So, what is a Jasmine Jett?
Jasmine Jett is, or was, a supervillain whose stock-in-trade was bank robbery, although she did burn down a senator's house once.
Sounds like a bad person.
Yes and no. I had a few goals with trying to write this particular story.
Such as?
Well, I wanted it to be funny. Humor fiction, there isn't much of it around right now. Everyone's jumping on the "young adult" fiction train, trying to become the next Twilight or Hunger Games millionaire. Those books are specifically aimed at teen readers, and you know them teens are a barrel of laughs.
So that was one goal. With superhero movies, and soon TV shows, becoming so popular I thought that was a particularly fertile ground to stomp around on. I have my favorites, like everyone does, but the whole genre is kind of absurd when you think about it. Putting aside the costumes and powers and stuff like that, these are people who wreak wanton destruction, usually in crowded cities, with impunity. Superheroes and supervillains regularly bash each other against buildings and knock them down, supposedly for the safety and welfare of the citizens, but they just destroyed their apartments in the process!
I'd also expect that the superhero/supervillain relationship is particularly symbiotic.
Symbiotic's a word…I'd say, more parasitic.
Why would that be?
Without the supervillain, what's a superhero for? What would they do without their mortal enemies? For a lot of them, they don't have any discernibly marketable skills. They're superheroes, that's all they do. So if the super-villain ceases to exist, so do they, so they're really, really invested in getting the bad guy, so long as there are still bad guys left to get afterward.
Sort of like job security.
Exactly. So that's where Dark Vengeance comes in. He's the "hero" and, I suppose, the arch-enemy of Jasmine Jett. But she's gone legit. She's really, honestly, trying to be good and stay on the right side of the law. But she's also his bad guy, and without her, he's just a cipher, so in the guise of keeping tabs on her, he's kind of a stalker. He's waiting for her to do something wrong, and what's she going to do about it? She burned down a senator's house! Who is the court going to believe? So, yeah, she's stuck.
I'd imagine the circumstances are complicated for someone who has such a criminal background to stay on the right side.
That was one of the most fun parts about writing the story, trying to tease out what she would need to do to make it work. First, she couldn't live in the city because she would never be out of sight. There might always be someone who calls in on her saying she's done something wrong, even if she hadn't. So that requires living in a place of some isolation, but that's expensive living right there. So she needs to make money, completely legitimately so as not to violate anything, but she has to do it all on the sly.
How does she do that?
(Laughs.) Well, let's save some things for reserve.
You said before the interview began that you didn't want the story to be a sermonette. What did you mean by that?
The story has a moral, but I hope it doesn't bash people over the head. I used the superhero genre to tell it because things are so "of the moment" in comics. You throw the villain into the building in the moment. The consequences are never brought up. There are only two modes of dealing with baddies in comics; you either kill them or lock them up forever.
But there is a third way. That's when the bad guy actually, truly decides to get right and live as a peaceful, legitimate citizen. Like I said though, in the hyper-stylized world of the comics, would the hero let them? And in the real world, have we created a system that encourages recidivism because all opportunities are dead to the individual when they get back out?
I'm not kidding myself. There are people who need to stay in jail for life, and that's the way it is. But for those who do change, and society doesn't want to accept that change, and relegates them to poor living conditions and lousy jobs, if any job at all, isn't that just continuing the punishment cycle? When are you truly forgiven? Will you ever be? Or do you have to go back into crime because society has steered you there?
That's heavy stuff.
Yeah, well that's why I threw some fart and puke jokes in to lighten the mood.
This is a comedy, so where do you get that from?
Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, those writers that didn't so much write about the world like humans, but like aliens that land and witness humanity for the first time, and then record just how screwed up we are.
Are you screwed up, Dw Dunphy?
Absolutely.
And how can you tell?
Well, I just interviewed myself, didn't I? That's pretty screwed up!