Brian Bendis, Stan Lee, [Stuart Little, Steve Englehart, Ed Hannigan, David Kraft, Mark Gruenwald, Steven Grant, Archie Goodwin, Chris Claremont, Frank Miller,] and Melissa Rosenberg, 2015
At the end of 1996, Marvel Comics went bankrupt, and discussion on the online comics boards turned from the machinations of Doctor Doom and the Red Skull to those of real-life villains such as Carl Icahn and Ron Perelman. After the corporate raiders had finished battling it out over the remains of the company, the new leadership team was willing to try some unconventional moves to try to get the comics line back on its feet. For instance, the old regime had farmed out four of its titles to independent studios run by flashy artists Jim Lee and (the critically reviled) Rob Liefeld; the new execs also farmed out four titles to an independent studio, Joe Quesada’s Event Comics, but this time the idea was to bring in some indie talent and aim for quality. What a concept! The resulting imprint, Marvel Knights, was enough of a success that publisher Bill Jemas promoted Quesada to editor-in-chief of Marvel as a whole, and for a while there, around the turn of the millennium, higher standards and more risk-taking were the orders of the day. One initiative rolled out during this period was the MAX imprint of mature-audiences comics. The flagship MAX title was called Alias, which introduced a new character unlikely to have seen the light of day prior to the bankruptcy: a hard-drinking, constantly swearing trainwreck of a human being, once an obscure superhero called Jewel, but now a private eye operating under her civilian name, Jessica Jones.
Alias was okay. It lasted 28 issues, starting at the end of 2001 and continuing up to the beginning of 2004. Had it only lasted 23 issues, it might be largely forgotten—or remembered mainly for the shock value of the first issue, whose opening panel consists of someone shouting “FUCK!” and which goes on to feature an infamous scene which prompted reviewer Paul O’Brien to declare, “Welcome to a brave new era of adult writing, mature issues, and anal sex.” But the series concluded with a landmark five-issue story arc which took a minor Daredevil villain called the Purple Man and launched him into the top ranks of comic book arch-nemeses. What’s interesting to me is that Alias writer Brian Bendis didn’t even have to reinvent the Purple Man to turn him into a formidable threat. All the ingredients are right there in the Stan Lee version, back in Daredevil #4. Stan introduces us to Zebediah Killgrave “as he politely waits his turn” in line at a bank. When he reaches the front, he asks the teller, “Please fill this case with hundred dollar bills! Only new ones, if you don’t mind! I like them nice and crisp!” And “without a moment’s hesitation, the teller does as he is told,” while Killgrave “casually stands and watches”, “betraying no signs of worry or nervousness!” For this is Killgrave’s power, acquired in the same accident that dyed his skin purple: everyone near him does what he says. Over the course of the issue we learn that Killgrave’s goals are simple. He just wants to eat at the finest restaurants, stay in the most luxurious hotels, and revel in his superiority over his playthings. We also get to see a lot of his trademark tactics, ordering bystanders to attack his foes or kill themselves if the heroes don’t back down. Most importantly, we see what happens when Killgrave happens across Karen Page. “You are most attractive, young lady!” he says. “I would like you to become my secretary!” “Of course, Mr. Killgrave!” Karen replies. “I’ll start immediately!” All Alias does is take this same character and ask what he would do if it were no longer 1964 and he were now in a mature audiences comic. Young superheroine Jewel, endowed with enhanced strength and the ability to fly, is patrolling the skies of New York City when she notices a commotion outside an upscale French restaurant. Inside, she finds Killgrave enjoying a steak and watching a couple of patrons fight to the death for his amusement. But just by flying into the restaurant, Jewel has come under Killgrave’s control. “What’s your name?” he asks. “And not your silly made-up name—what’s your real name?” “Jessica,” she replies. “You’re very attractive, Jessica,” Killgrave says. “Take off your clothes.” Jessica remains under the Purple Man’s control for eight months.
