Comic book writer Justin Jordan first came onto the scene with The Strange Talent of Luther Strode six-issue series for Image Comics. After being well received, he eventually went on to write The New 52 Deathstroke issue #15 in 2012, as well as writing 22 issues of the Green Lantern: New Guardians for DC Comics a year later. Now he has left the superhero world for the time being to launch his own series called John Flood.
Distributed by Boom! Studios, John Flood #1 features the story of a wanna-be private investigator who is in a constant dream state—shown through the trippy illustrations by artist Jorge Coelho (Sleepy Hollow)—after the government "poked around" in his brain, successfully removing his need to sleep.
Throughout the six-issue series, Flood must take steps to separate this dreamland from reality; however, he did acquire the skill to make connections other people can't from the "poking around"—a skill he uses to investigate murders.
Getting help from a violent ex-cop named Alexander Berry, the two men attempt to track down a serial killer who has been on a murderous spree for decades, killing families and leaving behind no evidence.
T-Lounge spoke to Jordan about the shift from writing superhero comics to picking back up on his own content-created books, and how the private investigator will match up against the serial killer.
You came onto the comic scene four short years ago with The Strange Talent of Luther Strode, then later joined up to do some superhero work in comics like Deathstroke and Green Lantern: New Guardians. How big of a change was it to go from the superhero story lines to going back to creating your own content out of this realm? What was the big difference between working on corporate-owned characters and your own characters?
I hadn't really ever stopped doing my own creator-owned nonsuperhero work; in the time [since] the first Strode we've done two more series, along with Dead Body Road and Spread, as well as Dark Gods at Avatar. So in that sense, it wasn't a huge adjustment. But writing your own stuff is very different than working on other people's property. There's a lot of stuff you simply can't do with the corporate-owned characters, you know?
I mean, I can kill John Flood if I want. Or turn him into a villain. I really can't do that sort of thing when I do work-for-hire stuff. And I shouldn't, in a lot of cases. You're working within a certain sandbox there and it's probably a bad idea to use it as a litterbox, to mix and stretch that particular set of metaphors.
But the big difference is in the ... purity of it, I guess? Work-for-hire comics are, by their nature, the product of a lot of different voices: editorial, the company, other writers, history. Creator-owned, what you're getting is very much the creative team with a minimum of other people involved.
How different was the pitch process at Boom! Studios for this comic compared with DC Comics? How much guidance did you have at both, and how many suggestions did the editors at Boom give you?
My experience in regard to pitching at both is an outlier, and not representative of how stuff usually works. The only thing at DC I've ever actually pitched which, you'll note, I never wrote. Although I think that was due to the book going under rather than the pitch itself. The rest of the time I was asked to take over (or in the case of Team 7, start) a book, with no real pitching involved. Basically just working with the editors to figure out what we were trying to do with the books.
Now at Boom! they've asked me to send them some ideas, which took a while, because I was way overbooked for a while. But eventually I sent them three different pitches, two of which were Deep State and John Flood, and they green-lit all three. Which, again, is not how this stuff usually works. And they were green-lit based on fairly short pitches, much different than, say, how my Image books happened.
Past the pitch stage, there hasn't been a huge amount of work with editorial in regards to the overall shape of the books. I work with them a lot on the individual issues, sending notes back and forth, but not as much during the macro stage. I'm not sure if that's unusual or not.
Have you seen a shift of more comic book writers leaving superhero comics to create their own content? If so, why do you think that this?
Most of the creator-owned stuff has been not superheroes, for sure. My instinct, and this is just that, is that this isn't any kind of reaction to superheroes per se, but a reaction to the marketplace. It is really, really hard to get a new superhero started. This is true even for Marvel and DC – the last genuinely new character to be a big hit was, what, Deadpool? Who is close to 20 years old, I think. Everyone else is a character based on pre-existing characters.
So just getting a new superhero going is hard, and it's harder still when you're not Marvel or DC. You can probably count the long-term viable non-Big Two [Marvel and DC] stuff in the 21st century on one hand: Irredeemable, Powers, Kick-Ass and Invincible, basically? Astro City? It's hard to do, so it mostly doesn't get done. Hell, as a personal example, I've got two superhero projects I'd like to do that I haven't done yet for exactly this reason. I can afford to have a book not make any money. Artists, on the other hand, can't, unless the publisher is fronting the cash for it. So I think that's a great deal of it. And indeed, I'll hopefully end up doing at least one of those projects at Boom! The other part is that when you're doing WFH, superheroes is most of it, so you're not usually getting a chance to do other stuff there, so you want to do the different stuff when you do your creator-owned.
