Following an unassuming one-shot- Bloodshot #0, with art by ChrisCross-Kindt has slowly worked his way across the entire fictional universe, first in books like Rai (a cyberpunk murder mystery with art by Clayton Crain) and Unity (a big ol’ team book with art mostly by Doug Braithwaite), then slowly running amok in giant crossovers like The Valiant, introducing the first new hero (and communist deity) to the relaunched Valiant canon in the Divinity tetralogy, and crafting a weird genre-bending spy-ninja thriller in Ninjak. This is the approach that Kindt has spent the last four years bringing to Valiant Comics. He’s deceptively straightforward, without much flair or showmanship, but has complete faith in the bigness of his ideas and the humanity at their core.

His prose is simple, his plotting clean, his mysteries constructed around you as you read them. Whether or not he’s collaborating with another artist, Kindt’s narratives have a way of fitting together that feels very deliberate. In a way, it feels like he’s constructing them in real time, right in front of you. Kindt makes comics a bit like puzzles-not the sort that is designed to stump, but the kind that employs the form and function of comics and genre to methodically craft stories.

“I can draw lines from everything else I like! There’s a natural progression from one thing to the next.” You can see it in his bibliography: the crime and spies, psychics and science fiction of Pistolwhip, Revolver and MIND MGMT. We’ve been talking for an hour, and Matt Kindt-a man who made a name for himself by crafting twisting, intricate narratives about spies and psychic manipulators complete with subliminal puzzles and clues-is struggling to tell me why he likes Conan the Barbarian so much.

Divinity by Matt Kindt