The Four Color Media Monitor: Dan Jurgens is unrepentent

I looked at Jurgens' Twitter feed, and shortly after the Superman story he penned came out and angered a lot of conservatives by scapegoating Americans as hostile to immigrants and Islamists, he said:

The fact that a few people object to Superman saving innocent, unarmed people pretty much proves the point of the story, sad to say.
— Dan Jurgens (@thedanjurgens) September 14, 2017

Sigh. He's clearly unapologetic about resorting to the cheapest of stereotypes, let alone serving a leftist agenda. Beyond this, Jurgens made no serious attempt to address the points unambiguously, or explain why he thinks his approach on that subplot was justified. He may say it's "a few" people, but I sadly get the feeling he means a lot more.

There may have once been a time I tried to overlook his more idiotic steps, all because I'd assumed he was at least a responsible conservative years before, and a realist. But thinking about this, it's clear I can't do that anymore. He lent his services to some of the worst crossovers in history, such as Zero Hour, and on that note, I thought to take a look at a fluff-coated interview taken by the ComicBook website 5 years ago:

How'd you come by the gig? Was it just a question of Superman's popularity at the time?

I thought it up!

Actually, I had been talking with Mike Carlin about a project with those general broad strokes for a while. At the same time, my old pal KC Carlson, who was then an editor on staff, had some similar thoughts.

So Mike put KC and I together and Zero Hour was the result.

It doesn't make much difference who thought up such a monstrosity; it's clear Jurgens was all for it from the beginning, and that's very sad.

I know you really respect Marv Wolfman's work. How did it feel to be doing what really amounted to an unofficial sequel to his biggest, best-known work?

You're right, I do respect Marv's accomplishments a great deal. I don't know that I consider Zero Hour a sequel, however. Crisis on Infinite Earths was a great achievement that stands alone.

Oh please. By going the opposite of how Wolfman handled Barry Allen, who sacrificed himself heroically to foil the plans of the Anti-Monitor, unlike how they handled Green Lantern in their bloated 1994 crossover? If he really respected Wolfman's COIE, he'd never have gone along with the idea of turning Hal Jordan into a lethal villain, something that's discussed just as sugarly in the following paragraphs:

How did Hal Jordan become the central villain? Was that part of your original pitch, or was it a question of DC saying, "We need a place to put this guy."?

The entire Green Lantern storyline was being developed around the same time.

Anytime you're putting something like Zero Hour together you talk about a lot of ideas that never make print. In this case, we were discussing some various ideas about how to handle some of the Green Lantern stuff and the idea of using Parallax as the major villain emerged. I remember sitting in Carlin's office when we started going down that road and we called Kevin Dooley in, who was Green Lantern editor at the time. He immediately latched onto the idea and we continued to build from there. [...]

With that in mind, was that why you wanted to get the time-displaced Hal into the story? It would have seemed a bit odd to see them all coming together without him.

Exactly right. Any story of that magnitude has to have the universe's biggest characters one way or another.

With Hal, the question really came down to whether or not we wanted to make him the villain. Based on where they were taking the character it was such a natural that it was, in my mind, a no-brainer.

He spoke about all that without a single sign of regret. In a way, he's right about one thing: they went into that whole affair with no brains in sight. Nor did he display any brains with the following:

And did that make the timeline coming out of Zero Hour (in this case, a literal timeline that you had to write and draw) a little more complex?

That timeline was a tremendous amount of work! It required an overwhelming amount of back and forth-- how would it look? How would it work? Can we say this? Will that fit?

But it was definitely worth it. That fans absolutely loved it and it provided great clarity and context to the DCU. I've mentioned more than a few times that we could use something like that again.