This is the backstory revealed in Alias’s final story arc, and it is also the backstory of the first season of the Jessica Jones TV series. There are a few changes. In the show, Jessica never actually takes on the name “Jewel” or flies around in a costume. Kilgrave (just one L in the TV show) doesn’t call himself the Purple Man and isn’t even purple, though it is his favorite color. And while in the comics Bendis goes out of his way to specify that the Purple Man never raped Jessica directly—“He didn’t. What he did instead was—he fucking made me stand there and watch him fuck other girls. Telling me to wish it was me. Telling me to cry while I watched.”—the TV show has no such compunctions. I have to say, the comics version always did strike me as bizarre—it’s weird to establish Killgrave as a rapist and then spend several pages clarifying that what he put Jessica through was everything but rape. Maybe Bendis was skittish about the criticism going around that rape was overused in comics as a mere plot device, i.e., as a lazy way to add trauma to a character’s story or establish a villain as Extra Evil, and that in dealing with sensitive topics it is that much more important to handle them well. But when making explicit that the antagonist rapes women is the center of your story… at that point you’re committed to the bit. So the TV version is better.
The TV version of Jessica Jones is also better. A few months ago I commended Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. for taking an insufferable Bendis character, Daisy Johnson, and turning her into someone I didn’t want to hiss off the screen; Bendis’s Jessica Jones is similarly unlikeable, and initially I was going to say that the TV writers pull off a similarly impressive feat in making her a character to pull for. I was going to point out that they are pretty blatant about giving her a heart of gold and putting it on display. In the TV version of the scene in which Kilgrave captures Jessica, he happens across her as she is interrupting a violent mugging with some violence of her own. When he asks her whether she enjoyed beating up the muggers, using his powers to compel her to tell the truth, she says yes—but when he asks why, she says, “Because I helped someone. I made a difference.” I couldn’t imagine the Bendis character saying that, and certainly not with that winning sincerity in her voice. But as I re-read issues of Alias, I found that Jessica’s basic character isn’t as different as I had remembered. So I am now inclined to believe that the TV version’s likeability is largely an outgrowth of the fact that she is an actual human this time rather than a collection of mannered Bendis speech balloons and stiff, repetitive drawings by Michael Gaydos. Live action offers much more bandwidth to work with—fleeting expressions, subtle vocal inflections—that can soften or run counter to the off-putting aspects of the character’s portrayal.
Speaking of softening: when Jessica Jones was brought into mainstream Marvel Universe titles after Alias ended, she couldn’t be quite the same hostile, alcoholic basket case she had been in her MAX days. After a short stint working for the Daily Bugle in The Pulse, she settled into a role in Bendis’s Avengers titles as Luke Cage’s wife and the mother of their child. This relationship was set up right from Alias #1, so it’s no surprise that Luke Cage is a major supporting character in this series. His powers fit the scale of the series as well: he’s a “street-level” hero like Daredevil whose gimmick is “unbreakable skin”, easy enough to depict on a TV budget. Then there’s Jessica’s best friend, set up in Alias #3: Carol Danvers. A.k.a. Ms. Marvel, a.k.a. Binary, a.k.a. Warbird, a.k.a. Captain Marvel. She is a cosmic-level hero whose movie was budgeted at a hundred and sixty million dollars. So the TV people needed to find their Jessica a new best friend. And with countless characters to choose from, they went with… Patsy Walker! For longevity, Patsy Walker has even the Fantastic Four beat: she debuted in 1944 (!) and starred in multiple teen humor / fashion / romance comics every month right up to 1967. Stan Lee gave her a cameo in the 1965 Fantastic Four annual in which Reed and Sue get married, and on this basis, in 1972, Steve Englehart decided to bring her into the superhero world—first in Amazing Adventures, and then in The Avengers, where she became a superhero called Hellcat. By 1980, Hellcat was an established member of the Defenders, and a team of writers put together a backstory for her: the Patsy Walker comics, we learn, are not part of Marvel Universe canon, but are in fact comic books within the Marvel Universe, created by Patsy’s mother Dorothy, “the ultimate stage mother”, and featuring the idealized “teenage romance idol” Dorothy wanted rather than the tomboy the real Patsy actually was. Delightfully, the show keeps pretty much all of this! TV Patsy doesn’t wear the Hellcat suit, and her backstory is updated so that she starred in a That’s So Raven type of TV show rather than in decades of comic books, but I loved the fact that they didn’t just apply Patsy Walker’s name to a random character the way it initially seemed, and instead actually made use of the Patsy Walker I grew up with. And the friendship / sisterhood between Jessica and Patsy works a lot better than any of Jessica’s friendships in the comics!
