MattBrady
10-29-2002, 02:27 PM
In the last issue of the Top Cow series The Darkness, things went to hell – literally. Jackie Estacado, host to the Darkness had betrayed his Mafia family, and in retaliation, his Uncle Frankie Franchetti had killed Jenny, the closest thing to a sister Jackie had. In retaliation to that Jackie blew up Uncle Frankie and himself in the process. Despite the death and all that, Jackie returns next month in a new series from Top Cow, written by Paul Jenkins and illustrated by Dale Keown.
As a quick recap of sorts, Jackie was a hitman for the Mafia who inherited, via his father, the “Darkness,” a near-sentient force that was bonded with Jackie and was immensely powerful. Jackie used the powers he was given to help his career, but unfortunately for the playboy hitman, the powers came with a limitation – the moment Jackie’s…um…seed was sown in fertile ground, the Darkness would leave him and inhabit his offspring, manifesting, as it did with Jackie, when he turned 21. The down side for Jackie was that the transfer would leave him dead. As a result, Jackie had to quit women cold turkey – well, at least the sex part of it.
Throughout the forty issues of the first series, the mythology surrounding the Darkness was explored, the Witchblade, Heaven, and Hell were all brought in, and things got to be…a little confusing, to say the least. Radical as it was, Jackie’s death in issue #40 was, according to Jenkins, who wrote the issue, just the kind of surgery the book needed.
We caught up with Jenkins for an overview of the new series, as well as his candid view of what needed to be fixed, tweaked, adjusted, or just left alone.
Newsarama: So, to catch things up – in the last issue of the series, Jackie sent himself, well…to Hell via an explosion that killed his uncle, his uncles men, and him. Sounds like it’s a tough place to start a new series. How does this new series play into the older continuity, especially the final event of the older series?
Paul Jenkins: What we did with the continuity, honestly, was get rid of it. Jackie had been a Mafia hitman, and then he turned them into the Feds, and then Uncle Frankie was after him, and there were angels and demons and monsters – you name it. I looked at it, and thought that considering how the series, started, with Jackie as a hedonist hitman, things really had gotten away from that original idea. We did a story in #40 that was going to end it – Uncle Frankie kills the girl, so Jackie kills Uncle Frankie and himself at the same time.
NRAMA: So, does #1 start at a funeral, or what?
PJ: No. I suppose the best thing to say as to what happens is that Jackie comes to realization at the beginning of our story that he’s back with no recollection, or a very difficult recollection of what’s happened to him. He remembers the events – he remembers dying, but he doesn’t remember the specifics, or the Darkness, either, but he realizes that he’s afraid of the dark - an irrational fear of darkness. He’s aware of the events that happened, but has no explanation as to why he’s alive.
All that does, honestly, it gives a small piece to the people who’ve followed the series and character for a long time, but the intention is one of, ‘Here’s a new series that hearkens back to the old days of The Darkness much more so than the later days of The Darkness.”
NRAMA: So, in your view, the first series is a closed book in terms of his relationships and other characters?
PJ: Yes. There’s only one character that comes back, Butcher Joyce.
NRAMA: But is Jackie a totally blank slate?
PJ: No – he remembers what came before. This is the 40% - the Darkness itself gives him an awareness of what’s gone on. It starts talking to him and giving him clues, and showing him things that he’s seen. He’s spent some time in Hell, so the Darkness shows him the hell that he lived through. It shows him Jenny dying. Throughout it though, it becomes pretty clear that the Darkness has its own agenda, and he doesn’t necessarily understand it – there must be some reason the Darkness brought him back. At first, it’s a series of bad visions and dreams, but it’s all starting to mutate, to change into something.
NRAMA: That said, where are you looking to take Jackie himself? Is he returning to the Mafia?
PJ: Yes. With Jackie, taking him back to basics is the absolute best thing that we should do. If you’ve seen the older issues that Garth [Ennis] did, this guy was a really great character, one that you very easily wanted to read about. There he was – he’s an untouchable hitman who does whatever he wants, says whatever he wants, but now can’t have sex. You could read this story and find it interesting. After a while, with the demon stuff that just kind of meandered, I don’t think anybody could.
What we’re going to do is a strong crime-drama, and the supernatural aspects of it are slightly lessened. The Darkness will be the 40%, as I said, and the story and characterization and crime drama is the 60% of it.