So Jurgens disregarded any and all Green Lantern fans who took offense at their taking a bad situation to worse. Tsk tsk. The worst part is that they've had awful moments like that again even before he babbled away with that gushy nonsense (Our Worlds At War, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Blackest Night). I think Jurgens did make a valuable contribution to comicdom with the creation of Booster Gold, along with a few other early works like art on the Warlord, Sun Devils and Green Arrow in the 1980s, but since then, he's gone downhill with several works in his portfolio like the Armageddon crossover from 1991, and the Death of Superman "event" from 1992, suggesting he doesn't have much faith in the DCU's other creations at all, let alone respect for stand-alone storytelling, which crossovers can make impossible. At this point, after he gave telling signs of what his politics could really be, I'll really have to take a lot of his better work with a grain of salt, because he sure doesn't seem very creative as a writer most of the time, and despite earlier suggestions to the contrary, he doesn't seem like much of a realist.

Labels: bad editors, dc comics, Green Lantern, islam and jihad, moonbat writers, politics, Superman, violence

The problem is not with Superman saving "innocent, unarmed people," but with the lopsided portrayal. The world view promoted by DC and Marvel is, "Duh, all immigrants good, all native-born citizens bad."

We see Superman save innocent immigrants from some armed redneck. But we never see him protecting someone like Kate Steinle, Josh Wilkerson, or Justine Damond.

And immigrants are portrayed as innocent women and children, but the majority of Syrian "refugees" are able-bodied, young adult males.

And the problem is not only with criminals and terrorist Trojan Horses, but with the high percentage of immigrants who get on the dole and become a financial burden.

Posted by Anonymous | 10:36 AM

We have a president who is hostile to immigrants and Muslims, and this site is certainly outspoken against immigrants to the U S and Muslims, so it is a bit off to start off by calling it a 'stereotype'.

Overall, immigrants to the heartland of the U S tend to do better economically than native-born people - they are willing to work harder at poor-paying jobs, and they often have stronger family bonds and support, which helps them to pull ahead economically.

Posted by Anonymous | 1:26 PM

Asian and Jewish immigrants, who came from cultures with a strong work ethic, have usually turned out to be hard-working, law-abiding, and successful.

Many Hispanic immigrants are willing to work hard, but a significant minority of them are more interested in getting on public assistance. And the ones who want to work often lack skills, and technology is eliminating a lot of unskilled labor jobs.

Muslim immigrants act like the new landlords, rather than guests. They do not assimilate. They self-segregate in enclaves where sharia law, rather than the civil law, is practiced and enforced. They demand that the host country adapt to their culture, rather than vice versa.

And the limousine liberals and the country club conservatives want a steady influx of peasants who are "willing to work harder at poor-paying jobs." It is not about helping refugees, it is about cheap labor.

Posted by Anonymous | 10:08 AM

When America had wide open immigration laws, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, it was because the country was industrializing and it needed laborers. It was not about helping refugees then either; and one reason the U S A voted at the U N to make Israel a country was that they didn't want the DP in Europe to come here.

The Jews and Chinese were not considered law-abiding back then; the police chief of New York blamed crime on the Jews, and they were seen as keeping to themselves in ghettos. Organized crime was blamed on the Chinese Tongs and the Jewish gangsters. The same things were said about the immigrants then as are being said about the Muslim immigrants now.

Posted by Anonymous | 11:29 AM

When the US had an open door immigration policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it did not have a massive public welfare system. It did not have a court system in which criminals had more rights than honest citizens. Immigrants expected to have to work, assimilate, and obey the law.

Today, there are fewer and fewer unskilled labor jobs available. The welfare system pays able-bodied young adults to have illegitimate children. The revolving door courts release criminals before the police even have time to finish writing their arrest reports. And imams openly advocate terrorism, and/or state that "non-believers" owe a tax to Muslims.

Posted by Anonymous | 12:12 PM

Avi woulspd probably have some worthwhile comments about sharia courts. He lives in a country that has official state-funded sharia courts that have jurisdiction, in some matters, over about a fifth of the population, subject to appeals to the regular court system.

Posted by Anonymous | 5:03 PM