AUTHOR INTERVIEW: David Guymer Talks The Patriot List

Hello and welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, where today I’m delighted to be chatting to David Guymer about his new novel The Patriot List, the latest instalment in Aconyte Books’ range of Marvel: Untold novels. If you like the idea of a superhero novel where all the ‘heroes’ are actually villains…and especially if you’re a fan of David’s Hamilcar stories for Black Library…then this sounds like a book you’ll want to check out! It’s available now as a global ebook, with the US paperback due very soon and the UK paperback coming in November.

Here’s the synopsis, to give you a taste of what to expect:

S.H.I.E.L.D. is gone, the Avengers have fallen. All that stands in defence of the world are its greatest villains, the Dark Avengers, in this high-octane adventure from the Marvel Untold line

Under Norman Osborn’s jurisdiction, the Avengers have been secretly re-formed with a cabal of deadly super villains. This is Osborn’s chance to finally put the Green Goblin behind him and become the Iron Patriot the world needs him to be. But villains aren’t easy to wrangle into the place of heroes – doing damage control for his new line-up constantly puts his empire at risk. When S.H.I.E.L.D. loyalists break into Avengers Tower and steal the secret list of replacements for his team of maniacs, the threat to his reign becomes intolerable. Osborn unleashes the worst of the worst to crush those responsible… It’s hard to be a hero!

Sounds cool, right? Now that’s whetted your appetite, let’s get straight on with the interview.

Track of Words: To start things off, could you give us an overview of what The Patriot List is about?

David Guymer: The Patriot List, essentially, is a book about villains being their absolute worst selves whilst pretending to be good guys.

ToW: Before we go into more detail about the book, let’s talk about the Dark Avengers overall, because they sound super cool. For anyone who’s unfamiliar, what can you tell us about the Dark Avengers as an organisation, and how they fit in with the wider Marvel universe?

DG: Ok, quick Marvel history lesson…

The Dark Avengers kind of begin with the Thunderbolts, which was sort of a rehabilitation program for super villains, operated by the U.S. government and run by Norman Osborn. Formerly the Green Goblin, but totally better now. After the Secret Invasion storyline (teased in the end-credit sequence of Spider-Man: Far From Home for you MCU people) in which shapeshifting Skrull infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D. and replace the world’s best-known heroes, Osborn steps up to take over. He divvies up the running of the world within a group known as the Cabal, which includes Doom, Namor, Loki, Emma Frost, and the Hood and employs his Thunderbolt villains to masquerade as the real Avengers.

ToW: Who are the key members of the Dark Avengers in this story, and what do we need to know about them?

DG: Being a team affair, there’s a decent roster of “heroes” demanding screen time, so here goes…

Norman Osborn is arguably the main character here. He’s charismatic, a genius, but also a monomaniacal villain hungry for wealth and power. Having taken up residence in Avengers Tower, and claiming all Tony Stark’s stuff he now fights in a suit of Iron Man armour and has rebranded himself as the Iron Patriot

Second in command is the villain, Moonstone, who is pretending to be Ms. Marvel. She was formerly a psychiatrist, but went to prison for killing her patients.

Ares is the Olympian god of war and the world’s greatest badass. He’s in the Thor slot, obviously.

Venom, I’m sure most people will be familiar with, is a Spider-Man-like alien monster with the occasional tendency for eating people. In this period however, the Venom symbiote has abandoned its would-be hero host Eddie Brock in favour of the more unscrupulous Spider-Man villain, Scorpion.

Bullseye is standing in for Hawkeye. He’s one of the best-known Daredevil villains and has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I love him.

Daken is the son of Wolverine. He has retractable claws and healing powers, but also produces pheromones that can influence other people’s emotions to give him what he wants. He’s mostly screwing the world to annoy his dad.

The Sentry is basically Superman. Or God. He just happens to be a schizophrenic drug addict with an alter-ego who wants to destroy the universe. Once broke every bone in the Hulk’s body and defeated Galactus single-handed.

And finally we have Victoria Hand, who’s not technically a member of the Dark Avengers but is Norman Osborn’s right hand as Deputy Director of H.A.M.M.E.R. (the organization that he set up to replace S.H.I.E.L.D.) She is a rare good person in all of this, genuinely believing that Norman Osborn is the guy who will do what Stark, Fury and Rogers never could, and finally bring some order and security to the world.

ToW: When you set out to write a Marvel novel, what made you choose to write about the Dark Avengers, out of all the possible Marvel characters?

DG: We had a list of suggestions from Marvel and the Dark Avengers were on it. I did pitch for someone else at the start, Mysterio I think, but I’m not unhappy that Marvel liked my proposal for the Dark Avengers more. Even though I wasn’t familiar with who the Dark Avengers were at the time they lured me in with a recognisable name (even my mum knows who the Avengers are now) and, coming from a limited run of comics, less homework! Of course, after reading the Dark Avengers comics I ended up reading back through the Thunderbolts comics too, and the Dark Reign, and the Secret Warriors, and on, and on, but the idea was sound in theory.