NRAMA: In that 60% that is characterization and crime drama, what’s the motivation for Jackie? Will he be out for revenge against the family that took everything away from him?
PJ: Not really. The story itself is about Jackie wanting to find out who he is, in a way. He needs a family. He’s never had one – he doesn’t remember his father or his mother, he was picked out of an orphanage and given a very dysfunctional family, the Mafia. But at least it’s a family.
It’s the story of Jackie trying to find or make himself a family. Here’s this family sitting there, the Mafia, but in a way, he’s betrayed it because he turned against Frankie, but his response to that is, “Look, Frankie is a scumbag, and he didn’t live by the old ways.”
NRAMA: But, given his history with Frankie, the Mafia won’t be welcoming him back with open arms, will they?
PJ: Most won’t – especially the new head of the family, Paulie. Basically, Uncle Frankie was the complete bastard. Now that he’s gone and there’s a power void, his cousin Paulie has come into town, and he makes Frankie look like a choirboy. The first thing that Paulie does is the most revolting thing that he could have done – it’s really, really nasty and you immediately get the idea that this guy is just a terrible person.
NRAMA: So, in a way, Jackie is stood against Frankie, and now Paulie, because they’re not “good” Mafia?
PJ: Well, there is no such thing as good Mafia, but that captures the essence of what Jackie really feels – “What happened to us?” It’s a real question of whether or not Jackie is going to find what he really wants to find. He would love it if there was such a thing of the Mafia that he’s envisioned in his mind, one that has honor and it’s own code of behavior that you never would cross as well as a sense of both family and community.
Frankie did deals with the Chinese and the Jamaicans, and Paulie’s following down the same path. Jackie doesn’t agree with this. The higher ups in Chicago and the other cities are watching this whole play unfold, but they’re not going after Jackie either. They’re waiting to see how it will play out, and it’s quite possible that they might accept Jackie back in, because he prefers the old ways rather than the bullshit that’s going on now. Cousin Paulie is nothing if he’s not terribly ambitious, and will screw everybody, and work with all kinds of other ethnic groups. Stuff that, in Jackie’s view, and quite possibly the view of the older Mafia members in the other cities, “dirties” the Mafia.
NRAMA: So Jackie’s wanting the Mafia to be more like The Godfather, not for making it a “better” organization, but for making it a better home and family for himself?
PJ: Yeah, it’s incredibly naive, but that’s his only chance at a family. He’s lost Jenny, so if the only thing he’s able to get is the most dysfunctional family there is, he’s still going to try and get it.
NRAMA: So he’s facing down the Mafia by himself? This is sounding like it could be a short series…
PJ: He’ll have friends. The one character we’ll introduce into the story is this faded old lady named Mary. She was the wife of the original Don Franchetti, the original head of the family. As the story goes, Mary was quite a young thing in those days, and he was totally enamored with her, but she wasn’t connected. She married into this family, and turned a blind eye to the things she knows her husband does in order to keep the relationship of this man that she loves.
When Don Franchetti died, the rest of the family went to Chicago, and there was a transfer of power, but here’s this old lady, still living off of the old money, and she loves Jackie. She’s a dotty old lady, but she sees him as her husband was. She even says to Jackie at one point, “I know what you do, and I’ll never ask questions about it, but I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She’s his chance to see a reflection of the family he wants. She represents the ideal of what it once might have been, but now, she’s a cracked and faded old lady. He wants to restore this in a way, but the reason he wants to do it is utterly selfish – he just wants to get his family back. Of course, the Darkness wants the family too, and wants it for a completely different reason.
NRAMA: Back to the Darkness itself, you mentioned that it’s mutating. What’s it going through?
PJ: It’s extremely malevolent now. It shows him aspects of itself throughout history, such as the revelation that it was the guiding force by all the atrocities committed by Vlad the Impaler. The Darkness provides Jackie with visions of the present as well – he has visions of people who are going to die, as well as clues as to the way things are going to happen around him.
In the first issue, as an example, in his dreams and visions, he keeps seeing a dead pig. In the last part of the story, Jackie starts going after cousin Paulie’s boys in a meat processing plant. There are bullets flying around, and all sorts of dead animals – including the pigs he’s seen. It’s really disturbing, both in the visuals and that Jackie had a vision o sorts about this happening. That’s generally the way we’re placing everything.
