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Jennifer's Blood #7 Writer's Commentary by Al Ewing

Published Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:00:56 -0600

Al Ewing wrote a commentary on this week's Jennifer Blood #7, out from Dynamite this week… pick up a copy and read it alongside.

PAGE ONE:

…is as close in time to Page 22 of Garth's last issue as I could possibly get it. One of the things I really loved about his six issues when I read the scripts was the one-issue-per-day format. I'm a sucker for formal restrictions of that nature – jumping through those kinds of hoops forces me to think about the material in new ways. In this case, I had to structure the plot so that cliffhanger beats fall on a daily basis, which occasionally meant having the action happening around midnight. (Around about issue #16, I'm planning to temporarily drop that requirement, but you can read about that in the solicits. SPOILER: it's all getting a bit heavy.)

Another thing I was planning to do sometime (but probably won't) is do something with the issue numbers that Garth included with the titles. I went straight on to 7 from his 6, mostly to keep the continuity rolling, but I had plans to do a 'flash-forward' to, say, 25 or so, and show Jen in vastly differing circumstances for an issue. Eventually, though, I decided that might break the momentum, but if enough people think it's a good idea, I might do something with it.

Meanwhile – swearword front end! I enjoyed writing that.

Guess which band all the titles of the first arc came from! First correct answer wins a feeling of superiority. If you can name their connection to the world of comics, you win the right to an even deeper feeling of superiority.

So much for Page One.

PAGE TWO:

You can definitely see the Garth Ennis influence in this first issue. But that's inevitable – when you take over someone else's characters, they speak in your head with the voices you're used to hearing from them. But over time – unless you're forcing yourself into an eternal pastiche – you start finding new things out about them and writing them accordingly, and your own voice starts to come through.

Uncle Pete, for instance. But you'll have to buy the annual to find out about that.

PAGE THREE:

Swearword back end! Everybody drink!

PAGES FOUR AND FIVE:

It's great having Kewber as regular artist on this — I've a terrible feeling that one day soon he'll be snapped up to draw The Repetitive Adventures Of Constantly-Dialed-Back-To-The-Status-Quo Man – and he certainly drew the living daylights out of this semi-truck crash. He got the "beats" on page five perfect as well. I love doing "beats"! Occasionally I'm also a DJ and I often get "hep" to some "beats" in that line as well, it is "a gas".

PAGES SIX AND SEVEN:

Got in a bit of visual play here – the ol' "unreliable narrator" bit on page six, followed up with the "corpses on the ceiling" caper. Beats floating heads! (I'm lying. Nothing beats floating heads. If Captain America isn't screaming 'Am I going… MAD?' in the middle of a sea of gawping Bucky faces then it's a wasted day as far as I'm concerned.)

PAGES EIGHT AND NINE:

Enter the sensational character finds of 2011, Fulsom and Pruitt. Fulsom got a mention during Garth's run as a corrupt detective investigating the Jennifer Blood murders – Jimmy ordered him killed to death, but presumably he himself got offed before he put that order through. OR DID HE. Fulsom might be in trouble.

Pruitt, meanwhile, is completely new. I didn't quite have her voice down at this point, but Kewber got what I was after. Basically, since it was becoming increasingly clear to me that Jen was not a very good person, I thought the book needed a leading female character who was a bit more morally sound. And I might as well make her Jen's polar opposite in personality while I was about it.

PAGES TEN TO TWELVE:

Plot time! I decided that having more Blutes popping out of the woodwork would get pretty dull pretty quickly, which is why I had the family of the Ninjettes decide to take their revenge – the Ninjettes being the characters who I felt least deserved to die in the original run. I mean, what was their crime exactly? It wasn't exactly self-defence on Jen's part, it was just her being mean. With a big sword.

(Obviously, this was before I took on the job of writing those same Ninjettes, so my opinion of them may have changed slightly as a result.)

Anyway, I figured if some of Jen's past crimes came back to haunt her then it might go with the theme I was started to latch onto, which is that Jen is her own worst enemy. Although people like Oshiro are going to do their damnedest to beat her record.

PAGES THIRTEEN TO SIXTEEN:

It's Sunday! And since Jen has a bit of a thing about being a typical American housewife, I have to assume that means Church. I'm not a believer myself, but I'm a fairly soft and woolly atheist, and I'm not about to rain on anyone's belief parade willy-nilly. So I'm a lot more sympathetic to someone like Andrew or Road-Safety Roger than I am to someone like Jen, who's basically there to keep up appearances, because it's easier than not going.

(My sympathy ends when people start using their beliefs as an excuse to try and control other people. Or their birth control. Or their right to have a teacher step in and say something before their children are bullied to death.)

Anyway, back to Jen and her pathologies. Jen's life is all about not being something – not being a Blute, not being her father's daughter. She's fetishized the idea of a 'normal' life, a safe, unfulfilling existence with a man she can tolerate and kids she can love. But there's that other side of her, that Blute side, that wants something else. It could be that by beating her five uncles all she's done is prove she's more monster than any of them.

PAGES SEVENTEEN TO NINETEEN:

Ah, mindless violence. Note how I'm introducing this particular gun in act one. Presumably it'll be fired… this week, in all good comic shops? You don't say!

PAGE TWENTY:

"Some sort of birdwatching thing." It's lovely how in tune Jen is with the man she loves… or quite likes, at any rate.

The Jen-Andy relationship is something that struck me when I was reading the scripts for the first arc – Jen ostensibly loves Andy for what he isn't, rather than for what he is. Also, judging by the brief glimpse we got in issue #1, their sex life seems to be pretty grim and joyless, quite frankly. Does she actually love him? I'm sure she thinks she does. Whether he thinks he loves her back — and whether this is a good basis on which to have two kids — I'll leave for another time.

PAGE TWENTY-ONE:

And you'll be seeing what this page leads to right now – in all good comic shops!

PAGE TWENTY-TWO:

And this scene as well! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? JENNIFER BLOOD #9! BUY IT! BUY IT WITH MONEY! BUY IT IMMEDIATELY! OR SOONER!

THIS COMMENTARY IS OVER!

BUY!

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