On Tuesday, August 31, 2011, “Justice League” #1 dropped, officially beginning the experiment known as the New 52. DC Comics was not just relaunching all of its titles, it was doing so in a new, clean(er) continuity, in an attempt to revitalize and enthuse the fan base. It was an unprecedented move that bore good, bad, and mediocre comics.
Over the next year, we’ll be discussing each of the New 52 titles with a member of its creative team. We’re not taking any clear path through these books, but hopping from title to title, line to line, in an effort to spotlight the breadth of the initiative.
Today, we’re chatting with Justin Jordan. Justin, who first came to prominence as the writer of the “Luther Strode” trilogy for Image Comics, wrote a number of books in the New 52, including “Team 7,” “Superboy,” and “Deathstroke.” Today, we are discussing “Green Lantern: New Guardians.” Justin came on the book after Tony Bedard wrapped up his run, along with all the other “Green Lantern” titles coming to a pause in the action after the departure of head writer Geoff Johns.
Justin is currently writing “Urban Animal” for WEBTOON, and can be found on Twitter, @Justin_Jordan.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You came on to “Green Lantern: New Guardians” right as Geoff Johns was ending his multi year Green Lantern story. There were a number of creators brought in to tell this next generation of Green Lantern stories. Did you pitch them on this book, or did someone come to you and say, “Hey, how would you like to feel about pitching “New Guardians?”
Justin Jordan: Kind of neither. I have had a weird career, in that, almost entirely for my work for hire at Marvel and DC, I’ve never really had to pitch anything. They’ve always come to me and been like, “Hey, this thing needs doing? Do you want to do it?” And I’ll either say yes or no, which was the case of “New Guardians.” And frankly, at DC, I think a large part of that was the perception that I was good at putting out fires. With the exception of “The Curse of Brimstone” and “Sideways,” every title that I worked on at DC, I came on really late in the production cycle. But like even books that I was the first person to write, say “Team 7,” we were already late, when we started doing the book, despite me being the person who “created” the book. So this one is a bit like that. So I got asked to do it, like, you know, fairly late in the thing, and I think I was, I don’t know this for a fact, but I think I was maybe the last person to be asked to come aboard those titles, and do “New Guardians,” which turned out to be a boon. But yeah, that was less a matter of me pitching to get the book and more of them going, “we want you to write ‘New Guardians,’ and we have a couple of things that need to happen with it.”
When they asked me to do it, they were basically setting up a new status quo that in the main “Green Lantern” book, they had found these Templar Guardians, which were Guardians of the Universe who had been basically sealed in a temple for billions of years, and they had gotten out. They were basically doing like a tour of the universe with Kyle Rayner as their guide, and they wanted me to do that. And in the main title, I don’t remember if this was just doing or if it was something that Rob [Veditti] did, he was going to do, but they were having relationship issues between Hal and Carol. And so they wanted Carol to be in the book and they asked me if, you know, we could find a way that gives Kyle and Carol a bit of a kind of romance arc. And that was basically my remit for the book; after that I could kind of do what I wanted, you know, with approval and that kind of stuff. But in terms of the editorial kind of top down, those were sort of the only things that I had to do. And so when I was doing the book, I actually thought of it as my Star Trek book, in that I intentionally wanted to just expand the DC Universe. You know, I wanted to create new worlds and show new stuff rather than just retreading alien races and stuff we’d seen. I wanted to do each one to kind of highlight something that was going on with Kyle, and we had this kind of developing plot about what was going on with Kyle and the White Lantern powers and that kind of stuff. I really liked working with Matt Adelson and Chris Conroy on that book, were my editors. Chris is now the Black Label guy and Matt has moved on to Dynamite, but it ended up being a really positive experience. So there’s no scoop there. Alas, it was a good book to be on.
Continued belowNow how did you feel about having to make Kyle and Carol have some sort of romantic interest? Because to me, and I know that this is like silly fanboy shit to a certain degree, but I always thought of Hal as being so much older than Kyle, that this felt like a little bit of a May/December romance. And I know that in the New 52, that wasn’t really the case. But how did you feel about pairing those two characters together romantically?
JJ: I didn’t mind. And part of that is I don’t have strong feelings for the Green Lantern universe. And I don’t mean that I don’t like the Green Lantern stuff. But it is not an aspect of the DC Universe I was ever super into. So it’s one of those like, you know, it’s not like, hey, we want Batman to have a romance with the Joker, in which case, you might have gotten kind of a stronger, more visceral reaction out of me. And now I kind of want to do that.