NRAMA: And Dale’s in line with your thinking for the series?
PJ: Absolutely. Dale’s really interested in two things – he’s great at monsters and evil, but his other strong interest right now is the character part of the story. We’ve talked a couple of times, and he just really digs doing a page or two where we’re building the characters up.
There’s also other, more subtle imagery that we’re putting in the book as well – Jackie may meet someone while he’s out walking his dog, and I’ll suggest to Dale that we show the dog take a crap in the background, not because it’s funny, but just more because that things that happen around these characters don’t necessarily reflect happy families. They reflect the sickness that is this Mafia family. The entire environment they’re in is poisoned.
NRAMA: Did you make any other changes to the Darkness itself? Given your description of the tone, it’s hard to imagine the little Darkness imps still sticking around…
PJ: Oh, we cut out the goofy little stupid monsters that make wisecracks. I just thought they were stupid. It was a very convenient way to write goofy one-liners, but not very interesting, or essential to the story or good for this character.
That said, there’s great gallows humor that’s inherent in the book. I think I got back to the point of Jackie being the funny guy from the terrible situations that he’s in, but not necessarily the one-liners and wisecracks, which I hate. I get to do that with Spider-Man, so I don’t need to do it in here.
NRAMA: Given what you said about your view of the series and where you want to take it, are you cutting the Darkness off from Witchblade and the larger Top Cow mythos that had a connection between the two forces?
PJ: In a way no, but in a way, yes. The connections will all still be there, but we won’t necessarily refer to it. We’re definitely not cutting things off – that was the whole point of Universe, to bring the books together and have a cohesive universe, so that won’t change. In that same vein the series doesn’t really suddenly change directions, even for the purists who’ve followed it up to this point and knew about all the angels and demons. My take doesn’t contradict that stuff, but it doesn’t necessarily refer to it. That way, we don’t have these meandering, huge ass stories that have to do with cosmic creatures coming after the Darkness.
NRAMA: More on the nuts and bolts side, how are you approaching the series, as a series of arcs, or one, long ongoing?
PJ: We’ve got a six issue storyarc to begin with. The beauty of doing this kind of story with Top Cow is that those guys are more inclined towards action and visuals, and I’m more inclined towards characterization. So the one thing we had a big discussion about was that the book continues to move, action-wise. We can’t do only character development in the context of a Top Cow book. That was maybe my mistake with Witchblade, thinking that we needed more character development. I’m known for doing that kind of stuff, and it worked in context of what the television show was, but it really didn’t work in context of the comic book.
In this case, we’ve already decided not to skimp on the action, and have some really mad shit going on. So we’ve got a Mafia turf war coming up, with body parts and all kinds of crazy stuff. To me though, if I’m going to do that, I’ve got to justify it – why should I do it? I hate gratuitous action – I hate the “formula” feel it gives to a book, so any action that’s in Darkness is there for a reason, because it’s part of the conflict.
NRAMA: Wrapping things up, speaking of that approach to it, and what you want to put into the series and get out, what is it about Darkness and your other Top Cow work that keeps you there? What itch does writing Darkness scratch for you that you can’t get with other books?
PJ: The Top Cow stuff allows me to scratch an itch in one sense, because I got to do The Agency, which sadly, because of one thing or another, had a hard time coming out and finding a large audience. So, there’s the potential to do creator-owned stuff. My challenge with Top Cow was, “Can I write characters in this goofy universe?” It’s generally been this sort of tits and bums universe, what can I do in terms of characters?
But also, something like Universe was a fun challenge – we tried to unify all of these disparate ideas into one concept. I was approached by Matt [Hawkins], I thought it was a good idea, I had fun doing, but because of difficulties they were having at the time, the promotion and ability to push it really fell down through nobody’s fault in particular. It didn’t find the hugest audience, but it did manage to come out. We’ve at least explained what the “Top Cow Universe” is.
Now, I get a chance to do a character that I am much more attached to – I can easily see this guy, and I can easily see him existing, and see the kind of thing that he does. Creatively, I’d decided recently that I didn’t want to do something unless I could create it. I’ve taken on a couple of things in the last few years a couple of books that, in hindsight, I can say I did my best on, but I should’ve known that my best work, and the work that in the end, is the best for my career and makes me the most money is the work that I enjoy the most. So I only take on things now that I know I want to do and can do and I’m very interested in. Spider-Man is one, the Darkness is another.
