Caught in the Nexus: Dan Jolley

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Dan Jolley garnered a great deal of attention for his work with artist Tony Harris on DC’s Elseworlds tale JSA: The Liberty Files in 2000, but his comic credits date back to the early 1990s. With writing gigs on several high-profile ’80s toy line titles and a couple of DC Universe series launched in the past year, Dan Jolley’s been getting a lot of attention. He’s not a new face in the industry, but he may be one you haven’t seen a lot of…yet.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Dan covering the range of comics he’s involved with, buzz vs. sales, the 1980s, and a whole lot more.

The Nexus: Hi, Dan. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with The Nexus. You seem to be one of the busiest writers in the business. How many different books are you working on right now?

Dan: Right now I’m writing Bloodhound and Firestorm for DC; for Devil’s Due I’m doing Voltron and I’m wrapping up the second G.I. Joe vs. The Transformers mini-series; and I’m just about to start on a pretty huge new project for a third company that I can’t talk about quite yet. Outside of comics, I recently wrote the screenplay for a short independent film, which is currently in production.

The Nexus: Your new DC Universe title Bloodhound recently launched to critical acclaim. For those that haven’t had a chance to sample the book yet, what is Bloodhound about?

Dan: At the core of it, it’s really about how non-super-powered people can deal with a world like the one in the DC Universe; everyone’s so accustomed to seeing characters that have superhuman powers, or incredible sci-fi gadgetry, or the kinds of skills you can only get through devoting your entire life to ceaseless study, and I wanted to spotlight someone who handles the world just fine with little more than above-average intelligence, some muscle mass, and a lot more stubbornness than is really healthy.

The story centers on an ex-Atlanta police detective named Travis Clevenger, who has a pretty good knack for understanding the way metahuman criminals think. These are not the obvious, costume-wearing bad guys; they’re the kind who don’t want anyone else to know about them. While he was on the job, Clevenger had the best record in APD history at collaring metahuman perps — but he was also very thoroughly corrupt, and ended up screwing himself over so badly that he killed his own partner and landed in federal prison. Bloodhound focuses on Clevenger after the FBI gets him out of prison to help them track down a suspected metahuman serial killer; he’ll soon be getting into a new kind of life as an FBI consultant, though on a very very short leash (so to speak). He’d honestly rather be left alone, and back in prison; Clevenger has realized now exactly what a monster he is, and would rather see the world at large without him in it. But the serial killer is targeting his late partner’s daughter, and Clevenger can’t let that happen.

The Nexus: Bloodhound‘s titular character, Travis Clevenger, is possibly the most brutal “hero” to enter the mainstream comic scene since The Punisher. What was your inspiration for the character?

Dan: Clevenger came from a lot of different sources. In the initial pitch to DC I described Bloodhound as “The Shield meets Pitch Black,” not only because of the tone and subject matter, but also because I really like the characters Vic Mackey and Riddick. Another source is Lucas Davenport, the protagonist in John Sandford’s Prey novels. But ultimately, I just wanted to explore how a guy whose only combat-related talents are that he’s really big and really mean would handle facing the kind of super-villains you’re likely to encounter in the DCU. Travis Clevenger is sort of like a modern-day barbarian; no matter how powerful the enemy, no matter what the odds, if he decides to go after someone he goes after them with everything he’s got, non-stop, until either they’re down (often dead) or he is. Of course, part of being fully human is the lack of anything like super-strength or invulnerability; consequently, Clevenger usually takes about as much damage as his opponents. More often than not he’s going to end up in the hospital once everything’s over.

The Nexus: Buzz for a new title can often help it find an audience. Bloodhound seems to be getting universal praise, yet the sales don’t appear to be where you’d like. Has word-of-mouth for Bloodhound begun to impact orders positively?

Dan: Not that I can tell. You’re right, it has been very well-received; virtually all of the reviews I’ve read have ranged from good to excellent. Yet it started off very low and has gotten a lot lower in numbers in just three issues. Of course, a big part of it can be attributed to promotion, and the almost complete lack of it; it was pretty disheartening this summer, when more than one retailer came up to me at shows, saw issues of the book on my table, and said, “Bloodhound? What’s that?”

Retailers.

Anyway. At this point the disparity between critical evaluation and commercial progress is so huge, I don’t even know what to think about it. I’m just sort of watching the praise build and the sales plummet, and thinking, “Huh.”

The Nexus: The month of November will be Bloodhound‘s first opportunity to interact with an established character in the DC Universe. Tell us a little about the crossover with Firestorm?