So I thought about it, and when I was looking at it, it’s just the nature of Carol’s powers and how they are kind of rooted in love. It made a certain amount of sense to me to have been doing that, if only to explore her powers and what kind of love would satisfy her. And what it meant to be Carol. The May/December thing did actually come up in the behind the scenes discussion, and the memories are foggy, but we definitely talked about it. I think what we worked out – and this was never codified into continuity – was that I think Kyle was around 25 in the New 52, Carol was like 30ish and Hal was like 35? 25 and 30 didn’t didn’t seem like an unreasonable sort of gap for me between those two. So no, I didn’t mind doing it.
Fans of Green Lantern are really into it and they had pretty strong opinions about the Kyle and Carol thing, which was actually fascinating to me in a way that was a little inside baseball. I sort of admire the ability of fans to become lost in the moment, for lack of a better way of putting it. By which I mean, I think all of us know sort of intellectually that Hal and Carol we’re going to get together again because the status quo always wins in comics. You can break up Peter Parker and MJ but they’re going to get back together. So I know that my reaction to it is different, but I was impressed by fans who act as if Hal and Carol are never getting back together and they have a really visceral emotional reaction to it. I do actually admire that; I wish I were able to engage with fiction that way. There were a fair amount of people who were not happy with that choice and it’s also the nature of the thing where I wasn’t about to throw editorial under the bus and be like “oh they asked me to do it.” I get it, but it was interesting to see that reaction and I was glad that people were engaged on that level, even if I took a little bit of abuse.
So I imagine that the Lantern titles were probably edited by the same couple of folks. And so I’m sure there was a pretty clear mission as to sort of how things were going to move. I know, you said you had a couple of sort of bullet points you had to work into your run. Was there any sense given that “we want these books to dovetail at a certain point?” Or was it pretty much whatever you wanted to do?
JJ: The answer to both of those is yes. Yes, there was a sense they had to dovetail at a certain point. And yes, we could do what we wanted, which sounds contradictory. The upshot of that was that everybody that was writing those books at the time, which was me, Rob [Venditti], Van [Jensen], Charles [Soul], and Cullen [Bunn] eventually got involved, we’re all friendly, and knew each other. And we also realized, and we talked with Matt and Chris from the get go, so when we started the books, the event that sort of started it all was ‘Lights Out,’ which introduced a character called Relic to the universe and up and that was mandated, to a certain extent. And so we did that, and I thought it was a good crossover. But we knew, and this was not coming from editorial, but we knew that we were going to have to do at least a yearly crossover between the four books. That’s just how it is. But since we all knew and liked each other, and Matt and Chris were cool with it, we were able to basically coordinate what that crossover was going to be and basically decided earlier, and it would, it would end up being ‘Godhead.’ That was something that like we came up with that was something we pitched DC and sold them on. We were able to craft our stories around that, knowing that we were eventually going to have to tail them together and have some interactivity when that actual crossover happened. So yes, we were intentionally writing stuff and dovetailing it together, but it was more of a bottom up thing than a top down animal, if that makes sense.
Continued belowI know that Josh Fialkov was originally supposed to be writing “Red Lanterns” and then that changed. Did anything ever change because of that creator or other creators coming and going from the books? Or was the editorial landscape sort of strong enough that you were able to, you know, take those blows and not necessarily have it affect the work too much?
JJ: No, it was definitely the latter. The thing was, once we got going, it was all fairly stable. Matt and Chris are very good editors and they were able to show the philosophy of what would have come down from on top, but also, I always had the sense that for the most part, once Geoff left the “Green Lantern” titles, for whatever reason, editorial higher up the chain just didn’t care. We got less scrutiny on those books than I did on any of the other big titles I did, in terms of we were kind of left to do what we want. So we were able to ride stuff out pretty well. It didn’t end up being much of an issue because we were kind of doing our own thing. Matt and Chris were the only kind of masters we had to please.
When you and I spoke in the past about the New 52, I think it was, maybe at the start of your “New Guardians” run, you had talked about the editorial nightmares that were coming from having a lot of different voices in your ears.
JJ: Yeah.
Did that continue with “New Guardians?” I know you said they were leaving you alone, so I would guess that’s not the case.
JJ: For “New Guardians,” that was mostly not the case. For “Team 7” and “Superboy” and “Deathstroke” to varying degrees, yes. “Team 7” the most. We really were getting a lot of conflicting voices, there were too many editorial hands. You know, too many cooks in the kitchen. And honestly, I love Dan DiDio, and Dan and I are friends. Dan is very good at some things, but Dan also changes his mind a lot. And it is really hard to make really good comics when the remit of your comic changes from one issue to the next. You have to kind of internally retcon stuff and work with, you know, all these kinds of things. I think Dan said as much, they didn’t really have a plan other than ‘we’re going to reboot the universe with 52 books and see what sticks.’ And that’s fine. In a sense, I admire the tenacity. And I think New 52 was a worthy thing because of that. But as somebody writing within it, it was just sort of nightmarish, partly because there was just stuff that nobody knew what one character was doing and frankly, if you were going to do what they did, you needed less of an editorial bottleneck at the top. And yet you also needed more editorial; you needed more editors to do that.
