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Do you remember The Forgotten Five? Probably not, the reason being that The Forgotten Five is actually a brand-new comic, which just launched this week via Patreon.
It’s written by the team of Alex Segura and Sara Century, with artwork by Pat Kennedy, letters by Chas! Pangburn, edits by Priya Saxena, and a logo by Travis Escarfullery. The debut chapter is up now, and it’s a fun, intriguing superhero setup romp.
I was so intrigued by this concept and opening salvo, that I made time to sit down with the co-writers and learn more about it. As such, you can find my recent interview with Segura and Century below … enjoy!
Alex Segura and Sara Century talk THE FORGOTTEN FIVE
ZACK QUAINTANE: How did this come together, had the two of you been wanting to collaborate for some time?
ALEX SEGURA: Sara and I became friends from Cerebro – Connor Goldsmith’s excellent X-Men podcast. I was just a fan – I listened to her talking about, like, Jean Grey and Rachel Summers. Eventually we became pals and just started chatting about different comics that we loved and found a lot of overlap. I forget if it was me or Sara who said “well what if they all went into a blender and became a comic that just ran for a while?” But that was the springboard. And we just started dropping ideas into a Google doc to see what stuck, and this is the result!
SARA CENTURY: Yes, the Cerebro connection is real! I already knew of Alex, I believe from reading the Arana and Spider-Man 2099 book, but I think our first actual conversations must have been about the X-Men. We both love 1980s comic book cliches like Claremontian prose, thought bubbles, and too many characters in every issue. My clearest memory is that Alex and I were both texting about our respective Vegan Thanksgivings back in 2023 right when we came up with the idea, so I’ll always associate the early days with my other favorite subject besides the X-Men; tofu! I was personally interested in this project because there was an opportunity to include the middle-aged versions of the characters. If we were going to introduce a new group of teen superheroes, I loved the idea of having their older selves involved in their own ongoing arc, sort of like Yellowjackets or Stephen King’s It, that sort of thing. It was one of the very first parts of the story that I distinctly remember us chatting about, and in my mind the rest kind of fell into place from there.
ZACK: How did Pat Kennedy then get involved, and what made him a great fit for this project?
SARA: Pat was Alex’s very correct suggestion for the book. I’m personally just a big fan of Pat’s. It’s a dream to see the TFF pages show up in my inbox. He’s really incredible.
ALEX: I’ve known Pat for a long time – he and his brother Tim, rest in peace, were two of my favorite “modern classic” Archie artists – which is to say they did classic stories for the digests…today. But my eyes were really opened when Pat moved from the digests to doing Jughead: The Hunger, one of the Archie Horror books I got to edit. Not only could he evoke DeCarlo and Lucey, but he could do more adult and genre stuff with power and flair. I remember just filing it away. We’d talked about collaborating on stuff over the years but never found the right fit until this, and Pat poured himself into the project. His designs are spectacular and he gets the conceit. I think the three of us really wanted to create the kind of series that feels modern, but also harkens back to an era where a series could run for a while, and the reader was braced for detours, subplots, and ongoing plot threads that didn’t naturally resolve in a mini-series or single issue. The book is not retro, by any means, but we put time into figuring out a business model that will hopefully allow us to do it for a stretch.
ZACK: I love the influences you can feel in these pages right from the start…can you walk me through some of them?
ALEX: I think the language we’ve been using – which isn’t to say we’re even in the ballpark of these runs, but that we think of them a lot, are Claremont X-Men, particularly the Outback era and Inferno, Jaime’s Locas, Giffen’s 5YL Legion, and early Drake/Premiani Doom Patrol…with the overall theme being about outcasts forced to grappled with not only their own problems, but the added burden of abilities they don’t want, and that aren’t, like, sexy or cool in the way of JLA or Avengers.
SARA: Definitely those have been our big touchstones for comics. We each have a couple of Forgotten Five playlists, too. I remember putting “Blue Light” by Mazzy Star on one of them and Alex replying with a crying emoji, so I would add that song to our influences. I listen to a lot of Kid Congo Powers, PJ Harvey, ESG, Grace Jones, and The Bags for TFF. I’m channeling a lot of cult or indie films from the 90s, or even some of the teen horror cycle like I Know What You Did Last Summer. Not to make it weird but I think Alex’s work also qualifies as one of my influences here because I was reading Alter Ego while we were working out the details.
ZACK: What’s the initial scope of this project and how long do you see it running?
ALEX: We’ve got the first two years laid out, plot-wise, and Pat, Sara, and I are onboard for the long haul. So the hope is that it’ll run for a good stretch. We definitely don’t see it as a mini-series or finite work. It’s the kind of book that we can hopefully drop any kind of idea into. And if we find some success on Patreon, we can collect, color (the comic is in black and white on the Patreon) and distribute the print edition to the direct and book markets once a year. That’s the hope, at least.
SARA: Our first task is to make it sustainable as it is, and then we’ll see how much we can add. I think one of the big downfalls of serialized storytelling today is that writers often have to cram a whole premise into eight episodes, or six issues, because a lot of the time that’s all the space you get. So a lot of great shows or comics can lose steam after their first arc because the story is so front-loaded. For TFF, even before we started scripting, we were intentional about not wanting to condense the story like that, and the only way that really seemed possible was by crowdfunding the project. Our main doc for TFF is like a hundred pages, so we’ve got ideas for days (possible decades). We’ll see how far we can go. For now, the goal is to make every single page absolutely bang.
ZACK: Finally, the tag on the Patreon says “with contributions from many friends”…can you elaborate just a little bit on that? Any friends in particular we might want to keep an eye out for?
ALEX: Yes, for sure! Chas! Pangburn, who was my first editor on Dick Tracy, is handling lettering, Priya Saxena is editing, X-podcasters supreme Connor Goldsmith and Chad Anderson are reading what we do and chiming in as needed, and my old Awakened collaborator, Dean Kotz, is gonna help with some special one-offs down the line. We definitely wanted to keep things tight in terms of the team, but the big vibe is we’re making a comic with our friends and enjoying the journey.
You can read The Forgotten Five now via Patreon!
English (US)