DE: Who’s the funniest League character for you?
JD: I always loved Blue Beetle.
DE: I figured it would be him or Booster Gold.
JD: It’s funny, Booster Gold was a guy from the
far future but he made the same jokes as everyone
else. There was something about Beetle and Booster,
their friendship and banter that I really related to.
I loved using the Martian Manhunter in the book and I
can’t wait until he shows up with the JLA in the new
series. One character Keith and I both loved, I’m
sure everyone will roll their eyes, was G’Nort, the
lame dog Green Lantern. He had an uncle in the Green
Lantern Corps who got him in. He was just totally
absurd. He was like an early Woody Allen character
mixed with Ed Norton from The Honeymooners. I’ve
successfully lobbied to get G’Nort in the new book.
DE: Maybe you’ll kill G’Nort?
JD: I would never do that. I would kill Superman
before killing G’Nort.
DE: Are the new chocolate covered Oreos going to
make an appearance? They’re really good.
JD: I’ll have to mention that to Keith.
DE: What did you think of Grant Morrison’s run on
JLA?
JD: I’ve been doing this professionally for so
many years that it’s almost impossible for me to
read anything objectively. It’s very rare that I get
engaged like I’m a twelve year old reading a comic
again. Will Eisner can still do that to me. That said,
if I was a twelve-year-old kid reading comic books
when this book was coming out I would have thought it
was the greatest superhero comic in the world. It had
everything that a mainstream superhero comic should
have. I thought Morrison did a fantastic job. It felt
like he did it very consciously. Like he sat down and
figured out what this book needed in order to get a
specific reaction.
DE: I was little surprised that someone that had
been in the business for as long as you have would
want to write the Hal Jordan as the Spectre.
JD: I grew up with the Hal Jordan Green Lantern.
That was part of my childhood. I wasn’t even aware
of what they did to Hal. Those things that they did to
him, like having him become a mass murderer...that was
a big mistake. The stories were very
well-crafted...but what were they thinking? So I heard
through the grapevine that they were gong to bring Hal
Jordan back as the Spectre. I didn’t get it. But
then they called me up and offered me the book and the
writer in me was thinking, “Well it’s a story of
redemption.”I love stories about redemption. That’s
my obsession. Here’s a chance to take a classic
character that was so screwed over in such a
distasteful way...which, no doubt, people said about
my own work during the Spider-Man clone
storyline...the chance to take this guy and have him
do something to redeem himself. That really appeals to
me.
When I spoke with the editor, Dan Raspler, I told
him I wasn’t too big on these vengeance driven
characters. Remember when the Spectre used to turn
into a giant cheese grater and grate the villains to
death? I can’t really write the Spectre as the
spirit of vengeance but I will write him as the spirit
of redemption. And Dan said that was exactly what he
wanted to do.
I’ve had a lot of fun on this book...but the
character is so convoluted, so full of backstory, that
it reminds me of an X-Men book. I understand why it’s
hard to please an audience with the book. You’ve got
these hardcore Hal Jordan fans and they’ll buy the
book but they don’t want to read about Hal Jordan
seeking redemption. They want to read about Hal Jordan
flying through pace having science fiction adventures
the way he did in the old days. And someone who wants
to pick up a mystical book about the Spectre gets all
this Hal Jordan baggage. I realize that it’s a
really fine line I’ve attempted to walk. I have
fallen off the line sometimes but we’ve also had a
chance to do some really good stuff.
The artist Ryan Sook was there for the first 13
issues and we clicked instantly. We did a few issues
that really stand out to me as some of the best stuff
I’ve done in the past few years. The fun of a book
like this is that you can step outside the DCU and do
offbeat, poetic stuff. But sometimes you have to go
back in to the mainstream to please certain people,
that’s why Sinestro is back. Norm Breyfogle is
drawing the book now and he’s doing a terrific job.
He brings great intelligence and passion to his work.
DE: How much of your own spirituality is in the
Spectre book?
