The summer before NetEase released Marvel Rivals, the wildly popular 6v6 hero shooter, a Marvel editor reached out to writer Paul Allor, asking if they might be interested in writing a little comic series to accompany the game called Marvel Rivals Infinity Comic. This wasn’t Allor’s first time writing superheroes over their 14-year career, though as they tell it, it probably wasn’t the quality of their work that brought Marvel knocking.
“I suspect I was recommended by Marvel’s talent manager as someone who can get something done on a quick timeline,” Allor said in a July 3 interview with Polygon. “None of us knew [Rivals] would end up being the phenomenon it became. At the time, [Infinity] was just planned as a six-issue thing with just a chance of appearing in print. I don’t think anyone expected it to go beyond that, so [in hindsight] I feel like I really lucked out getting this.”
Marvel might’ve had turnaround times and tight deadlines in mind when they chose the writer for Marvel Rivals Infinity. However, Allor’s creative philosophy turned out to be a perfect fit for the many challenges on the project. Allor’s writing is also one of the reasons the comic series went from a one-off promotional thing to an in-demand, permanent fixture accompanying new seasons in the game.
Image: Paul Allor
Allor’s professional writing career started as far removed from comics as you can get, unless you’re Clark Kent: They were a journalist. While they dabbled in various writing styles and enjoyed reading a wide range of books, comics played little role in Allor’s life until their late 20s when, by chance one Christmas, they received a comic from a colleague in a Secret Santa swap (a volume of Astonishing X-Men) and experienced a minor epiphany.
“I’d written prose work before,” Allor said. “Then I realized, oh wait… this is something that I think I might enjoy doing. I really liked the format, the interplay between the words and drawings, and the different things you can do with that.”
So Allor started writing comics, creating one-shots, a 20-issue set, mini-series, and more, totalling roughly 2,000 pages of work they say no eyes but their own will ever see. They took a class (that they now teach) on writing standalone five-page pieces with Comics Experience, a platform where experienced writers and artists teach courses on everything from writing to color theory.
All this eventually led to their first published comic in 2011, Clockwork, a standalone collection of 12 five-page stories spanning different genres and with art from multiple creators. Allor said they sent it out in an act akin to “carpet-bombing the industry,” but the persistence in getting Clockwork in front of people paid off with opportunities to pitch elsewhere for original and licensed projects. Allor pitched on everything from Godzilla, which they didn’t land a commission for until later, to G.I. Joe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the latter of which ended up being their first major commission with a licensed property.
Allor refined a particular approach to storytelling in the three years between Clockwork and their early work on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They see everything as a possible source of inspiration and intentionally seek out mediums and storytelling styles outside their preference zone for a chance to tell a story that stirs emotions or casts light on a human problem.
Image: NetEase Games
“People do tend to think of a very closed cage of influences [writers] can have,” Allor said. “I feel like a lot of comics are influenced only by other comics and a handful of movies from the ’80s, and it starts to feel like you’re making a clone of a clone of a clone. I think the way to combat that is to very consciously try to bring in a lot of different ideas and different voices.”
For TMNT Universe, that voice was a ‘70s-style action movie to help give some extra tension and energy to a scenario where the turtles had to join their enemies to fend off foes and hold their position. For Tet, Allor’s Vietnam War series, it was Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (“He has this way of holding off on information that the reader needs to know until the point where it will be the most devastating,” Allor said) and the piercing social commentary of British espionage novelist Graham Greene’s work.
When Hasbro wanted to reboot G.I. Joe in the mid-2010s to focus more on military people and less on the institution itself, Allor looked to what they call “the trend lines of society” and ended up with one of their favorite works to date. Cobra became a prominent global force instead of a shadow organization in Allor’s reboot, ruling through oppression and kidnapping dissenters off the street, and instead of military fighters, it was average civilians recruited into special ops who became the heroes. Allor also used the project as an opportunity to examine the social and emotional problems that veterans face during and after their service, with one such issue of the series even winning the SAVE National Media Award for Excellence in Reporting on Suicide for its depiction of mental health trauma among veterans.
Allor’s broad range of interests and their talent for using those interests to tell unique, evocative stories was exactly the kind of approach that Marvel Rivals Infinity required, even if no one realized it when the project initially began. The inaugural series needed two teams of six characters, mirroring Rivals’ in-game matches, and they needed a reason to use their Team-Up Abilities, which was a daunting enough brief considering Allor only had 36 pages to work with. However, they also needed to include Spider-Zero and the Master Weaver to coincide with the first season’s Tokyo 2099 setting, along with Galacta as a narrator-slash-master of ceremonies.
It’s the kind of logistical problem Allor loves to tackle.
Image: NetEase Games
“What’s fun to me is trying to tell a great story, while also having to solve this puzzle,” Allor said. “You’re taking away the biggest tool in the toolbox for a Marvel comics writer, which is the history that these characters have together. [Rivals] characters have no history and come from all these different worlds, so you have to figure out their motivations and why they would even care about each other.”
With the boundaries of franchise and timelines removed, Allor was free to pick a direction they thought would be interesting and decided relationships and value clashes were the best foundations for the series. They spent hours watching footage from the Marvel Rivals beta and scouring wikis where eager fans were already compiling collections of character voice lines to get an idea of which heroes and villains might have the most interesting chemistry to work with.
