. And so Kittelsen and Zawadzki (alongside colorist Mike Spicer) are springing on that unintended momentum with a new trade paperback of Heart Attack. It not only features the first six issues but six all-new chapters that conclude the story. Without spoiling too much, it sees Charlie and Jill continue their campaign to topply a rigged system and unite humanity under a new banner of community and connectivity.
The Heart Attack TP is due out this week (October 4) from Image Comics. Kittelsen recently fielded some of our questions about the project, including a crash course for newbies, the prescience of that first arc, how Charlie and Jill’s relationship continues to evolve, and a possible future for the series.
Courtesy of Image Comics.
AIPT: How would you describe Heart Attack to any newbies?
Shawn Kittelsen: Heart Attack is about star-crossed lovers in a near-future where gene therapy has revolutionized medicine but also created a generation of people with “Variant” DNA. Variants don’t seem to be superhuman, or have “powers of mass destruction,” but many people still fear their potential, so Variants are denied human rights. Our two leads, Jill and Charlie, are Variants who discover that whenever they touch, they have such powers. Jill wants to use their powers to change the world, Charlie is afraid they’ll only make things worse. Can they find common ground? Or are they destined to be divided like the world around them?
AIPT: With the focus on gene therapy and healthcare issues in general across the first “arc,” it felt timely that the book debuted just before COVID. How did that bit of “unintended precognition” feel, and did it influence what you’re doing with these new chapters?
SK: It’s a weird bit of synchronicity that so many concepts in the book were conceived years ago but now seem like they’re ripped straight from the headlines. The pitch for Heart Attack and writing the first chapters goes all the way back 10 years ago during the Obama administration. Even most of the new chapters were written pre-COVID. I’m definitely not precognitive. The story was intended to be about a near-future some decades out and suddenly it’s just… today!
Courtesy of Image Comics.
If anything, that’s all evidence of what a history buff and media junkie I am. You could see all these trends – pandemics demanding radical new treatments, growing inequality, political extremism, mass protests, the militarization of police, the rise of authoritarian populism – rippling around the globe for decades and years before they became “everyday” facts of life in the 2020s.
AIPT: What was it like working together on the new chapters? How has your creative partnership evolved over the time working together?
SK: The first six issues were written before we found Eric, and looking back on it, that made it a lot harder to envision the finished book. Once Eric started drawing, he brought all these subtle performances to the characters, and his panel layouts were always way more interesting than my suggested breakdowns in the scripts. So writing the new chapters, having Eric there as my partner, I felt much more confident about where we were going. I could write to his strengths and trust that he would always find cooler ways to visualize the story than anything I could detail in a script.
Courtesy of Image Comics.
AIPT: When the first six issues debuted, the concept and story felt extra relevant. But now even more has happened — are these new chapters somehow doubly relevant?
SK: I think so. This book is about how you deal with a world you can’t control. The first six issues ended with this massive cliffhanger that was the worst possible outcome for a controversial, risky decision that Jill and Charlie made. They went from feeling like they had everything under control to the situation rapidly spiraling into a tragedy. And I think that’s how a lot of us feel these days. The state of the world, the country, the climate, it’s all changing faster than we can process. What do we do with that? We can’t snap our fingers and Thanos the world into a more ideal state. Even if we could, would snapping our fingers help or would we create more problems? At the same time, we can’t just sit back and watch things fall apart. We have to do something to leave a better world for our children and future generations. So if we can’t fix everything, where do we start? Our characters are wrestling with all the same issues we are.
AIPT: Let’s talk about the Jill-Charlie dynamic — how’s that evolved in these new chapters?
SK: They’re a better team but that means they’re going to be tested in bigger ways. Of course there’s that big cliffhanger from the end of #6 to resolve, and that’s something they both feel responsible for fixing – especially Jill, who wants to save her friend Face. We’ll learn more about Charlie’s complicated personal history, and that history is going to catch up with him whether he likes it or not.
Courtesy of Image Comics.
He’s not prepared to deal with that, and he’s afraid that getting Jill involved will hurt her and everyone around them. Jill finally gets the validation from Sefton that she’s been looking for since the first issue. Sefton is her ex, though, so the more closely she works with him, the more that triggers trust issues for Charlie, at a time when he needs to trust her more than ever.