Dan: It started out with a character that I had intended to introduce in Bloodhound: a sadistic Miami drug lord named Luis Salvador, who calls himself “The King of I-75” (a major drug artery that runs from Miami to Atlanta and all the way up through Detroit to Canada). Salvador and Clevenger have a lot of history — not the good kind — and Salvador was waiting for Clevenger to get out of prison so he could kill him himself. But in the course of revising and refining the first arc in Bloodhound, Ivan Cohen and I realized we needed to trim some stuff down, so we excised the whole Salvador element and just figured we’d use him later.

Then, in Firestorm, I wanted to address the repercussions of what happened in issues 1 – 3, when the main character, Jason Rusch, meets and accidentally kills a drug dealer and loan shark named Stevie Golek. Well, I was mapping out exactly who would come looking to find out what happened — knocking ideas around with my Voltron writing partner, Marie Croall — and it hit us: Stevie’s boss is Luis Salvador! The whole thing flowed so organically from that point, the story practically wrote itself, as the saying goes.

So we get to see Salvador interact with Jason — and with Firestorm — and then the action moves from Michigan to Georgia as Salvador realizes he has the perfect opportunity to settle his score with Clevenger. Things were going to take a turn for the truly gruesome, but DC stepped in and had me knock it back a smidge. As it is, though, there’s still going to be mayhem and plenty of it.

The Nexus: Speaking of Firestorm, how did you land the gig on the oft-delayed relaunch of one of the more memorable characters from the 1980s?

Dan: Pete Tomasi offered it to me. Well, more accurately, he offered me the chance to pitch for it; so I turned in a pitch really quickly, and was pretty pleased with it. The DC brass didn’t care for that take and had me do several others, but they did seem to be pleased enough with what I did to begin with that they didn’t talk to anybody else until I had turned in Round Two. I gave them three separate ideas — very different from the first (rejected) one, of course — and they picked the one they liked best. That became the series as we have it today.

The Nexus: Firestorm is certainly not an icon, but he’s a character that enjoyed a healthy fan following. Why the decision to replace Ronnie Raymond with Jason Rusch?

Dan: That was a group decision; DC was looking for a completely fresh starting point for the series, a way to go at it so that people who knew nothing about Firestorm could jump right in. So after a couple of conversations with Pete Tomasi, I very tentatively made a suggestion, expecting to be summarily shut down. But Pete got pretty excited about it and took it to Dan DiDio; they called me back, and several group conversations later we’d modified the concept into this brand-new character, Jason Rusch. The rest is history. Sort of.

The Nexus: The fate of Ronnie Raymond as Firestorm was only recently revealed in the pages of Identity Crisis #5, and it was followed up the same week in Firestorm #6. Was Ronnie’s “end” decided by Identity Crisis writer Brad Meltzer, DC editorial, yourself, or was it a group decision?

Dan: Because of conversations I had with Pete Tomasi and Dan DiDio back before I actually wrote any words down, I knew that Ronnie Raymond was going to be taken out of the picture in some fashion. I didn’t learn exactly how until many months later, and I didn’t see the actual sequence until Identity Crisis #5 hit the stands.

The Nexus: For many years, the original Firestorm was a fusion of Ronnie Raymond and Professor Martin Stein. You’ve fused Jason with various characters during the early issues of the new series. Was the opening of issue #6 the first hint of Ronnie being a permanent part Jason’s psyche as Firestorm?

Dan: Oooh… can’t answer that one. You’ll have to keep reading. Sorry!

The Nexus: DC’s January solicitations are out and Killer Frost is back. What can you tell us about Jason’s first confrontation with a member of the original Firestorm’s rogues gallery?

Dan: Y’know, I’ve said in other interviews that I try to subscribe to the school of thought that states “There are no villains.” I never write an antagonist who has no motivation for doing something other than “I’m evil! Hahahaha! I’m so eeeeeevill!” People in stories need to have motivations for what they do, even if they don’t fully understand those motivations themselves; Dennis Hopper’s character in “Speed,” for one example, felt he was entitled to bomb the crap out of L.A. because he got screwed on his retirement.

That being said, though, Killer Frost comes about as close as I’m comfortable with to being truly, unrepentantly evil. I mean, she has her motivations — in this story it’s a pretty basic human one, too — but Good Lord, she’s a vicious bitch! Frost doesn’t do things half-way, and her encounter with Firestorm is going to have serious and long-lasting repercussions on him and on the book as a whole. She didn’t get the name “Killer Frost” for nothing.

The Nexus: Trade paperback support by a publisher can expand the readership of a new title. Do you know if DC is preparing trades for either Bloodhound or Firestorm?

Dan: They’ll probably trade Firestorm, but Ivan Cohen has already said there are no plans to do a Bloodhound trade. Shame.

The Nexus: The 1980’s nostalgia wave has been in full effect for a few years now. You mentioned that G.I. Joe vs. The Transformers and Voltron are two of your current projects. Are you a child of the ’80s that now has the opportunity to “play” with their old toys?

