Brain Drain: Paul Jenkins Leaves DC, Writes Open Letter And Gives Interview Guaranteeing He Will Never Return

I’m about a week late to the party on this one, but the parade of talent walking away from DC Comics has added Paul Jenkins, who did the opening Deadman arc on DC Universe Presents, as well as a pretty decent fill-in on Stormwatch, and until recently was writing Batman: The Dark Knight.

Jenkins apparently has made the decision to walk away from both DC and Marvel to work exclusively for Boom Studios, currently writing Deathmatch for them. Which is fine; creators sometimes make the move to creator-owned comics from the Big Two – if I wrote comics, I’d be pounding on every indie publisher’s doors with creator owned ideas in the hopes of getting a TV contract and the keys to the Rich Guy’s Pissoir where Robert Kirkman currently pisses into Perrier.

Jenkins, however, rather than simply walking away to pursue his own projects, took a page from well-known people person Rob Liefeld and dynamited all his bridges by publishing an open letter regarding his reasons for leaving DC at Comic Book Resources:

I hope those reading this will agree the discussion will be worth their time. I feel that we are once again moving in the wrong direction, creatively. I’ve been down this road before, and it’s a road we can and should avoid. I don’t need to tell you what Greg Rucka and numerous other respected creators have already told you – that the Big Two have removed their focus away from the creators and towards the maintenance of the characters…

I know when it was a lot easier, and that was back in the days of Marvel Knights. In those times, Marvel had been in bankruptcy, and they had little choice but to allow the creators the freedom and trust that so many of us deserve… I look back on “Inhumans” and “Sentry,” on my Spidey runs with Bucky [Mark Buckingham] and Humberto [Ramos], and on various successes with “Wolverine: Origin” and others, and I know – because I was there – that they succeeded in large part because I was given freedom to create without being handicapped by editorial mandates. It just hasn’t been that way for a while. In recent years, I have watched, helpless, as editors made pointless and destructive changes to scripts and artwork that they had previously left alone. It bugs me that the creators were a primary focus when the mainstream publishers needed them, and now that the corporations are driving the boat, creative decisions are being made once again by shareholders.

Wow. Okay, there’s certainly an discussion to be had about the state of both Marvel and DC in the age of the blockbuster superhero movie, and after each publisher has either been bought up by a huge multinational corporation, or more closely folded into the huge multinational corporation who already owned them. God knows that, as a reader in the early 2000s, I felt like there was a sense of experimentation and a focus on new kinds of stories that I hadn’t felt from almost anyone outside of Vertigo Comics since the early 90s.

But I thought that DC’s New 52 was supposed to replicate that feeling by blowing continuity out of the water and starting over with A-List creators and allowing them to run wild with these long-running properties, right, Paul?

Right?

Gravity Doesn’t Suck: Stormwatch #7 Review

In reading Stormwatch #7, it occured to me that the best Stormwatch and Authority stories (and let’s face it: the New 52 Stormwatch is just The Authority with The Martian Manhunter) have been simple sci-fi and superhero comic tropes, only racked up on amphetamines and extrapolated out to their craziest violent extreme. Warren Ellis had them fight God. Mark Millar did great tales of the team fighting “The Avengers” (Sure, it was a pastiche of a famous superteam, but with personal and sexual problems… but up to a point, isn’t that all The Authority was?).

In this, writer Paul Jenkins, in his first issue on Stormwatch (First of two before Peter Milligan takes over), starts with an idea you could pull out of any Doc Savage story or early issue of Justice League of America – The Gravity Thieves! – and spins it out into a very dense-feeling, hard sci-fi(ish) story that, if not in league as the classic Ellis and Millar stories, at least it’s in the same ballpark, swinging for the fences.

The book hits pretty much every mark on the successful Authority story checklist. Weird sciency shit blowing people up in gruesome ways? Check; got that out of the way by the end of page two. Unknown, faceless entity demonstrating its power by taking out Big Gun Apollo? Yup; disembodied energy tentacles, to excite even the most darkly perverse hentai/tazer “enthusiast”. Find out that the threat is potentially extinction-level in nature to Earth? Hell, this one is capable of stealing gravity with their energy tentacles and wiping out all life in the known universe… possibly from being hit at high speed by hentai/tazer enthusiasts being flung through zero gravity in the opposite direction of their penises.

Because Stiffman’s Power Is COMPLETELY Different: DC Universe Presents: Deadman #1 Review

Deadman is one of those characters created in the 60’s that, if he hadn’t been drawn extensively by Neal Adams, probably wouldn’t exist today except maybe in a background shot of a Grant Morrison story written on a day when Grant was feeling a nostalgia for Silver Age DC ephemera almost as powerful as the peyote that’s probably fueling that nostalgia.

The concept behind Deadman is pretty ridiculous at its core for a superhero comic: a famous circus trapeze artist not named Wallenda (which was apparently something you could earn a living at in the days before cable TV and home video pornography) is shot to death by a sniper with one hand. He is then sent back to Earth as an invisible, undetectable ghost with the power to possess people. And he uses that power in the pursuit of justice, rather than the pursuit of possessing whoever happens to be banging Lindsey Lohan at this particular moment, or making Linda Blair gack up pea soup. Possibly while banging Lindsey Lohan. But I digress.

Seriously: Deadman’s power is to possess people, giving those people the ability to… do whatever those people could already do, only with a carny sense of humor. Which is a great character to have in your deck if you happen to need a deus ex machina (“Being invisible, I saw that The Joker fled to the playing card factory!”), or for a familiar character to suddenly start spitting out douchey jokes, (“I saw that The Joker fled to the playing card factory! Now pull Superman’s finger, Batman!”). It has it’s uses, but it’s not like Deadman’s ever been the kind of character that could ever anchor his own title.

Which is why, when I found DC Comic Presents: Deadman #1 in this week’s books, I dealt it to the bottom of the read pile. And why I was surprised that, when I did read it, I found it to be the sleeper hit in this Week’s New 52.