ToW: How did you find writing a novel where essentially all the main characters are villains? Is it more fun writing about villains than heroes, or is it harder to make them relatable enough for readers to want to read about them?

DG: Writing this book was tremendously good fun. Possibly too much fun. The kind you wonder if you shouldn’t be feeling guilty about. What with lockdowns and things, you see, I didn’t know my Aconyte editors nearly as well as I do those at Black Library, and I did start to worry what they would think of me for taking such obvious glee in a tool like Bullseye. I actually started to self-censor some of what came out of his mouth somewhat, though I doubt you’d be able to tell from reading it.

Making Villains Relatable 101 is to lend them some kind of redeemable quality or to pit them against an adversary who’s even worse. Now, Daken and Bullseye have no redeemable qualities that I’ve been able to notice, but fortunately Norman Osborn is, in spite of his very relatable and human issues, about ten times worse. As a result, it all works quite nicely, even though the “villains” of this book are technically heroes.

ToW: Where did you look for influences and inspiration while writing about these characters? Was it a case of focusing on their depictions in the comics, or did you draw from other sources outside of Marvel as well?

DG: I took my lead exclusively from the comics, ignoring the depictions of the MCU as much as possible although, I’m sorry, Willem Dafoe will always be the voice of my Norman Osborn even if his look is from the comics.

It’s unusual for me to take musical inspiration, but I first heard King for a Day by Battle Beast while writing this book and it so perfectly fit my characterization of Osborn and the plot of the book that it became a sort of unofficial theme for the novel. I listened to it every day before writing his scenes and imagined it playing whenever he entered the room! The original Dark Avengers comics came out in 2009 but, looking at the world from the heady vantage of 2021, let’s just say that there are plenty of contemporary influences for Norman Osborn in modern American politics.

To anyone familiar with my Age of Sigmar work for Black Library, there’s also a powerful strain of Hamilcar Bear-Eater in this book. In the sense that it’s about larger-than-life characters doing outrageous things, saying what they really think, and getting away with it. I wonder what it says about me that that seems to come so naturally.

The final credit goes to my dad. There’s definitely a little bit of him in my Bullseye.

ToW: How much of a Marvel fan were you before you wrote this? You’ve written for lots of different IPs already, but how does it feel to have written a Marvel novel now?

DG: I confess to being something of a warm weather fan before coming to write this. Comics somehow passed me by in my childhood, which is absurd as I was into everything else, but there you go. My main introduction to Marvel then was the X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons that were on TV in the 90s, and then the early movies of the 00s. I dipped tentatively into comics more recently with Hellboy, Constantine, and a couple of issues of Deadpool, but it was only after all the reading I did for Patriot List that I really got into it. I have my Marvel Unlimited subscription now, just renewed for a second year, so it looks like I’m hooked.

Writing for Marvel is definitely a wonderful thing to be able to say out loud. I have now “made it” in some ineffable way.

ToW: If someone loves this and wants to read more about the Dark Avengers, do you have any recommendations for where they should start with the comic books?

DG: I’d suggest they do exactly what I did. Read the Dark Avengers’ run of 20-or-so comics. Then expand into the Dark Reign storyline which basically explores the same period but from the perspective of other characters like the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. Then go back to the Thunderbolts, read through the Secret Invasion, and see how it all came to be.

ToW: What do you hope readers will get out of The Patriot List by the time they’ve finished it?

DG: As always, I hope they have a good time and then go tell their friends. All I ever try to do is entertain.

ToW: Can you tell us anything about what you’re working on with Aconyte for future release, or anything else you’ve got in the pipeline in general?

DG: I have a couple of books planned with Aconyte, but I probably can’t say much more than that at this point. I have two Age of Sigmar books already written for Black Library, which are probably stuck somewhere in the pandemic pipe waiting to come out. Likewise a clutch of short stories and audio scripts. I’m also just starting work on another novel for Black Library which I definitely can’t tell you about.

ToW: Lastly, if you could call on one of the Dark Avengers to help you out of a tight spot, which one would it be and why?

DG: Ouch, good question. Discounting Victoria Hand and Noh-Varr (because one of them isn’t in my book and the other one would totally be cheating), I’d probably go for Ares. As well as being the second most powerful member of the team, he’s relatively stable and honourable and is probably the least likely to accidentally (or deliberately) kill me in the process of my rescue.

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David Guymer is a scientist and writer from England. His work includes many novels in the New York Times-bestselling Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes, notably Headtaker and Gotrek & Felix: Slayer, and the bestselling audio drama Realmslayer. He has also contributed to fantastical worlds in video games, tabletop RPGs, and board games.

Follow David on Twitter.

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Thanks so much to David for chatting to me for this interview, and for giving us the lowdown on The Patriot List. It sounds like a real blast, I’m looking forward to reading this one! The Patriot List is available as a global ebook right now – the US paperback is due out on the 12th October, followed by the UK paperback on the 25th November.

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