the man who brings you misery
   
  September 26, 2002
 
 
 
I am, after a few months of abstaining, back on the comics wagon. I was lured back by Kevin Smith's work on the Green Arrow, a character which I have a curious affinity for.

 
 
 
Yes, I wanted to be Robin Hood when I grew up. Sigh. Actually, the Green Arrow is a rare pick for me since he is neither 1) a woman or 2) a socio/ psychopath. 
 
 
 
What was my segue again? Oh, right. The Green Arrow. Comes back from the dead. And Etrigan tries to kill him. Then Jason Blood tries to kill him. I love the cold, calculating types. And the immortal amorality just makes it so much sweeter. 
 
 
 
But I would not have cared for Jason Blood if I had met him in his first incarnation. (and if I had known he carried the taint of Camelot, but that's another story) 
 
 
 

The difficulty is that there are two histories of Jason Blood.
   
  The difference between this:  
  in which our hero teams up with Batman in the Brave and the Bold 137, 1977.
   
and this:
   
 
in which our hero refuses to team up with Bats in Detective Comics 602, 1989.
 
   
 
I should explain that for all my proported love of Jason Blood, I have very few of the actual comics. What I have is this: 3 issues from the original Jack Kirby mid-seventies run, a few crossovers with Batman (as above), part 3 of 4 of the Matt Wagner Mini-Series 1986 (where Etrigan comes onto the board as a player in his own right with his own goals), about 10 issues of the Alan Grant run in 1990, the first six issues and a handful of the 'teens (where Etrigan comes across as a dangerous version of Puck from Midsummer's Night) and four from the Garth Ennis run circa 1994 (where Etrigan really lets loose with the violence). And crossovers with Swamp Thing 1984, The Books of Magic 1990, Hitman 1997, Green Arrow 2001, the Justice League 2002, and Wonder Woman (which I know I own, but I can't find the damn thing so I don't know when that happened) so I lifted the historical stuff that I couldn't glean on my own from this site: http: //www.geocities.com/theshade00*
 
 
 Jack Kirby created the Demon, and since I'm not going to be research girl, lets just say around 1972- and the essentials were there, a man and a demon sharing the same body, a connection to Merlin (Damn Arthurian legends!), living in Gotham City and occasionally working with Batman. The Demon it appears is working for Merlin, to protect the modern world from spells gone wrong. But the Demon has no personality outside of Jason Blood's. He loves what Blood loves and speaks as Blood speaks- as everyone in 1972 speaks- with lots of exclaimation points.
   
 
   
 
 But the Jason Blood I adore is the darker one, the one who was cruelly used by Merlin, who moved through history with his memories distorted or missing, who is constantly waging war and forging alliances with the monster caged inside him, who cares nothing for anyone- and yet he's still out there, tracking down demons. He is arrogant, callous and impossible. He is struggling for the soul he knows he already lost. Etrigan is his own, um, man in these later stories and his aims are not always concurrent with Blood's.
 
 
 
 The history of this Jason Blood is that when Morgan La Fey stormed Arthur's castle, Merlin called his demon half brother, Etrigan, (Yes, in DC's 'verse, Merlin was half-demon) to help fight- which he did, and they still lost. But when the battle was over, Merlin couldn't send Etrigan back to Hell, so he bound him to Jason Blood. In Gaiman's Books of Magic, it is indicated that Jason and Merlin were childhood friends, also apparently someone else has him as one of the (unknown) knights of Arthur's court. Anyway, (in Garth Ennis' run on Demon) Jason went mad, killed a lot of people, then woke up one morning more or less sane, sometimes amnesia-ridden, and began to study magic as a way to get rid of the burden he was saddled with- ending up in the 20th century as a renowned demonologist who gives lectures at Harvard on mystical artifacts.
 
 
 
  But there is a third version of the story; and I caught it on Cartoon Network's Justice League: the Animated Series. In this version, Jason betrays Arthur to Morgan because he's infatuated with her. She kills him and Merlin binds him to the Demon until he atones for his sins. A man betrayed by a woman forced to take vengence on her 1400 years later. Intrigue! Romance!
 
 
 
 The Demon they use in the Animated Version is neither as quite as bland as the original Etrigan, nor as distinct and entertaining a presence as the reinvented rhyming one. This version is somewhere in the middle- a sullen, gruff Etrigan, and a Jason who is neither overly enthusiastic or grim. Just a man trying to get his job done. My biggest complaint (of course) is that Jason is only in the first five minutes of the show then it's all Etrigan. My next complaint is that they made Etrigan as gruff and sullen as every other hero they've got on that show...
   
 
 
 
 
 my dreams are bad because you're here
   
   
   
   
    how can you recover when you're the disease?
   
   
   
  *I got a very nice email from the guy who ran this site- thanking me for the link and for the pictures he took off my article. But the last time I checked the link, this site was gone.
   
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
[home][write]