JD: I have to come at it from that angle. When you’re
doing a book like this about a man who died and
basically works for God, you have to write what you
feel and what you believe. Anyone who follows my work
knows that I weave in spiritual themes all the time
because that’s my life. I am doing it, I hope,
without proselytizing and within the context of the
story. I am fallible and sometimes I fail. But I say
what I feel about life, the universe and everything,
within the context of this quasi-supernatural
quasi-superhero comic book.
DE: You’re working on a Superman project and you’ve
worked on the book in the past. What’s it like to
write Superman?
JD: Things at Marvel a few years ago had gotten
fairly ugly so I left Marvel to work for DC. One of
the first things I did was to write a Superman story,
which I had never done. And after having a horrendous
year at Marvel and feeling disgusted and jaded by
comic books, I found myself writing this story and the
little twelve year-old in my soul thought, “Whoa, it’s
Superman!” I thought it was great fun to do and that
was also the first time I worked with Ryan Sook.
Then Eddie Berganza [Superman Comics Editor] asked
me to work on the monthly books and I took it. It
probably lasted about twenty minutes [laughs]. That
was really nobody’s fault but mine. The Superman
books are four very integrated books where things
overlap. I found I was never getting a chance to write
my own Superman story. It was like when I wrote Spider-Man,
I always ended up in the Dematteisverse, doing the
character my way and not getting too involved with
anyone else. I did not have a good time with Superman.
It wasn’t my best work by any stretch of the
imagination.
After that I did a original Superman graphic novel
called Superman: Where is Thy Sting? I had a
lot of fun with that. Now I’m doing a book called Superman:
The Kansas Sighting. It explores the whole UFO
mythology in sort of an X-Files way and
explores the UFO phenomenon using the work of guys
like Kenneth Ring [author of The Omega Project]
and John E. Mack [author of Abduction, Human
Encounters with Aliens] as a jumping off point.
They explore it as an evolving consciousness on the
planet...sort of looking at it in a Jungian way.
Plus we get into a whole lot of Kryptonian stuff.
If you were Jor-El, would you just shove your kid into
a rocketship and send him off or would you send some
probes first? Superman deals with the issue that his
father may have been coming to Earth and abducting
humans. In a medium that’s full of spaceships and
big bad aliens all the time, it’s getting into it in
a more metaphysical kind of way.
DE: What artist is drawing it?
JD: Jamie Tolagson, who I worked with on my
Elseworlds story, Supergirl: Wings. He does
truly elegant work, which you can’t say about a lot
of people.
DE: You wrote one of the last Mysterio stories
before Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada killed him. What
did you think of that?
JD: Well you’re talking to the guy who killed Kraven
the Hunter, Harry Osborn and Aunt May so I guess it
doesn’t bother me.
DE: What was it like killing Aunt May? I was pretty
happy about it.
JD: I really liked Aunt May. As a reader I was
like, they’ve really beaten this poor woman to death
anyway. But as a writer you find all these layers and
levels to the characters. I fell in love with Aunt
May...with the untapped depths of the character and
her wonderful relationship to Peter. It’s great to
build the reader’s relationship with a character,
get them to see the character in new ways, and then
kill them.
It was the same thing with Kraven. I always thought
Kraven was one of the nerdier villains. His pants were
too short and he was goofy. Then in Kraven’s Last
Hunt I found this whole new way into his head.
Suddenly everyone who made fun of the character
freaked when he died. When we killed Aunt May, Marvel
was going through a lot of changes at the time. The
editor of Spider-Man at the time, my good buddy
Danny Fingeroth, felt that people’s perceptions of
the Spider-Man books was that nothing ever
changes. All the writers felt we needed something big
and killing Aunt May seemed like the right thing to do
at the time. We did this big, emotional story of her
death and John Romita, Sr. -- whose work I revere --
called me up to tell me the story touched him very
deeply, that he actually cried when he read it. Can
you imagine how that made me feel? But of course this
is comic books so like a year later they brought her
back.
I didn’t actually read the book where they
brought her back but I’m told it was an actress
disguised as Aunt May who died in Peter’s arms
Explain that one to me! But that’s comics. In my
mind, when I left those books that’s when Spider-Man
ended. I worked on Spider-Man for many years
and I just can’t look at it now. Not because I think
the books aren’t good...but because I’m too
emotionally attached to the version we all worked on
back then.
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