As a quick recap of sorts, Jackie was a hitman for the Mafia who inherited, via his father, the “Darkness,” a near-sentient force that was bonded with Jackie and was immensely powerful. Jackie used the powers he was given to help his career, but unfortunately for the playboy hitman, the powers came with a limitation – the moment Jackie’s…um…seed was sown in fertile ground, the Darkness would leave him and inhabit his offspring, manifesting, as it did with Jackie, when he turned 21. The down side for Jackie was that the transfer would leave him dead. As a result, Jackie had to quit women cold turkey – well, at least the sex part of it.
Throughout the forty issues of the first series, the mythology surrounding the Darkness was explored, the Witchblade, Heaven, and Hell were all brought in, and things got to be…a little confusing, to say the least. Radical as it was, Jackie’s death in issue #40 was, according to Jenkins, who wrote the issue, just the kind of surgery the book needed.
We caught up with Jenkins for an overview of the new series, as well as his candid view of what needed to be fixed, tweaked, adjusted, or just left alone.
Newsarama: So, to catch things up – in the last issue of the series, Jackie sent himself, well…to Hell via an explosion that killed his uncle, his uncles men, and him. Sounds like it’s a tough place to start a new series. How does this new series play into the older continuity, especially the final event of the older series?
Paul Jenkins: What we did with the continuity, honestly, was get rid of it. Jackie had been a Mafia hitman, and then he turned them into the Feds, and then Uncle Frankie was after him, and there were angels and demons and monsters – you name it. I looked at it, and thought that considering how the series, started, with Jackie as a hedonist hitman, things really had gotten away from that original idea. We did a story in #40 that was going to end it – Uncle Frankie kills the girl, so Jackie kills Uncle Frankie and himself at the same time.
NRAMA: So, does #1 start at a funeral, or what?
PJ: No. I suppose the best thing to say as to what happens is that Jackie comes to realization at the beginning of our story that he’s back with no recollection, or a very difficult recollection of what’s happened to him. He remembers the events – he remembers dying, but he doesn’t remember the specifics, or the Darkness, either, but he realizes that he’s afraid of the dark - an irrational fear of darkness. He’s aware of the events that happened, but has no explanation as to why he’s alive.
All that does, honestly, it gives a small piece to the people who’ve followed the series and character for a long time, but the intention is one of, ‘Here’s a new series that hearkens back to the old days of The Darkness much more so than the later days of The Darkness.”
NRAMA: So, in your view, the first series is a closed book in terms of his relationships and other characters?
PJ: Yes. There’s only one character that comes back, Butcher Joyce.
NRAMA: But is Jackie a totally blank slate?
PJ: No – he remembers what came before. This is the 40% - the Darkness itself gives him an awareness of what’s gone on. It starts talking to him and giving him clues, and showing him things that he’s seen. He’s spent some time in Hell, so the Darkness shows him the hell that he lived through. It shows him Jenny dying. Throughout it though, it becomes pretty clear that the Darkness has its own agenda, and he doesn’t necessarily understand it – there must be some reason the Darkness brought him back. At first, it’s a series of bad visions and dreams, but it’s all starting to mutate, to change into something.
NRAMA: That said, where are you looking to take Jackie himself? Is he returning to the Mafia?
PJ: Yes. With Jackie, taking him back to basics is the absolute best thing that we should do. If you’ve seen the older issues that Garth [Ennis] did, this guy was a really great character, one that you very easily wanted to read about. There he was – he’s an untouchable hitman who does whatever he wants, says whatever he wants, but now can’t have sex. You could read this story and find it interesting. After a while, with the demon stuff that just kind of meandered, I don’t think anybody could.
What we’re going to do is a strong crime-drama, and the supernatural aspects of it are slightly lessened. The Darkness will be the 40%, as I said, and the story and characterization and crime drama is the 60% of it.
NRAMA: In that 60% that is characterization and crime drama, what’s the motivation for Jackie? Will he be out for revenge against the family that took everything away from him?
