The Four Color Media Monitor

If you were ever a fan of Gerard Jones's runs on books like Green Lantern, Wonder Man and Justice League in the early 1990s, you'll be sickened to learn that he pulled some filthy crap on a scale much like what the disgraced artist Justiniano was convicted for several years ago:

An accomplished San Francisco comic book and nonfiction author, who has been published in Marvel and a slew of other publications, was arrested on suspicion of possessing more than 600 child pornography files and uploading the graphic videos to YouTube, police said Friday.

Gerard Jones, 59, was arrested after a police investigation and ensuing search warrant at his residence in the 600 block of Long Bridge Street in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood turned up a host of electronic devices storing more than 600 images and videos depicting child pornography, police said.

The longtime author has written screenplays for Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox, served as a writing teacher for the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto, and put together graphic novels for both DC Comics and Marvel Comics, according to his official website. [...]

He was booked into San Francisco County Jail on suspicion of possession of child pornography, production of child pornography, sending harmful material to a minor and distribution of child pornography, police said.

The uploaded YouTube videos depicted a child performing sexual acts on an adult, police said. And other videos uncovered inside Jones’ home showed adults performing sexual acts on children as young as 1-year-old, police said.

This was enough to make me want to throw a tantrum of despair. I thought his work on some of those books he'd written for DC/Marvel over 2 decades ago were pretty good, and now, I have to suffer the aggravation of discovering that another man whose work was better than that of his successors is as scummy as Justiniano and even some of the Hollywood "celebrities" who've been exposed for crimes either similar, or worse. On which note, the news about Jones gets that much worse:

Police also determined Jones allegedly traveled to London several years ago to engage in sexual conduct with an underage minor. [...]

The investigation into the England incident is on-going, police said.

Now it's enough to make my blood boil to explosion point. There was once a time when I felt sorry Jones got booted by Kevin Dooley, who turned out to be one of DC's worst editors, from the job he had on Green Lantern. Now, I'm only sorry that the original direction in GL got thrown out with bath water. And I feel especially sorry for Jones's victims. Forget that now, any reprints of his comics material will probably gather dust on shelves for a long time before future generations can get to see them, if they even care to at all. What matters is that Jones turned out to be another sad case of a moral hypocrite who complained about the darkness forced into 1990s comicdom yet embraced the same in real life. He's not the only one, and he won't be the last.

Incidentally, Bleeding Cool's follow up report has an awkward note about his bibliography:

He is also the co-creator of DC hero El Diablo, [...]

No, that is not accurate. The original El Diablo, Lazarus Lane, was created in 1970 by Robert Kanigher and Gray Morrow, in the 2nd issue of All-Star Western. Jones only created the second protagonist in the title role, Rafael Sandoval, in 1989, in a solo series that actually bore the codename as title. Another product that'll probably gather dust on the warehouse shelves for a long time before being reprinted. Sure, it may be possible to separate art from artist in a comic book more easily than to part actors in a live action movie/TV program from it, but now, we have a situation where some people are likely to be discouraged from reading Jones's past work for understandable reasons, and I'm utterly disgusted at Jones for lowering himself to stupefying depths of inhumanity. I was afraid/knew/predicted something like this awful case would turn up, and tragically, it did.

Update: something else about Jones that isn't too surprising: he's a Democrat, and on his own site, he wrote post-elections:

This year has been so heated and bizarre that it’s hard even to talk about this, but when I look back four years I remember a lot of fairly reasonable people calling one centrist, pro-Wall Street technocrat a radical leftist or the other centrist, pro-Wall Street technocrat a radical rightist. And I can see the lenses in action this year. I know sensible Republicans who were appalled by Trump in the primaries but were actively supporting him in the end because they saw Hillary as a threat to everything that makes America what it is. From my side, I can’t conceive how anyone could possibly see a cautious, centrist wonk like Clinton as a threat to everything that makes America what it is (or at least any more of a threat than any Republican or Democratic candidate of the past forty years). But they had no doubt. On the other hand, they don’t understand how I can see Trump as a racist, fascist threat to everything that makes America what it is, where they see just an impulsive jerk who attracted some wing-nut supporters but is basically a pragmatist who will at least preserve most of those things that make America etc. Leaving aside any argument about who’s closer to the truth, there's a split in perceptions here that’s clearly in place long before we know what candidates we’ll be dealing with.

Sigh. In light of the discoveries Jones may have committed child molestation, he has really presented an utter head-shaker there. Man, is he one sickening hypocrite. Why do I get the feeling he's not even sorry he lost the gig on GL in 1993? As of this writing, his Twitter account appears to be cancelled, but I may have seen him spouting more liberal propaganda there too in past years. Well now he can blabber in prison for the duration and not litter up the comics landscape ever again.

Labels: dc comics, indie publishers, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat artists, moonbat writers, politics