Dan: Oh, very much so. My head just about popped off when Josh Blaylock told me he’d gotten the license to do a Voltron comic; I immediately started babbling at him about how much potential the old cartoon had, and that if he needed a writer, I was definitely his man. And it worked; a few days later I got an e-mail from him with the subject line, “Will you form the head?”

The Nexus: Voltron is a property that has come and gone from the spotlight since its U.S. debut in 1984. Does the current series follow the established line of continuity from the previous television incarnations, or is this a re-imagining?

Dan: This is definitely a re-imagining. We started off very close to the original setup, but as we’ve gone along we’ve departed from it more and more. Plus, right from the start, we kept everything we liked and totally jettisoned everything we didn’t. So no dancing space mice; no bad, corny foreign accents; no self-contradictory story setups. We just decided to treat it like the grand space opera it always could have been, and the fans seem to be eating it up.

One of the funniest early reviews I read said something like, “I don’t understand why they did the story this way; Jolley just took the cartoon show and put it on paper. There’s nothing new here!” Well, the person who wrote that obviously hadn’t seen the cartoon in twenty years or so, because the changes we made to it were massive and sweeping. We all want to remember the shows we loved as being perfect and flawless, but they so seldom are… and Voltron, love it though I did, was far from flawless. The production team definitely did the best they could, considering they were splicing together and re-editing two completely unrelated Japanese series to create one show, but still, the first episodes had, shall we say, a plot hole here and there.

The Nexus: Some writers have had creative difficulties working on licensed properties. How much freedom do you have as a writer with the Voltron license?

Dan: A tremendous amount, actually; the licensors, World Events Productions, are extremely cool and easy to work for, and so far I think the only change they’ve requested was that I take out one word in one of the early scripts. I’ve been sort of surprised that they’ve let me (and my frequent co-writer, Marie Croall) make so many changes and modifications to the universe they established, but they seem to be very pleased with what we’re doing, so I’m just forging ahead and enjoying the heck out of it.

The Nexus: You are writing the second G.I. Joe vs. The Transformers miniseries for Devil’s Due. Other than the obvious Transformers/G.I. Joe conflict, what’s the focus of the series?

Dan: Honestly, for me, the focus is on fun. Especially in light of the sort of dynamic brutality of Bloodhound, and the relentless darkness of the first six or seven issues of Firestorm, I wanted to work on something a little more light-hearted, and this really fit the bill. This story is the biggest, most outrageous, most Jerry Bruckheimer-esque thing I’ve ever done, and I think it captures a lot of the spirit of the old cartoon show; of course, we go places and do things that the cartoon never did (or could), but it’s still very much just a wild ride I got to go on with the characters.

The Nexus: You’ve worked on Micronauts, Voltron, G.I. Joe: Frontline, and G.I. Joe vs. The Transformers. Are there any other toy properties you’d like a chance to work on?

Dan: Nah. I mean, I’ve enjoyed Micronauts and Joe a great deal, and I have tons of affection for the whole Voltron mythos, but I think I’m just about toyed out.

The Nexus: Do you have a dream project?

Dan: Not any one in particular; there are a number of projects I’d love to do, but no specific one that I’ve just got my heart set on. I think that might be because, over the fourteen or so years I’ve been doing this, I’ve realized that a project that may seem mundane at the outset can become a dream project, and one that you think is going to be utterly fantastic can go really, really sour. There aren’t as many variables to deal with in comics as there are in, say, Hollywood, but you never know how something’s going to go. The art team you work with, the editor, even company policy can sometimes radically change both the nature of a project and one’s enjoyment of it.

The Nexus: Is there a particular writer or artist that you want to work with someday?

Dan: Oh, there are a bunch of people I’d love to work with! Steve Dillon, Killian Plunkett, Mike McKone. I worked with Sean Phillips once on a Star Wars short story, and I’d love to do it again. There are so many talented people out there, the list goes on and on.

The Nexus: Besides the comics that you are working on, can you recommend a title you’re enjoying to our readers?

Dan: I used to think it needed as much support as it could get, and then it won an Eisner award… but I’ll plug it anyway: Eric Powell’s THE GOON. It’s my favorite comic on the stands today.

The Nexus: Thanks for sitting down with us, Dan. Good luck with all of your projects, and keep us informed of anything on the horizon.

Dan: Thanks! Will do!

If you’re interested in checking out some of Dan’s recent work, head to your local comic shop or an online retailer. The crossover issues of Bloodhound (#5) and Firestorm (#7) are in stores now. Voltron #11 and G.I. Joe vs. The Transformers #3 will be out in November. In addition, the first two digest-sized Voltron trade paperbacks (“Revelations” and “Paradise Lost”) are currently available.