PJ: Not really. The story itself is about Jackie wanting to find out who he is, in a way. He needs a family. He’s never had one – he doesn’t remember his father or his mother, he was picked out of an orphanage and given a very dysfunctional family, the Mafia. But at least it’s a family.
It’s the story of Jackie trying to find or make himself a family. Here’s this family sitting there, the Mafia, but in a way, he’s betrayed it because he turned against Frankie, but his response to that is, “Look, Frankie is a scumbag, and he didn’t live by the old ways.”
NRAMA: But, given his history with Frankie, the Mafia won’t be welcoming him back with open arms, will they?
PJ: Most won’t – especially the new head of the family, Paulie. Basically, Uncle Frankie was the complete bastard. Now that he’s gone and there’s a power void, his cousin Paulie has come into town, and he makes Frankie look like a choirboy. The first thing that Paulie does is the most revolting thing that he could have done – it’s really, really nasty and you immediately get the idea that this guy is just a terrible person.
NRAMA: So, in a way, Jackie is stood against Frankie, and now Paulie, because they’re not “good” Mafia?
PJ: Well, there is no such thing as good Mafia, but that captures the essence of what Jackie really feels – “What happened to us?” It’s a real question of whether or not Jackie is going to find what he really wants to find. He would love it if there was such a thing of the Mafia that he’s envisioned in his mind, one that has honor and it’s own code of behavior that you never would cross as well as a sense of both family and community.
Frankie did deals with the Chinese and the Jamaicans, and Paulie’s following down the same path. Jackie doesn’t agree with this. The higher ups in Chicago and the other cities are watching this whole play unfold, but they’re not going after Jackie either. They’re waiting to see how it will play out, and it’s quite possible that they might accept Jackie back in, because he prefers the old ways rather than the bullshit that’s going on now. Cousin Paulie is nothing if he’s not terribly ambitious, and will screw everybody, and work with all kinds of other ethnic groups. Stuff that, in Jackie’s view, and quite possibly the view of the older Mafia members in the other cities, “dirties” the Mafia.
NRAMA: So Jackie’s wanting the Mafia to be more like The Godfather, not for making it a “better” organization, but for making it a better home and family for himself?
PJ: Yeah, it’s incredibly naive, but that’s his only chance at a family. He’s lost Jenny, so if the only thing he’s able to get is the most dysfunctional family there is, he’s still going to try and get it.
NRAMA: So he’s facing down the Mafia by himself? This is sounding like it could be a short series…
PJ: He’ll have friends. The one character we’ll introduce into the story is this faded old lady named Mary. She was the wife of the original Don Franchetti, the original head of the family. As the story goes, Mary was quite a young thing in those days, and he was totally enamored with her, but she wasn’t connected. She married into this family, and turned a blind eye to the things she knows her husband does in order to keep the relationship of this man that she loves.
When Don Franchetti died, the rest of the family went to Chicago, and there was a transfer of power, but here’s this old lady, still living off of the old money, and she loves Jackie. She’s a dotty old lady, but she sees him as her husband was. She even says to Jackie at one point, “I know what you do, and I’ll never ask questions about it, but I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She’s his chance to see a reflection of the family he wants. She represents the ideal of what it once might have been, but now, she’s a cracked and faded old lady. He wants to restore this in a way, but the reason he wants to do it is utterly selfish – he just wants to get his family back. Of course, the Darkness wants the family too, and wants it for a completely different reason.
NRAMA: Back to the Darkness itself, you mentioned that it’s mutating. What’s it going through?
PJ: It’s extremely malevolent now. It shows him aspects of itself throughout history, such as the revelation that it was the guiding force by all the atrocities committed by Vlad the Impaler. The Darkness provides Jackie with visions of the present as well – he has visions of people who are going to die, as well as clues as to the way things are going to happen around him.
In the first issue, as an example, in his dreams and visions, he keeps seeing a dead pig. In the last part of the story, Jackie starts going after cousin Paulie’s boys in a meat processing plant. There are bullets flying around, and all sorts of dead animals – including the pigs he’s seen. It’s really disturbing, both in the visuals and that Jackie had a vision o sorts about this happening. That’s generally the way we’re placing everything.
NRAMA: And Dale’s in line with your thinking for the series?