I think one thing I liked about the choice of Patsy Walker is that she and the Purple Man are both examples of one of my favorite tropes: the redemption of the ludicrous. The Purple Man was a silly supervillain from 1964, and for all his faults as a writer, Bendis did successfully turn him into someone who makes you go “oh, shit, now we’ve got trouble” when he shows up on panel. On the flip side, it may seem like turning Patsy Walker from a teen humor character into a woman who fights crime in a yellow cat suit makes her more ludicrous, but from the perspective of the ten-year-old boys Steve Englehart was writing for, she went from silly cartoon books for girls to real comics, and was indeed thereby redeemed. The TV show doesn’t have this history to build on—in the MCU, these are both brand new characters—and so some of the Pattern 12 coolness is lost. But I suppose that to many, any translation from comic books to live action is in and of itself an attempt to redeem the ludicrous. I know a little bit about this, insofar as this was briefly my job about ten years or so ago. Folks in this line of work can create an adaptation in any number of different ways. Among them are:
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Tell this story. Find a fairly self-contained story within whatever superhero universe you’re working in and act as if you’re adapting a stand-alone novel with minimal additional research needed.
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Tell your story. Familiarize yourself with the basic premise and a handful of characters from the series you’re adapting. Using those building blocks, make up your own story, more or less from scratch.
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Tell the whole story. If you’re bringing an encyclopedic familiarity with the property to the writing table, you might be inclined to weave some giant tapestry based on what you know—while being faithful to the source material, of course.
But another option is to do what the Jessica Jones creators do. The show couldn’t be a simple adaptation of Alias, as that series brought in all sorts of elements of the MU that hadn’t been established in the MCU circa 2015. The seasons of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. that I have seen have done a lot of option two, but that’s not what we have here. And it’s not quite option three either. The creators do use a wide range of source material, pulling together characters from all sorts of different periods: Patsy, as noted, is from the 1940s; the Purple Man is from the ’60s; Luke Cage is from the ’70s; secondary villain Nuke, though he isn’t (yet?) called that in the TV show, is another Daredevil villain, this time one from Frank Miller’s run in the ’80s; and Jessica Jones herself is from the 2000s. But unlike in option three, the tapestry is a total patchwork. I think the articles I read in grad school called this sort of thing bricolage. I have no idea what percentage of viewers knew or cared about the provenance of what they were watching, but to me the adaptation decisions are the main draw.
But I guess I should say something about the show in its own right. It was pretty good—I’d put it on the same level as the Daredevil series. As many have noted, one of the strengths of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that each property slots into a different genre, and here we have a film noir private eye procedural. I did feel like the show revolved a bit too much around its own plot mechanics—twists and turns for the sake of twists and turns. I guess I’ll head into spoiler territory for this last half-paragraph here. One perennial theme of superhero comics is the moral calculus involved in killing or sparing villains. The idealistic superhero (Spider-Man, Captain America, Hawkeye, Daredevil) says, “True heroes don’t kill! We have no right to take another person’s life!” The ruthless superhero (Wolverine, the Punisher, the Black Widow, Superior Spider-Man) replies, “By sparing this villain you’re indirectly killing all of his victims during his next murder spree!” For quite a while, it looks as though Jessica Jones is squarely in the latter camp. The climax of the final episode is Jessica’s premeditated and indeed carefully planned execution of Kilgrave. She could have killed him eight episodes earlier, but kept him alive, not so much out of idealism, but in order to keep one of his thralls, a young woman named Hope, from having to serve a prison sentence. And it sort of worked—Hope was released from prison! …and a few minutes later, died horribly. As did many other innocent people who would have lived if only Jessica had offed Kilgrave in episode 5 rather than episode 13. So it seems as though the moral of the story is that some people just need killin’ and that to have qualms about this is merely to let evil continue to flourish and allow more lives to be destroyed by it. But the closing monologue in which Jessica frets about becoming “the villain” even as she is acclaimed far and wide as a hero suggests that the series is not actually choosing up sides but instead offering up this theme as a dialectic. I presume that season two will get into this more deeply, but since there were some skip years in between the first two seasons, I won’t be finding out any time soon.
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