Jenny Sparks #4 - "We Got Him"

[laughing_tree]

I was like, well, is the 20th century dead? Like, has it stopped affecting us? Because I think at one point in my life, probably around 2000, I'm old enough to have been alive then, I thought the 20th century was dead, and people were telling me the 20th century was dead. They're like, all those conflicts that sort of riled you: World War I, where so many people died needlessly. World War II, where so many people died evilly. Evilly, that's my new word. And then that of course followed by nuclear conflict and the Cold War. And then, towards the end of the 90s, we started to get this sense that, like, okay, we're past all that conflict and that we are now a progressive society. We're not a perfect society. We're still fucking broken in a thousand ways, but somehow Western culture... it was this idea of soft power, it was the idea that we're gonna slowly spread our culture and with our culture democracy is gonna follow, and that's gonna spread across the whole world. And people wrote books called The End of History. We're just fucking done with conflict now and now it's time for us to sort of, you know, globalize and be friendly and all hold hands and order a Coke. And I totally bought into it. [...] We thought the 20th century was dead, but it wasn't dead. It came back. -- Tom King

Comments

[mysteryguy]

Thanks for sharing these. I picked up issue one on a whim but didn't love it enough to add it to my pull list. Now I may have to pick up the trade whenever it comes out.

[nyadnar17]

I know there is a disconnect between people born into the majority and everyone else but hot damn can I not even imagine believing "the fight" was over in the late 90s.

I remember the 90s. The Clinton Years was my first time experiencing politics as an adult, I can't even imagine thinking that time period was "The End of History".

[shakalooloo]

We got the end of the Cold War, supposedly the final possibility of global conflict averted. Boris Yeltsin was drinking and Timmy Mallett was handing out chunks of the Berlin Wall; we had at last put an end to the nasty legacy of the World Wars.

Main story was over, just side-quests to finish up.

[zachbeacon]

Still don't get why this isn't a Jenny Quantum book. Midnighter and Apolo's baby girl is much more likely to end up here than the woman who was buddies with Hitler.

[icon_uk]

Did they explain why she was alive 24 years into the century after the one she was the embodiment of?

[cainofdreaming]

Aside from King's explanation that "90s never ended"? Not so far.

[beyondthefringe]

She literally came out of her own grave.
For …reasons.

[zachbeacon]

You said it was 9/11 when I asked.

https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/10879509.html?thread=235806229#cmt235806229

Was it explicitly 9/11?

Or was it just subtextually 9/11? (Because all Tom King comics are ultimately about 9/11)

[thezmage]

Pretty sure it was literally 9/11

https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/10879509.html

[cainofdreaming]

I dunno. It doesn't say that Jenny's little outburst happened literally during the same day, just that it looks similar to 9/11 to the guy.

[super_fly]

A power even greater than her own: nostalgia

[shakalooloo]

Well, is the 19th century dead? Like, has it stopped affecting us?

Well, is the 18th century dead? Like...

The world does not entirely reboot like a comics universe every century, of course each one will build on the one before.

And I would personally argue that while 9/11 may have been born from 20th century grievances, the world its aftermath created in no way resembles what came before. I did not think 'wow, this just shows that nothing will change', it was quite the opposite.

Every century has had human conflict. Just because one failed to result in 'the end of history' does not mean it continues on, otherwise we'd still be repeating the very first one.

[thezmage]

Exactly. We arbitrarily picked December 31st as the end of the year and an estimate of the birth of Jesus as zero 0 (later reestimated to be when he was three or so) and time never just ended with no connection to what came before. And whilst 9/11 was the result of what came before, it did represent a change in perspective which is so much more relevant considering cultural perception is the only thing separating the centuries

[knight_moves]

I remember an old Seanbaby article on 'afterschool special' comics where he joked about how those comics painted evils like rape or famine as all being the result of one colorful supervillain and how nice it would be if the issue could be solved forever by just killing that one person.

Didn't expect that same level of political nuance (or lack thereof) to be applied to the financial crisis in a comic so expressly for adults that it's published by a special, sweary sublabel.

[laughing_tree]

It’s not meant to solve the financial crisis, though. It’s meant to deliver the satisfaction of a horrible person getting the just deserts that he’d otherwise escape. Like, when Spider-Man puts away a mobster, it’s not unstaisfying just because he hasn’t addressed the systemic problems that enable organized crime.

[zachbeacon]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Batman (sometimes) is the only one who's trying to "end crime" or whatever. For everyone else it is mostly just triage or vengeance.