PJ: Absolutely. Dale’s really interested in two things – he’s great at monsters and evil, but his other strong interest right now is the character part of the story. We’ve talked a couple of times, and he just really digs doing a page or two where we’re building the characters up.
There’s also other, more subtle imagery that we’re putting in the book as well – Jackie may meet someone while he’s out walking his dog, and I’ll suggest to Dale that we show the dog take a crap in the background, not because it’s funny, but just more because that things that happen around these characters don’t necessarily reflect happy families. They reflect the sickness that is this Mafia family. The entire environment they’re in is poisoned.
NRAMA: Did you make any other changes to the Darkness itself? Given your description of the tone, it’s hard to imagine the little Darkness imps still sticking around…
PJ: Oh, we cut out the goofy little stupid monsters that make wisecracks. I just thought they were stupid. It was a very convenient way to write goofy one-liners, but not very interesting, or essential to the story or good for this character.
That said, there’s great gallows humor that’s inherent in the book. I think I got back to the point of Jackie being the funny guy from the terrible situations that he’s in, but not necessarily the one-liners and wisecracks, which I hate. I get to do that with Spider-Man, so I don’t need to do it in here.
NRAMA: Given what you said about your view of the series and where you want to take it, are you cutting the Darkness off from Witchblade and the larger Top Cow mythos that had a connection between the two forces?
PJ: In a way no, but in a way, yes. The connections will all still be there, but we won’t necessarily refer to it. We’re definitely not cutting things off – that was the whole point of Universe, to bring the books together and have a cohesive universe, so that won’t change. In that same vein the series doesn’t really suddenly change directions, even for the purists who’ve followed it up to this point and knew about all the angels and demons. My take doesn’t contradict that stuff, but it doesn’t necessarily refer to it. That way, we don’t have these meandering, huge ass stories that have to do with cosmic creatures coming after the Darkness.
NRAMA: More on the nuts and bolts side, how are you approaching the series, as a series of arcs, or one, long ongoing?
PJ: We’ve got a six issue storyarc to begin with. The beauty of doing this kind of story with Top Cow is that those guys are more inclined towards action and visuals, and I’m more inclined towards characterization. So the one thing we had a big discussion about was that the book continues to move, action-wise. We can’t do only character development in the context of a Top Cow book. That was maybe my mistake with Witchblade, thinking that we needed more character development. I’m known for doing that kind of stuff, and it worked in context of what the television show was, but it really didn’t work in context of the comic book.
In this case, we’ve already decided not to skimp on the action, and have some really mad shit going on. So we’ve got a Mafia turf war coming up, with body parts and all kinds of crazy stuff. To me though, if I’m going to do that, I’ve got to justify it – why should I do it? I hate gratuitous action – I hate the “formula” feel it gives to a book, so any action that’s in Darkness is there for a reason, because it’s part of the conflict.
NRAMA: Wrapping things up, speaking of that approach to it, and what you want to put into the series and get out, what is it about Darkness and your other Top Cow work that keeps you there? What itch does writing Darkness scratch for you that you can’t get with other books?
PJ: The Top Cow stuff allows me to scratch an itch in one sense, because I got to do The Agency, which sadly, because of one thing or another, had a hard time coming out and finding a large audience. So, there’s the potential to do creator-owned stuff. My challenge with Top Cow was, “Can I write characters in this goofy universe?” It’s generally been this sort of tits and bums universe, what can I do in terms of characters?
But also, something like Universe was a fun challenge – we tried to unify all of these disparate ideas into one concept. I was approached by Matt [Hawkins], I thought it was a good idea, I had fun doing, but because of difficulties they were having at the time, the promotion and ability to push it really fell down through nobody’s fault in particular. It didn’t find the hugest audience, but it did manage to come out. We’ve at least explained what the “Top Cow Universe” is.
Now, I get a chance to do a character that I am much more attached to – I can easily see this guy, and I can easily see him existing, and see the kind of thing that he does. Creatively, I’d decided recently that I didn’t want to do something unless I could create it. I’ve taken on a couple of things in the last few years a couple of books that, in hindsight, I can say I did my best on, but I should’ve known that my best work, and the work that in the end, is the best for my career and makes me the most money is the work that I enjoy the most. So I only take on things now that I know I want to do and can do and I’m very interested in. Spider-Man is one, the Darkness is another.