The bi-monthly series will focus on the titular Scarlet, a woman who "is pushed down by a very corrupt government and finds herself with the strength she didn't know she had to fight back, and her fight actually sparks a new American Revolution," elaborates Bendis. "It's a book that starts very small, but then gets very large very quickly. It was inspired in part by writers like Paddy Chayefsky, who [wrote the movie] 'Network.' He created this world that was almost a parody [of our own], and then all of a sudden [we realize] it's actually the world we live in."
As such, Bendis sees a great deal of overlap between the real America and the America that Scarlet inhabits.
"You read the paper every day-and this isn't about politics or anything like that-but it does seem like, if we woke up and someone started a revolutionary war, I don't know how shocked we would be," laughs the writer. "We'd be a little like, 'Yeah, I can see where that was coming from.' I see the anger and some of it I understand and some of it I don't, and I just wanted to write about it.
"The book takes place in Portland to start. I live in Portland, and [it's] a town filled with protests. There's a lot of really sincere protesting, and I always look at it and go, 'Yeah, you feel better, but nothing will happen from this protest. Nothing has ever happened because of a protest, ever.' And I thought, what if one of these people-and I'm even one of these people-someone who's pushed like this, finds himself with the strength to push [back] farther than you could ever have imagined."
