SDCC: Rick Remender Discusses The Sacrificers and The Holy Roller

CBR sat down with Rick Remender at SDCC 2023 to discuss The Sacrificers and his work with Andy Samberg and Joe Trohman on Holy Roller.

Between impressive stints on several Marvel titles (including Captain America, Uncanny X-Force / Avengers, and Venom) and several creator-owned series, like Deadly Class, Low, and A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance -- Rick Remender has built a reputation for telling compelling, thoughtful stories.

CBR sat down with the venerable writer at San Diego Comic-Con 2023 to discuss his newest projects with Image Comics. Remender discussed his and Max Fiumara's The Sacrificers, which is due out on Aug. 2, and teased what he, Andy Samberg, Fall Out Boy's Joe Trohman, and artist Roland Boschi have in store for audiences in the recently announced Holy Roller.

CBR: What can you tell us about your upcoming projects with Image Comics?

Rick Remender: Well, the first one is The Sacrificers, which is a book I'm doing with the brilliant Max Fiumara and colorist Dave McCaig. This is sort of a dark science fiction fantasy story if we had to pin it to a genre. It's a story that, at its heart, comes down to an examination of the older generation's stranglehold on the world and their inflexibility and unwillingness to relinquish it to the younger generations coming up.

In this world, every family is expected to give over one child, a Sacrificer, to the ruling five families. In exchange, their world is made perfect. There's an abundance of food, the weather is perfect, and everything functions properly -- but nobody knows what happens to the child they hand over. This is the story of one particular Sacrificer as we follow him on his journey.

That's a very interesting premise, like a utopia at a cost.

That's right. But what is the cost, and what's happening? I'm enjoying the onion approach to storytelling on this one, where I'm just slowly revealing one layer after the other and trying to hide the ball in a lot of ways. One problem with comics is that it's imperative that you give the audience some kind of idea of what it is they're getting into upfront. But I'm the opposite.

I'm reminded of David Lynch because I grew up on Lynch films, and he won't tell you in interviews what a movie is about. He won't tell you what Twin Peaks is about. He won't tell you what he thinks is happening or what was in his head because he wants every individual experiencing his art to come away with whatever they get from it. I love that because there's a participation aspect to that way of storytelling. And so, what I'm trying to do moving forward as we unveil the new line of books over the next year or two, and we get into unrolling this huge line of product, is to treat it with a little more artistic respect and give just a very basic snapshot. All the rest of the secrets and reveals will be slowly doled out to the people who want to take the ride.

There's also another project you're working on with Image. What can you tell us about that book?

It's called The Holy Roller, and it's a story I'm sharing with a friend of mine, Joe Trohman, who is the guitar player in a band called Fall Out Boy. He is also a television writer, and while we were taking a break from writing one day, he was talking to me about being a Jewish kid in this area of Chicago where he was experiencing anti-semitism fairly regularly. And so, as we were discussing that, he was saying that he would deal with being bullied by going to the bowling alley to blow off steam. He said he had an idea for a superhero vigilante called the Holy Roller, who uses bowling balls as weapons. A friend of ours, who was a producer, heard the idea, and we set up a Zoom call with Andy Samberg, who loved it. I was really isolated during the pandemic, so the idea of collaborating and writing with people again was really exciting to me. Joe and I, along with Andy, spent hours and hours on Zoom developing this and forming it into something we fell in love with. So I brought in one of my art teams, and we put this thing together.

It seems so crazy, but the more we got into it, the more it became a really fun action vehicle. It had a good social commentary and discussed something that still continues to rear its ugly head in our society, anti-semitism. And then it handles the issue with a sort of wink in a really intelligent way that still manages to make fun of it. Maybe it's a Generation X trait that we have this sort of gallows humor about the horrific and a tendency to laugh at the ugliness instead of letting it consume us. I think that was where Joe was coming from with this idea. I've had so much fun making this book because you get into the seriousness of it all alongside the humor to discuss something that's pertinent to the world we live in, blemishes and all. That's truly the Holy Grail of creating comics.

The Sacrificers is due out on Aug. 2, and Holy Roller is due out on Nov. 22.