Let's get into John Flood. Flood has the dreamlike abilities that make me think of Will Graham from Bryan Fuller's Hannibal series. What was the inspiration for this character?
The character isn't inspired by Graham, but the feel of the book is, to a certain extent. I was sort of drawing from a couple of sources there, one of which was definitely Hannibal, and the other being Italian Giallo movies [murder-mystery thrillers], which tend to have a very dream-like feel. Flood himself was inspired by a couple of things. One was the notion of the defective detective, which is a very common trope. Will Graham, especially as depicted in Hannibal, is one, but House was another, as are most modern depictions of Sherlock Holmes. So I wanted to do something that played with those tropes.
The other chunk of it was just me having experienced a lot of insomnia and any number of stretches where I didn't sleep for days. You stay up long enough, and you start getting weird, and the world starts seeming weird. So it felt like it'd be fun to explore that.
Flood has abilities that make him borderline crazy. How hard is if for him to distinguish dreams from reality, and how does this help him on his quest to find the killer?
The inability to distinguish the real world from what's going on in his head is one of Flood's bigger problems. He's actually better at it when the story picks up than he would have been earlier, but even so, he can't live a normal life. His world only really intersects with the real world about 80 percent of the time, which means he's not going to be able to work a real job or keep a real relationship going. And he knows this, which is why he's pissed about what he says has been done to him.
Because Flood is constantly living in a dream state, what was the biggest challenge in creating what he sees, and how did you overcome it?
The trick with that is that you don't want to lose the reader. I didn't and don't want to write something that's incomprehensible, so I needed to strike a balance between suggesting how messed up the world is from Flood's perspective and still making it something the reader can understand. Which, you know, I am not the best writer for, which was part of why I wanted to do it. Weird and surreal is not how my mind works or how my work usually goes, so I wanted to try and do it. Hopefully it's an entertaining book.
Were these scenes Jorge illustrated what you imagined them to look like?
Better. Jorge and Tamra [Bonvillain] really knocked the art in the book out of the park. Which is what you want as a writer out of a creative partnership. You want someone who takes what you put in the script and makes it better than what you had in your head, which Jorge and Tamra have done.
It seems like Alexander Berry will keep Flood rooted in reality, and his aggressive approach makes the reader clearly see why Flood thought he was the best man for the job. How do they help each other, and are they are they as different as they seem?
Berry has two main jobs, which are basically anchor and muscle. Berry keeps Flood sort of generally focused on the real world and makes sure that he doesn't wander off and end up naked in a field in Idaho. At the same time, he's also there in case Flood needs rescuing because between his brain and the generally wasted state of his body, Flood is not great at the physical stuff. And certainly on this particular case, he needs to be. Flood and Berry share a common problem; both are men broken by circumstances that were maybe beyond their control, looking for something to make their lives work. But they are very different people, in ways that will become a lot obvious as the book goes.
Will there be as much gore in John Flood as there was in Strange Talent? What can readers expect?
Oh no. There are some brutal bits, because the killer is very much not a nice man, but for the most part we're trying to stay within the PG-13 ballpark. I save the hardcore gore for Strode and Spread.
The ending of the issue has me wanting more. Social media plays a part in the series through the viral videos. How important is the viral video Flood uploaded in terms of getting the killer's attention? Killers who love media attention are at a risk for getting caught since they might make mistakes and leave a trail. Will the video lead the two to cross paths, and will Flood and Berry be out of their league?
That video is very, very important. The killer has been successful for this long precisely because he doesn't seek attention. He's not operating out of compulsions that cause him to repeat the same crimes over and over, and as a result his nationwide murder spree has lasted 25 years and before Flood, no one had any idea he might exist, let alone that he did.
But, you know, the world changed around him. We're very interconnected now, and that made it possible for Flood to do what he did. And once that genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back. Now that people know, or are at least willing to consider, that the killer exists, he can't go back.
Which means a lot of things, but the most important is that he really, really has it in for Flood and aims to make him suffer. Which is a big problem for Berry and Flood, because this is a man who has been able to kill anyone he wants and go undetected for two decades, which makes him exactly as smart and capable as that implies.
John Flood #1 goes on sale Aug. 5.
