Let's Solve JENNY SPARKS
A good faith attempt at understanding a work of art? What is this, 2012?
There wasn’t much to talk about last week and then I just really dug into this one, and then there was a massive internet outage in my area, so it took longer to make, and also there isn’t anything about comic news or that new Question series that’s pretty much just Lesbian Superhero Justified. Sorry in advance! There might be a regular issue this week! Fingers crossed!
If you’ve been following me on social media lately, which, at this point, you might as well, you’re already joining Bluesky like it hadn’t been the cool thing to do six months ago, then you might have seen me get frustrated-to-the-point-of-being-angry-and-loud-about-it at the sheer laziness and incuriousness with which Tom King’s latest DC Black Label shocker, the series they dared to call Jenny Sparks, is getting discussed by the loudest and coincidentally wrongest people I have ever come across. From their description, you’d believe the series to be full-throated apologia for the myriad crimes of the American Empire, with extra emphasis on those that its writer, famously of the CIA, was in the room for. And it would be very easy for you to brush these accusations aside; all it takes, really, is the ability to read and understand a comic, and, at a push, knowledge of some context clues, including those provided by some of the most obvious comics ever devised.
It would, except for this one thing: if Jenny Sparks isn’t, in fact, propaganda for the past two decades of American war crimes, whispered from the blood-stained mouths of legions of warmongers to your fragile ears, then, what is it exactly? Figuring it out has been a struggle; it’s very easy to zoom in on the imagery, especially when Jeff Spokes draws it this gorgeously, and see a cynical juxtaposition of real-life events and technicolor comic book nonsense. Fixate on that, and you miss the larger idea that is in play. Doubly so if you weren’t there for the events, or at least, not really. Luckily, the series has been advancing through the 21st century at an increasing pace, and Jenny Sparks #4 concerns itself with the year two thousand and eleven. Wouldn’t you know it, I was legally an adult at that time, which gave me the insights that got the ball rolling. I solved Jenny Sparks. Let’s get into the case study.
In 2011, the world wanted vengeance. Three years prior, a global financial crisis had nearly swallowed the world whole, and yet none of the people responsible for the damage had been anywhere near the inside of a prison cell. Instead, governments offered “austerity”, which is the polite way by which you let people starve in the cold. This didn’t go over too well, as you might imagine, and from there, a wave of populist protest movements crashed on public squares, from Tunisia to Egypt, and then from Madrid to New York. Some of these movements fought for justice. Some fought for a better world. All of them faced overwhelming violence and repression from the Empire they were standing up against; some led to disasters, that led to horrors beyond our imagining, others, to political movements that have never stopped struggling since.
But in the United States, there was a hunger for revenge of another kind. Three years prior, Barack Obama had been elected President. That he had failed at his objective of bringing about a new, gentler era of politics, based on negotiation and compromise, with the goal of improving peoples’ lives was irrelevant. He was black, and that was all the offense that mattered. In 2011, a mediocre reality television star, once more trying to get into politics, picked up a torch that had been lit many years prior, since Obama’s star began to rise in the national conversation. He was an elitist. He was effete. He wasn’t even born here. You know what happened next.
There was, however, an achievement of Barack Obama’s that no one could deny. Ten years prior, two planes had struck at the heart of New York. Two wars and one global manhunt later, the mastermind of that operation was, as the expression goes, caught and compromised to a permanent end. Osama bin Laden was dead. Did it make things any better? Not really. Did it change the way the world turned? I’m genuinely unsure. But it was a grand gesture of revenge, and, as I said: in 2011, the world wanted vengeance.
Jenny Sparks #4 is a comic of two parts. One is set in the present day of 2024, and the other is a flashback set on that fateful evening of May 2011, just as the announcement of the death of 2001’s most infamous terrorist is being broadcast. The 2024 story is about the messy business of hostage negotiation, as Jenny walks over the bodies of the late Justice League to talk terms with Captain Atom. Despite all the grawlixed epithets, they do have a polite conversation at the fraying edges of reality, in which each side make their offer and state the nature of their threats until an agreement is found, and gestures of good faith are made.
Meanwhile, in 2011, what else but a tale of vengeance? Jenny Sparks finds a dirtbag, tells him of his sins in the fast-talking, visual-gag-laced style of The Big Short, and then offers him up for execution to someone he wronged. It’s a straightforward interventionist fantasy of making a better world through targeted violence, of a kind not too dissimilar to what The Authority ended up becoming, albeit at lower stakes, and in itself, that was just an update on a radical streak in superhero comics that dates back to before that had even become a genre to be codified.
It doesn’t take much of a genius to notice some similarities between the two stories. They both involve someone making a demand to a higher power. In both, the higher power ends up surprised at the exact nature of the demand (In 2011, payback ends up being delivered without any fanfare or emotion, to Jenny’s shock; in 2024, Captain Atom laughs as Jenny picks which hostage gets to leave). Finally, both of them involve deliberate use of Batman iconography, whether it’s homaging the cover to The Dark Knight Returns or just plain and simple putting the Batman’s cowl on. It all returns to vengeance, and that all returns to the very first page of the comic, which features a triumphant member of Seal Team Six, his gun still smoking.
Once you see the pattern in this most recent issue, it becomes way easier to see it in the issues that came before it. Take a step backwards and consider #3, framed by the Fall of Baghdad, and in which two superheroes jump into a grand display of power. Take another step, and you’re at #2, dominated by the wreckage of 9/11, in which people are desperate for a miracle to undo some tragedies, or barring that, some guidance from on high. At the start of it all, you can see Jenny’s final words, from The Authority #12, and after that, you can see a whole comic where those words get turned against themselves; her final wish was, though not in these exact words, a better world: she got the 21st century instead.
Keep on moving forward, and you start picking up on the other thread running through all four issues so far: Jenny Sparks has a death wish, which can only be fulfilled if the world’s links to the 20th century get completely severed. And here, we get at the superhero in the room, because the Superhero is the dramatic figure of the 20th century that we cannot seem to get rid of. This is the question that burns throughout the work: Why do we seem unable to move forward? And its answer, at least so far, seems to be: because the Superhero has become a delivery mechanism for anything we might want. It can take any shape, it can serve any ideology. That’s good, if you’re in the business of selling superheroes, but bad if you want anything new to grow and take its place. And none of that will seem like a particularly radical or original thought to anyone that has engaged with either Mark Fisher or Alan Moore, but it remains worthwhile to say! Grappling with that reality, being in conversation with those, that’s gotta count for something, right?
It also bears repeating: this is a damn fine comic book! Jeff Spokes has several times over proven himself to be an expert at blending clean and stylish linework with the tactical materiality that made the Wildstorm school of comics so unique, and, when given the chance to flex his formalist muscles, he delivers finely paced definitive imagery like nobody’s business, and he dares to put flourishes on it all. So many moments in this comic are framed in smoke and rubble; it invites you to think about it in a way few mainstream superhero comics do, and in the end that’s what makes it so worthwhile to discuss.
Is it exactly the comic you want? No. People who have lost patience with Tom King’s comics for simply describing a fucked-up thing and not presenting a more radical alternative will remain frustrated, at least two thirds of the way in. If you have an issue with comics where bad things happen to your unambiguously cool and smart and unproblematic favorite characters, it will remain one of those, especially considering we still have the traumas of 2016 and 2020 to tackle in our tale of the 21st century so far. I don’t know what I can do to convince you it’s a comic worth checking out. I can lay out my case, and hope it’s better than out-of-context screenshots. I guess not being on Twitter does help.