AIPT: Did you try to inject anything new (design, ideas, etc.) to make the new chapters stand out from the original six issues?
SK: The biggest thing that I think makes these chapters stand out is that it’s Eric and me working at peak collaboration. We’ve already set the stakes. We know the characters, we know their world, so I think we packed in more character per page than the original issues. Eric’s sequences are so animative. Mike Spicer added to that by taking more risks with color choices that emphasize the shifting emotions and mood in the story. I can’t wait for everyone to see these new pages. We’ve also got more variety in the news articles and social media posts between chapters, which I really enjoyed using to add context for the larger world that Jill and Charlie exist in.
AIPT: There’s hints in the solicitation about burgeoning doubts in their plot for overthrowing the government/current system. How much is this, then, a metaphor for the larger relationship between Charlie and Jill?
SK: Very much so. They’re teenagers. Everything they do is plagued with doubts, but now those doubts are magnified by the fact that they really screwed up at the end of #6. If Charlie was a reluctant hero before, he’s even more reluctant now. Jill exuded endless confidence from the first, but now we see how much that confidence is performative. And once they start to doubt themselves, they’re going to doubt each other. It’s that much harder to love someone or let them love you if you don’t love yourself.
Courtesy of Image Comics.
AIPT: The first six issues really focused on our two heroes. But there seems to be more room for others made in these new chapters. How does that help the story, and does anyone really stand out to you from the other players?
SK: The spotlight stays on Jill and Charlie for most of the story, but the world is expanded. Sefton and the Governor get room to shine. We’ll see more of what makes them both effective, ruthless, and morally compromised leaders of their respective movements. There’s a new antagonist who comes into the picture, someone with a vendetta from Charlie’s past who threatens Charlie and everyone he cares about. Plus there are the news articles, so we’ll heard from more voices commenting on the cultural impact that our characters have on the story. We might also find out what happens to desaparecidos, those Variants who disappear into VCU custody…
AIPT: Building off that last question, and because I think the new chapters address it, but who has had a larger impact/effect on the other, Jill or Charlie?
SK: I think Jill has a larger impact on Charlie. The first time we met him, he was only concerned with looking after himself. He had no family ties or social connections. There are good reasons for that, and we’ll dig deeper into those in these new chapters. Jill is the opposite of Charlie. She takes responsibility for her sister, her friends. She’s an influential voice in the Freebodies movement. That kind of social exposure scares Charlie, but if he’s going to be close to Jill, he’s going to be part of that community, so the question is, can he adjust to that change?
Courtesy of Image Comics.
At the same time, Charlie has an important impact on Jill, it’s just a more subtle shift. There’s a part of Jill that’s tethered to serving a bigger movement. She believes in the Freebodies more than she believes in herself. She has something to learn from Charlie’s self-sufficiency.
AIPT: It feels like the tone shifts in subtle but important ways. Would you agree, and what facilitates that move?
SK: I think the end of #6 really shifts the mood. Blood has been shed. Things get real, and fast. So the book is a lot more conscious of what Jill and Charlie’s powers mean to the wider world. And much like the real history of segregation in Austin figured into our depiction of the city in the original issues, there’s a sobering dose of reality in this arc, too, from life in a privatized prison to political theater at city council meetings to the complex personal situations that edge people toward hate and extremism.
AIPT: Do you have a favorite moment/panel/page/gag from the new chapters that feel important or speak to the larger mission of this newer story?
SK: I don’t want to spoil anything, but the larger mission really comes together in the final two chapters of this book, and my favorite moments are in the last chapter. If the book as a whole is a reflection of the challenges we see in our world today, then the ending is… Well, readers should pick up the book to find out!
Courtesy of Image Comics.
AIPT: Could we expect even more from this universe down the road?
SK: Eric and I could absolutely tell more stories in this universe. We worked hard to give this book a worthy ending after leaving such a massive cliffhanger back in 2020. But just like in real life, the end is never the last word, it’s just the start of another adventure.
And Skybound recently announced that Fuji TV in Japan is making a live action TV series based on the book, so get ready – you haven’t seen the last of Heart Attack!
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