Coming Up: Justice League by Dan Jurgens and Dan Slott

[tom daylight]

http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=7197

"I had started working on a "Justice League" project with Dan Slott a couple years ago, and it got put to the side, and now I'll be picking that up and finishing it off now that Dan has gone exclusive to Marvel."

How much of this did you do, Dan? Obviously you can't necessarily comment on how much of it will be your stuff in the end and how much will be Dan's, but how much did you actually produce for it? Would I be right to assume you only worked out plots for a few issues?

[Dan Slott]

Tom,
Hi! This is something I wrote some time ago. JLA Editor, Mike Carlin, approached me about pitching him some JLA ideas not that long after ARKHAM ASYLUM LIVING HELL had wrapped (this was around the same time he commissioned arcs from Gail Simone, Keith Giffen, and a number of others)
.
Dan Jurgens and my story is a 5 parter called THE 4th PARALLEL. It's set during the time when both John Stewart and Plastic Man were part of the team (though not Aquaman-- though he does make an appearance). The arc features the Royal Flush Gang, and an all-new villain, THE RED KING (who you may have seen a sneak preview of in JLA SECRET FILES & ORIGINS 2004).

It's got a pretty funky structure (which I'm not going to give away). But I can tell you that both the first and last chapters are DOUBLE-SIZED!
The Dan Jurgens art is nothing short of AMAZING! And I'm sure it will blow everybody away.

As far as my involvement in the project-- I plotted out all 5 issues. Anyone who's read my plots knows they're pretty tight, mostly panel-by-panel descriptions of what's going on-- and the loose gist of what the characters are saying. Nothing that you could really call "full script", but not as loose as Classic Marvel Style.

I'm pretty proud of the plots I did for 4th PARALLEL. (Especially the issue called "World's Apart"-- the ideas in that are pretty darn BIG!). And I have TREMENDOUS respect for Dan Jurgens as a writer-- and I can't wait to read his scripts on this job! As for the art, I called for a lot of IMPOSSIBLE visuals in this project-- super-mega-crowd shots, end of the world stuff, big-Big-BIG things-- and Dan Jurgens pulled them ALL off!

Whenever people would drop my apartment, I'd show off pages from this gig-- and people who WEREN'T into comics would look at them in awe and give out the prerequesite "oohs" and "ahhs". On the other hand, people who WERE in to comics would look at these JLA pages, audibly gasp, turn to me and say (something like) "You MADE your artist draw ALL of this? This? This was in your plot? You are such a *@#$!" And they were right.

I think the opening shot of the first issue went something like this:
"Open on everyone on Earth..."

I'm such a bastard.

Anyway... I'm really looking forward to seeing this come out! I hope everybody enjoys it! And I'm very grateful to Mike Carlin for the opportunity to work on the mainstream JLA.

[Dreg]

So can we expect more Wally West action in this series? It's a well-known fact that he's awesome.

[John Drake]

Well you got me excited for it! I'll buy it for sure.

[tom daylight]

Nice! Thanks for the details, Dan!

[Crimson]

So out of interest Dan (I'm not looking for details, as that's rather personal information) but do you still get paid for this work? I'm guessing its ok for you to because it was submitted before your exclusive?

I may have to check this out. I'm not a DC guy at all but I love Slott and Jurgens is great too.

[tom daylight]

He would already have been paid for it when DC actually bought it from him. Our Dan's no fool!