Interview With Will.I.Am & Brian David Johnson

This year at New York Comic Con. I had the pleasure of chatting with artist Will.I.Am and Brian David Johnson about a new graphic novel they will release entitled "Wizards and Robots." We talk about the process of the comic, technology and more.

                        Justin, Brian David Johnson and Will.I.Am

OtakusandGeeks.com: How did this project of Wizards & Robots come about?

Will.I.Am: This project is two years in the making it started in my living room on Halloween.  I called Brian David Johnson and was like I have this idea and I want to know what you think. You know Brian he has already wrote and published books on his own. I ask him if I came to him with an idea would you be interested and he said yeah.  Two months later I told him the idea of “Wizards & Robots” and we kept writing and it turned into a trilogy.  Here we are two years from that time with metallic robotic figurine, an artifact, a book and a bible before the graphic novel comes out. It was important for me to build a world first because most people in my world, they will just come here and launch a graphic novel. However it was important for us to allow people to really see detail, so that’s why we made an artifact and a detail bible based on the characters that way people can see what we are geeking about. I’m really happy that we were able to accomplish this on our own, there is no studio, no companies just two guys.

                               Metallic Robot from Wizards & Robots

OtakusandGeeks.com: Can you give us a brief synopsis of the story?

Will.I.Am: Well I don’t want to spoil the whole story *laughs*

Brian David Johnson:  It’s about these robots from the future that traveled back in time to do battle with these ancient wizards. The robots come back to have war in our time in the modern era.  It’s based on their technology and their spells are based on real robotics and real quantum physics.

OtakusandGeeks.com: How exciting is this for you?

Will.I.Am: It's really exciting with the concept because we were doing an interview on the tomorrow project at Intel, and he was talking about robotics and stuff he was doing and the growth that microprocessors will have. What I heard worried me that a phone or appliances will be more intelligent than a seven year old forty years from now, because we are not educating our kids in inner cities, so you mean to tell me that a phone in 2013 forty years from now can outperformed my seven year old niece. In today's world this is almost possible. However we still have to input request to a computer now but forty years from now it will think on it's own. Thinking of that I was like wow darn it I want to do more things to inspire kids in inner cities to educate themselves and see themselves in different fields than just entertainment and sports. There is other places to escape other places to build in and tools to use to turn and change your reality. 

OtakusandGeeks.com: How difficult was it to creating a universe that's expanding into a trilogy?

Will.I.Am: It took a lot to think of how to approach it because it started from science fact that most folks probably aren't aware of. Then putting a world around factual things regardless whether they are here now. The math tells you that this will be possible, however today's technology doesn't allow us to do these things now. When you're dealing with factual things based on mathematics you can create worlds that won't be fantasy for fantasy sake.

Brian David Johnson: The story actually has it's basis in science. In theoretical physics there is a thing called a thought experiment which was exactly what Will and I were doing. If you could do time travel what would it look like? If you could do spells that was using quantum mechanics what would look like? It's literally just the theoretical thought experiment but it has wizards and robots which is awesome. 

OtakusandGeeks.com: When will Wizards and Robots be released?

Brian David Johnson: March 2014 and the prequel will released online soon.

OtakusandGeeks.com: Since you're entering the comic realm. We have to know who is your favorite comic book character?

Will.I.Am: John Wraith *laughs*

Brain David Johnson: I'm old school I like the classics Spider-Man, Captain America those are the ones that inspire me.

Be sure to look out for Wizards and Robots in March of 2014. More details will be released later.
http://wizardsandrobots.tumblr.com