Like Bond and Bourne before him, Edward Zero isn't very connected to the world or his deeper sense of self.


James Bond gave way to the likes of Jason Bourne, and now Edward Zero is the latest superspy with a license to kill.

The protagonist of the Image Comics series Zero is the creation of writer Ales Kot (Wild Children, Change), and the character gets a new interpretation from a different artist for each issue and each gritty adventure.

Zero himself is as core to the book as its speculative spy-thriller setting in the near future, but "everything else will be morphing," Kot says.

Out Wednesday, the first issue drawn by Michael Walsh and begins in the United Kingdom in 2038 before quickly shifting to the Gaza Strip in 2018. Readers are introduced to Edward Zero, who's working undercover on a mission to neutralize a biomodified Palestinian terrorist and nab an important piece of tech for his bosses at the shadowy Agency before Israeli intelligence gets a hold of it.

Zero also gets caught up in a never-ending battle of fisticuffs between a superpowered Hamas soldier and an Israeli who's every bit his equal.

The second issue of Zero is a "classic" spy tale drawn by Mateus Santolouco, while the third "a raw, brutal, unrelenting riff of Steven Soderbergh's Haywire" with visuals from Morgan Jeske, Kot says. A 9-year-old Zero goes on his first mission in Belfast in the fourth issue featuring Tradd Moore, Zero No. 5 is mostly set in an interrogation room illustrated by Will Tempest, and Kot teams with Tonci Zonjic for the sixth issue that wraps up the first story arc "by taking many of the threads from the first five and showing you a bigger piece of the puzzle," teases the writer.

Kot was inspired by "the repetitive patterns of the good/bad dynamic in fiction and in our world," he says, but he also thought about kind of a spy I wanted to explore as well as the spy and noir stories that most affected him.

"Edward Zero arrived as someone who does bad things for what he was conditioned to see as good reasons," the writer adds. "What happens when you grow up in a system that celebrates murder as a means to an end? That was one of the first questions I asked myself and it's still one of the key ones."

As far as his personality goes, Zero is based on "the bleak male spy archetype that sees the world as something that can be changed by applying pure force to it," Kot says. On certain levels, Zero's convinced that the end justifies the means and is, like Bourne and Bond before him, "not very connected to the world or to his deeper sense of self."

He shares the title of the book so Zero will be in every story — there will be a few issues "where he will be a presence in ways other than ordinary," Kot says — and his handler Zizek from the Agency is a series regular as well as Cooke, who co-runs the government organization.

"There is a very deep secret at the core of what the Agency does and it will become unraveled, bit by bit," Kot says. "Edward Zero's life will follow."

The Agency is an archetype that utilizes attitudes of various security agencies and terrorist organizations — "which are sometimes, in our world, one and the same thing," Kot says.

"If I talk about the United States, to be specific, we are constantly spied upon by our government. The same government also wages covert wars that kill kids and mark them as collateral damage. The same government also bullies journalists and whistleblowers. Inspiration comes easy — it's about looking outside my window and processing what I see."

The writer's tackled political and social themes in other works, too, though with the new series "I invite the readers to interpret Zero for themselves," he says. "I find that explaining it too closely beforehand can do the project disservice."

Kot wants Zero to run 30 to 40 issues, with each adding a piece of the overall puzzle. And in picking illustrators to add to this world, Kot looks for a "high pain threshold. Also, my imaginary dog has to like them," he quips.

"I just want them to be the right people for the project. That comes down to their abilities, professionalism and the way they smell. I like people who smell right. If we hit it off, our schedules align, we have a good creative conversation and they like the story I have in mind, we're working together. Simple as that."

For the story of Zero itself, Kot's found a surprising inspiration in director David Cronenberg. The filmmaker's work and approach influenced Kot's Wild Children and Change, and after reading his first four scripts, "I realized that Zero is an exploration of wounds, which is a main theme in Cronenberg's work as well," Kot says.

It's a "fascination with the psyche as a wounded mechanism that conceives the physical world, which, as a reflection of the psyche that co-creates it, is also wounded," the writer adds. Zero is an "investigation of the possibilities inherent within transforming those wounds into majestic, beautiful scars."

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