David F. Walker doesn't quite know how Cyborg has been a second-tier hero all these years.
"I'll be honest," he said by phone Monday. "I was thinking the same thing about 20 to 25 years ago when I was a kid reading his adventures in The New Teen Titans.
"It's sort of the question: 'What took so long'?"
Now is the time, and he gets to write it. It's a role particularly suited to him, to hear him tell it.
"You can stay in your underwear," he said, then laughed. "It helps for a solitary misanthropic lifestyle to be in comics."
Maybe he's one of those loners who is also a joiner. Walker used to wear many hats. Some may know him from his webzine, BadAzz MoFo. Others may know him from his work as a filmmaker or a journalist. He's also known as a bad azz comics writer and will probably cement that reputation with Cyborg #1, out Wednesday at your local comics shop.
His fame precedes him. But he's handling expectations.
"I go back and forth between giving myself a little pep talk: 'You got this, son' ... to 'Oh, God, I'm not ready for this'," he says. "I've been doing stuff in the public eye for the better part of 20 years, so I'm used to this. You take it as it comes. How we react to these things makes our character."
He's taking that attitude to writing Cyborg, who has traditionally been seen as part of a team. In the DC reboot, high-flying athlete Victor Stone became Cyborg when, in an effort to keep him alive after an explosion in the lab takes away a lot of his body during an alien invasion, his scientist father put him back together again. Soon, he's in the company of a nascent Justice League, battling a force from outer space.
While that may seem far removed from daily life, Walker would beg to differ.
"The most universal thing that we go through is change," said Walker.
"The other day I was at a friend's wedding and I was thinking how the path that life takes us on is seldom the one we envision for ourselves," he continues. "At some point, if you begin to understand that, you begin to bounce back when things go south. That's the driving core of what this story is about."
Victor Stone has to deal with turning into Cyborg. This will become kind of a What Would Cyborg Do? type of book. Walker plans to ponder the bigger questions.
"How does he reconnect with his humanity? It's something I think we all struggle with day to day. Especially when you're part of a group that's been historically and systematically oppressed," he said of the teenager who is not just black, but mostly robotic. "How do we reclaim it? He views himself as more machine than man. But what makes us human? If 70 percent of his body is cybernetic, that doesn't mean that 70 percent of him isn't human. That's what I'm having fun writing and exploring."
Of course, there's the fun of having a character which already has a huge fan base.
"Part of it is the animated Teen Titans show," he said of Teen Titans Go! on Cartoon Network, one of my (cough), I mean my daughter's favorites. "They all know who Cyborg is because their children watch the animated show. By the time we get a live-action film going, these kids will be ticket-buying age."
So he stays true to all the iterations of Cyborg, especially the more exuberant aspects of his characterization from the animated show.
"Whenever I meet a young person, their first question is, 'Is he gonna say boo-yah?," said Walker. "I realized that it's such an important character trait that I put that in. Let's make readers happy!"
DC has announced a Cyborg movie for April 2020. Until then, Walker's going to try to do just that, make readers happy.
"I just love the creative process," he said. "I'm just trying to write a really good comic book."
