The Four Color Media Monitor

ComicBook interviewed leftist writer Justin Jordan about his new DC project called The Curse of Brimstone, which sounds like it'll be an anti-Trump metaphor, and he certainly makes his leftist standings clear later in the paragraphs. Here's a description:

“The Curse of Brimstone is kind of a superhero horror book, which is kind of what I broke into comics with,” Jordan told ComicBook.com. “That’s what The Strange Talent of Luther Strode is, although we’re doing very different kinds of horror in each one.” [...]

“The Curse of Brimstone is a very personal sort of book, which is actually why I was doing it when Dan [DiDio] approached me about doing a supernatural kind of book,” Jordan said. “I come from a very rural place in Pennsylvania. The county that I live in is the size of Rhode Island and has 40,000 people in it. It is literally 99% white people; it is that kind of place. It is coal country. The coal mines moved out, factories moved in, factories moved out, nothing moved in. It’s a dying area. And most of the U.S. by geography is that — but that is not what we see in superhero comics.”

Is he implying there's something wrong with living in a community like that? I have no idea, but for now, it's clear this is yet another of the kind of projects DiDio's favored as a publisher. If the neighborhood's collapsing, he might want to consider the likelihood Obama's economic policies were a contributing factor, but I'm sure he won't.

“I was trying to reconcile — I see these people making decisions that I think are bad for them. I see them personally because I still live in an area like that,” he added. “I was like, ‘what drives people to make those kind of decisions?’ I don’t think in fiction, especially comics, that has been real accurately portrayed. I think horror gives us a lens to look at that kind of stuff. I think horror works well when it’s examining real things and real fears and stuff.” [...]

“What Brimstone’s actually about is, basically this kid grows up in this no-nothing town. He has no prospects of getting out. He’s too poor to move, he can’t go to school. He sees that his sister’s probably going to go the same way even though she’s smarter than he is and could do better. He sees this town has died in his lifetime. The elementary school he went to has closed down. A man called The Salesman comes and he makes him an offer: he says, I will give you what you want; I will give you the ability to make this town great, make this town somewhere people want to visit. You just have to be the agent for these people I work for. He foolishly agrees, and it turns out that’s a curse, not a deal.”

“Brimstone is this kind of supernaturally-charged version of him,” Jordan said of the series' hero, Joe. “He gets these powers and he decides to do good, to prevent The Salesman from doing this to other towns, but the problem is, Brimstone really is a curse. How can you use a fundamentally evil power to do good? Can you do it? I talked to Dan DiDio about it, and it’s kind of like a firebreak. If there’s a fire coming, and you need to stop it, you can burn down part of the forest to do it, but you’re still starting another fire and it can do unpredictable things. Brimstone is fighting supernatural evil, but he is himself supernatural evil. The more he is used, is he making the world worse or is he actually improving things? That kind of stuff has always interested me. If you look at my superhero career, the idea of what power means, what you can do with it, and what it does to an individual is something that’s always interested me.” [...]

The balancing act, of course, will be writing a series that can tackle political themes in a deeply divided society without alienating the very people the story is meant to empathize with.

“It’s tricky,” Jordan admitted. “I can look out from my house and I can see two people that had Trump flags and stuff in their yard, and I know that these are good and decent people and I know that they do not want what Trump promised them or what he’s certainly going to give them. And reconciling how people that I know personally can be good, can make those sort of decisions, is sort of the impetus for the series. The Salesman is not a Trumpian figure, but the impetus for the series — what can desperation do? What can being forgotten do to you?”

I'm not sure why Jordan thinks people who voted for Trump don't want what he's going to give them, or not, or why he's telling us the Salesman isn't a metaphor for Trump. One of the lines I highlighted is very reminiscent of the MAGA slogan to boot. If he thinks he can do this without alienating his neighbors, I'd think again if I were him. If I were his next door neighbor, I'd feel sorry for him. His story premise is just so dumb; a tired retread of the whole Faustian theme mixed with Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

And this is another reason why I'd rather not give an audience to Sideways, which was co-written by Jordan and DiDio. It could've been a great example of doing the diversity marketing right, but when you look at the project under a microscope, you see that DiDio could be exploiting this as a means of gaining legitimacy he doesn't deserve in the eyes of the audience after all the harm he did in the 2000s, and Jordan's own SJW leanings and blocking readers on Twitter is another reason why this isn't bound to work well.

Labels: bad editors, dc comics, moonbat writers, politics