One of Allor’s favorites ended up being the relationship between Jeff the Land Shark and Namor, which grew into a subplot running through the Season 0 comics. The setup came about entirely by chance after Allor heard a voice line from Daniel Marin, Namor’s voice actor, where the Sub-Mariner asks Jeff whether he wants to take over the world together. Allor said Marin’s delivery sparked a completely new idea for how to handle these characters and prompted them to rewrite the story, the final version of which sees Jeff neglected by the other heroes and eager to lend his penchant for mischief to Namor’s cause as a result.
Then there’s the challenge of working with more than 30 heroes and hundreds of years of combined publishing history written by dozens of different authors. One of the more noteworthy examples of this kind of problem is the case of Peni Parker’s parentage. Gerard Way — yes, that Gerard Way — only called her father SP//dr. He outlined a loose relationship with Peter Parker’s “Uncle Ben” and “Aunt May,” who may or may not have been SP//dr’s blood relatives, but never gave SP//dr a name. He’s also rarely discussed again in the Peni Parker comics or elsewhere in the Spider-verse. Allor thought Peni had a more direct connection to Peter, that Peter was perhaps SP//dr in another timeline, and wrote the initial Marvel Rivals Infinity comic with that in mind.
“And then Marvel — it wasn’t even Marvel Games, it was Marvel proper — they were like, ‘No… [her father is] Richard Parker,’” Allor said. “Art was already coming in, so that’s what I rewrote it for, trying to do damage control halfway through the process. So I have Peni call him Richard Parker, and Peter’s like ‘Oh, we’ve had a horrible misunderstanding here!’ The continuity is sometimes very confusing.”
Image: NetEase Games
Allor sorted everything out and delivered on time for Marvel Rivals Infinity to release alongside the game. Readers heckled Allor over character pairings in the comics, pointing out how inefficient a team with several Vanguards (defensive characters in Rivals) would be — “I’m writing a comic, not playing a game!” Allor laughed — but the overall reaction was positive, more than anyone could have predicted. NetEase and Marvel decided to make this an ongoing series to accompany each season of the game, starting with Season 2, the introduction of Ultron, and a summer vacation-style beach story paired with clashing mutants. Allor tackled more logistical obstacles (what would Emma Frost, Storm, and Captain America possibly fight over?), landed more surprise victories (letting Emma Frost call Captain America a fascist government’s science experiment), and ensured Marvel Rivals Infinity would come back for a third round, coinciding with Season 3’s focus on Klyntar, planet of the symbiotes.
Klyntar presented another kind of challenge. This time, it wasn’t having to tease out specific pieces of lore to understand minute details. In Klyntar’s case, there’s practically no lore at all. Allor trawled through past representations of the planet and came up with almost nothing, and Rivals and Venom editor Jordan White told them it wasn’t that they were looking in the wrong place. In the 60 years since symbiotes started appearing in Marvel comics, Klyntar has only ever been a place where the creatures exist and a base for the supervillain Knull, a location so infrequently visited that each artist who depicted it came up with their own interpretation, none of which became the official version of the planet.
Klyntar was this big challenge for the series, but Blade, one of Season 3’s new characters, was an even bigger opportunity. Past representations of the hero, including New Line Cinema’s Blade film trilogy, put the vampire hunter through the physical and emotional ringer, but took little time to explore what those horrors do to Blade as a person. Rivals’ first season brought Blade and Dracula back together, a nod to Blade’s first appearance as a supporting character in 1973’s The Tomb of Dracula. Allor decided this was a good opportunity for some introspection and character development.
Image: NetEase Games via Polygon
“Blade is seen as being the quintessential tough guy, and he definitely is, but he’s also incredibly vulnerable,” Allor said. “He has all kinds of abandonment issues, and a deep need for human connection, so he’s constructed this tough loner persona to hide the fact that he’s basically just a giant emotional wound, walking around in humanoid form.”
“It’s great to focus on fewer characters, to give them more room to breathe, but I was also very excited to focus on Blade in particular.”
While the Season 3 set still includes characters who aren’t Blade and Shuri, Black Panther’s sister and Blade’s companion for the series, letting just one story be the primary focus is a marked change from the Season 0 comics, with its baker’s dozen of protagonists, and Season 2’s mutant mutiny. How Marvel Rivals Infinity will continue evolving is uncertain. However, the series’ success and Allor’s approach to its myriad challenges have given Marvel and NetEase enough confidence to consider less orthodox approaches to creating this new branch of Marvel canon. One of Allor’s most recent pitches involved a storyline inspired by Martin Scorsese’s surrealist film After Hours, and Marvel approved it without question.
From a 36-page one-off to a surrealist dream inspired by Scorsese in less than 12 months – not bad for a quick turnaround project. It’s a lot to digest, but that’s exactly how Allor likes it.
“Writing these stories is like working to prepare a complex and refreshing meal, with a constantly shifting list of ingredients,” they said, so it’s little surprise when asked to describe the Marvel Rivals comics and the last 12 months of working on it, they summed it up in one word: “Epicurean.”