So you would have stuff like there was a character who was appearing in “Team 7,” and I was like, “has this character appeared in the New 52?” And they’re like, “nope,” which was wrong. And like, so it was very much a matter of like one hand to know what the other hand was doing for a lot of that stuff. That combined with constantly changing editorial mandates from above made things tough, even though for the most part for the Green Lantern line that was not an issue. They kind of let us have our own chunk of the universe and do our own thing. That was more of an issue when it came to the other books that I did.
You were on “New Guardians” for the better part of two years from issue 21 to the final issue at number 40. How far out did you know that that series is gonna be coming to a close?
JJ: Oh, a long ways. The series ending was not my choice, but the final issue I did, I had told them ahead of time that that was going to be the end of my run. They decided to end that iteration of the book with it. So that again, was sort of a bottom up sort of thing. Issue 40 is where this run is ending more or less. I’m coming to the end of this particular arc, which is Kyle dealing with the consequences of having the White Lantern thing. So it’s either bail off the book, or come up with a new sort of concept for the book. I thought I’ve done all I needed to do with Kyle and the Green Lantern stuff. They probably would have ended it anyhow, but the fact that it was issue 40 was my last issue with me making the choice rather than the book ending.
Continued belowDid you feel like you were able to tell more or less the story that you set out to tell in that book?
JJ: Yes, pretty much, for better for worse. If that book sucks, it is not because I had editorial issues. I set out to tell a certain story in a certain way, and I was actually able to do that, which I’m really grateful for. I am actually still very fond of that run, I thought it was a strong story and I thought we brought it to an interesting conclusion. I will admit, I have enough ego that I’m a little disappointed that nobody has picked up on the various things that we did in it since the run ended. I thought we introduced some cool characters to the universe, and set up some situations that basically no one ever picked up on again.
How much of that is probably because there really hasn’t been multiple Green Lantern books like that since?
JJ: I would guess that probably a decent chunk of it. I know when Tom King went to write “The Omega Men,” we chatted a little bit about Kyle and that kind of stuff. But like, you know, Brad Walker and I created characters like the Godkillers and stuff that I thought were super cool.
Looking back on the New 52 In general, do you think that it was more or less a good initiative for DC and for comics in general? And what do you think is the sort of overall lasting legacy of the New 52?
JJ: That’s a complicated question. So there are two ways to look at that. I think, from a business standpoint, and an industry standpoint, it was a great idea. I think it was a necessary idea, given the state of where DC was then and how the universe and how the industry was going. I think they had to do it. Creatively, I think it was a mixed bag. Some of the books that spawned out of New 52 were really good, and some weren’t. And I wish they had had more of a plan kind of going into it, and that they were sort of willing to let the creative team do their own thing. I think the books that distinguished themselves out of the New 52 are the ones that, for one reason or another, got the least amount of interference. You know what I mean? I think Scott [Synder]’s run on “Batman” was really excellent and part of that is that Scott had enough clout and has the right kind of personality to sort of shrug off a lot of the slings and arrows of editorial which, you know, good on him.
He also had Mike Martz as his editor, and Mike can be pretty protective of his writers.
JJ: He was, and I have a lot of good things to say about Mike as an editor and a person. Matt and Chris are some of the finest editors I’ve ever worked with and I genuinely do not know how well we were able to do Green Lantern run comes down to them. I don’t know how much they were sheltering us from stuff, but my suspicion is probably a lot. And the further I get along from it, I think the more credit they probably deserved for that run. So in general, I think the New 52 was a good sort of thing. I don’t think love the reboot happy environment that it spawned at DC afterwards, which is in what 10 years, it’s kind of rebooted, like four times?
I think it’s the same sort of animal as what’s like the Dark Age of Comics, right? “Watchmen” and “The Dark Knight Returns” did well, so we got to do a lot more of that. It’s like, the New 52 did well, so we need to reboot all the time. And I I don’t know that that is a good legacy. I think it was a necessary step that could have been executed better, but produced a mixed bag of titles. You know, I’m glad that it happened. And certainly it’s worked to my benefit. I don’t know if the New 52 was not the environment that was happening when I was moving into writing comics professionally that I would have gotten at DC. DC has given me a lot of work and I’ve had a good relationship with DC over the years. I still think the”New Guardians” run was really good. I am proud of what we did with “Curse of Brimstone.” I think it turned out to be a good book, and that kind of stuff and that stuff wouldn’t have happened without the New 52. Some of it was miserable and some of it was awesome.
