Hello and welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, where today I welcome back Tristan Palmgren to talk about their new novel Outlaw: Relentless, part of the same range of Marvel: Heroines novels from Aconyte Books as their previous book, Domino: Strays. Whether you’ve read Domino: Strays or not (and I definitely recommend you do), if you’re a fan of Marvel’s mutant characters then this promises to be well worth checking out! It’s available now as a global ebook, with the US paperback due later in September and the UK paperback coming in November.
Without further ado though, let’s get straight on with the interview.
Track of Words: To begin with, could you give us an overview of what Outlaw: Relentless is about?
Tristan Palmgren: All right. So…
Outlaw: Relentless is about going home as an adult – wherever you think of as home. It’s about rediscovering the things you loved, the things you told yourself you did, and the things that made you a worse person. And maybe a few of the things that made you a better one.
It’s a chase story, a Western about hunters and prey, and the ways survival is equally at stake for both of them. Death stalks the predator just as their quarry. It’s about internalized prejudices, weaponized hate, and the way they poison your blood and turn you septic.
Most importantly, though, it’s a character piece about Inez Temple, the kickass cowgirl mutant mercenary from Marvel comics.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
TP: Inez Temple, aka Outlaw, came out Gail Simone’s Deadpool and Agent X runs, and has bounced around with a cacophagic grin ever since. Most recently, she’s been in the Domino and Hotshots series, on a team led by her best friend Neena Thurman. She’s a mutant with superstrength and endurance, but she prefers to stay independent of bigger groups like the X-Men. She came from rural Texas, and worked Texas into every part of her style, but it’s been years since she’s been back and she works mostly out of New York and California. There are reasons she hasn’t gone, and she doesn’t want to talk about any of them.
Neena Thurman, aka Domino, is the leader of her team and the luckiest mercenary alive. Literally, the luckiest – like Inez, she’s a mutant, and her mutant power is luck. In combat, things just fall into place for her. (Her personal life isn’t quite so blessed.) Like a lot of mutants, she’s overcome a lot of trauma to survive as long as she has. No one alive has Inez’s back more than she does, but she doesn’t know how to handle Inez all the time.
ToW: Where and when is this story set?
TP: In what is ambiguously the present day in Marvel’s cosmology, in the parched badlands of West Texas. Home sweet home for Inez.
ToW: Inez/Outlaw also appears in your novel Domino: Strays – how does Outlaw: Relentless fit in with that novel, and Outlaw’s own stories elsewhere in the wider Marvel range?
TP: Generally, you shouldn’t need to worry about what else happened and what didn’t. We aim to avoid continuity lockout. If you read the comics, there’s plenty of easter eggs and references, and you might have some idea of where things are going next.
If you want to get plugged in or already are, though:
Outlaw: Relentless is set after the events of my novel Domino: Strays, but it’s not a direct sequel. They can be read together or independently. Outlaw: Relentless and Domino: Strays both follow Gail Simone’s Domino and Hotshots series closely. Other elements come from X-Men: Civil War and X-Men: The 198.
Aconyte Books’s version of the Marvel universe hews closely to the comics, but with a few things shuffled around. One element of our shared setting, for example, comes from several years earlier in the comics, where there was a split between Cyclops and Wolverine that led to them founding rival mutant schools. The Xavier’s Institute novels focus on those. Domino: Strays didn’t touch on the split, but Outlaw: Relentless will.
ToW: What appeals to you about Outlaw as a character to write about? What sort of challenges or opportunities does she provide?
TP: Outlaw’s voice is a delight to write. Just like Domino: Strays, I knew right away that this story needed to be told in the first person. Prose gives her a big canvas to be herself. Sometimes whole paragraphs and pages would appear in my notebook where I felt like I was just transcribing what she was telling me.
West Texas is a big part of not only who she is, but who she wants to be seen as. She spends most of her time on the coasts, in cities. Partly, that’s because that’s where the action for a merc is easier to find. But it’s not the whole reason.
The biggest challenge with that voice is that Outlaw doesn’t want to talk about her vulnerabilities, and when something hurts. It takes her effort to spit it out. Since this is a story about Outlaw’s old wounds, she needed some coaxing to talk about it.
ToW: When we spoke about Domino: Strays you said you took inspiration for that book from reading a lot about cults. What were your inspirations and research subjects this time around?
TP: I have a complicated relationship with Westerns. For as many of the tropes that pull me in, there’s another that pushes right back out. I love just about anything with a sense of loneliness, tension, and desperation. And quiet personal struggles played out against a backdrop of all of the above plus violence. So many Westerns either romanticize the era or are so deeply involved with deconstructing works that do that they’re impenetrable to newcomers. I wanted to write a modern-day Western that married all the things that I like about the genre with Marvel’s style and Outlaw’s attitude.
ToW: What do you hope readers will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?
TP: A fun time! And some new thoughts about sharing weaknesses, letting your friends support you, and a need to read more about Outlaw, Domino, and their crew.
ToW: If someone enjoys this novel and wants to know more about Outlaw, do you have any recommendations for where to go next?
TP: Go to Gail Simone! Gail created Outlaw, and her runs on Agent X, Domino, and Hotshots feature Outlaw at her best. They’re some of the funnest comics I’ve read. If you have a Marvel Unlimited subscription, they’re all available there.
ToW: Now you’ve written novels about two of Domino’s merc crew, are you hoping/planning to write about more of them?
TP: Definitely. I’ve got things in the works that I can’t talk about yet, but some of the story threads picked up in Outlaw: Relentless haven’t been set down for good.
ToW: Finally, if you had to pick one of the mercenary mutants/superheroes you’ve written about Domino, Outlaw, Diamondback, White Fox, Black Widow etc. – to help you out of a dangerous situation, who would you call first and why?
TP: Toughest question yet! They’re all extremely good at their jobs, and I’d trust any of them with my life… but all of them exist in violent narrative universes, and the people around them don’t get exempted from that. With any of them, I’d get out of a dangerous situation alive, but probably beaten up, burned, bruised, and bloodied in different measures. I’d probably go with Diamondback, because a rescue in which her rescuee gets maimed would be a serious cramp on her style.
The other downside is that I’d probably owe them all money afterward, too. Hey, they’ve got bills to pay.
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Tristan Palmgren is the author of the critically acclaimed genre-warping blend of historical fiction and space opera novel Quietus, and its sequel Terminus. They live with their partner in Columbia, Missouri.
Check out Tristan’s website for more information.
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Thanks so much to Tristan for chatting to me for this interview, and for giving such fascinating answers about what sounds like another brilliant Marvel: Heroines novel! Outlaw: Relentless is available as a global ebook right now – the US paperback is due out on the 28th September, followed by the UK paperback on the 11th November.
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