This month’s column is an interesting one for me; as a young teen, I rediscovered my childhood love of comics through Dan Jurgens’s Superman–a title that would stick with me until I was 19 and interning at Wizard Magazine, during which time I both spoke with Dan for the first time, and reported on the folks who would take over after he and his collaborators left. To this day, many of my favorite superhero stories come from that run, which defines Superman for me and has not, in my opinion, been paralleled since.Having something of a front-row seat to Dan’s second time around on the Man of Steel has been fascinating, informative and a distinct pleasure, and while I’ll follow his work to The Fury of Firestorm the Nuclear Man (which he will begin writing and drawing along with inker Ray McCarthy, who did Superman #12, with October’s #13), there’s still nothing quite like a Dan Jurgens Superman story.I’ve really enjoyed the last six issues, and been excited to have the opportunity to speak with my childhood hero about them without having to softball the questions; great work is the best friend of a reviewer who’s trying to stay on speaking terms with the artist.I like to think we’ve given some color commentary and context for what he, Keith Giffen, Jesus Merino and the other talented collaborators and editors working on the title have been trying to accomplish. And while their team is moving off Superman, to be replaced next month by Scott Lobdell and Kenneth Rocafort, I’ve been impressed by the work they’ve done these last six months and the sense of stability they’ve brought to the table in spite of what are now some pretty well-publicized challenges faced by the book following the departure of Dan’s predecessor George Perez.
Superman
The first thing, of course, has to be that DC announced this Wonder Woman thing on th esame day your issue came out, and Clark had a date. Was that a little awkward?
Have you been “in on” the plan from DC in terms of a Wonder Woman relationship?
Is that a Warners thing or a writers’ thing, do you think? Geoff is not averse to formalizing his old fan desires (see the Superboy-Lex thing he did in Teen Titans), and a great many fans want to see those two together.
Have you seen the digital edition of this issue? The guided view on ComiXology is very effective in the sequence where Superman is coming back to consciousness.
Everybody had the same reaction that I did–that there’s some Predator similarities in the design here. But was that on purpose?
Can I just pretend like this is the New 52 redesign of the Sauroids from Sun Devils? You know, for me?
Ray McCarthy is going to be your new inker on Fury of Firestorm. Is this the first time you’ve worked with him, though?
Green Arrow
Superman
It’s a very different approach to your work than Jesus’. More confident lines, but a bit less fluid. There’s more of a Romita feel. Do you think that’s fair?
You think that’ll work particularly well with a character like Firestorm, whose best days were at a time when that was one of the major styles of choice?
Firestorm
This is an interesting spin on the old “he’s just trying to get home and we’re persecuting him” trope that you get in things like E.T. and Starman (the John Carpenter version, not DC’s). Having him be not only a mass murderer but one who has no conception of what he’s done wrong is an interesting hitch to it.
And Superman, in the end, kind of decides “it’s probably better he got away.” Is that a segment of dialogue you have to write carefully to make sure he’s not coming off as too callous?
Obviously there’s a use for a guy with nuclear connections in Firestorm. Might we see you picking up on the Russian threads over there down the road?
So, the suit does indeed regenerate. Is that something that’ll help with the old issue that DC never particularly liked seeing Superman’s costume in tatters?
In spite of a somewhat larger scope and the fact that the good guy is winning–both of which seem to open it up a little bit–this fight scene is kind of an echo of last issue’s, in terms of being quick and brutal. As a two-part story, basically, was that a structural thing?
Is there anything special about the font that the creature used for most of the issue? I seem to remember that there was a uniform font DC was using for “alien languages” in the first few months of the New 52.
Is there something subtly political about this idea of a character who’s in enemy territory and says, essentially, “Your laws don’t apply to me”?
Is the tentacle monster a bio-weapon or something, or is it just a matter of a number of different species in the other dimension?
It’s interesting–you got that great splash page of Superman in front of the Daily Planet building this issue, and also the last page of Clark and Lucy bungee jumping. Do you think you’re the only artist ever to get splash pages of both Supes and Clark flying in the same issue?
Any last thoughts on leaving Superman? I mean, you were only here for an arc, but there are very few working artists more closely associated with the character than you are, so it feels somewhat bigger than that. Or is that just the readers?
