‘Red Hood’ Writer Purposefully Avoided Reading Past Jason Todd Stories Before Penning Upcoming DC Series: “I’m Not A Person Who’s Interested In Continuity”
In a stark case of ‘not knowing one’s audience’, DC’s upcoming Red Hood series writer Gretchen Felker-Martin has proudly admitted to not having read a single issue of Jason Todd’s comic book history, as she had no interest in “continuity” impacting her personal take on Batman’s former sidekick.
Marking the comic book debut of Felker-Martin, a transgender author best known for her post-apocalyptic, anti-TERF novel Manhunt, DC’s Red Hood Vol. 2 will see the once-dead Boy Wonder leaving Gotham and lending his gun-toting talents to the city of New Angelique, an in-universe New Orleans analog whose police force has found themselves the pointed targets of a blood-thirsty metahuman.
“New Angelique, a city drowning in corruption, seems like the perfect place for Red Hood to put down roots,” reads the book’s official solicit. “There’s crime, vice, and sedition everywhere. When Jason discovers a super-powered serial killer who is targeting the city’s police, he finds himself sucked into a deadly conspiracy with seemingly no end in sight.
“But Jason isn’t the only person on the scene. Following his trail is Helena Bertinelli a.k.a. Huntress. Is she here to stop him, or will she join his crusade? What will happen when the two black sheep of the Bat-Family start working together?”
In announcing the series, DC editor Arianna Turturro promised that “Red Hood is the in-continuity story Jason Todd fans have been waiting for,” with “every element of the book highlight[ing] the core aspects of Jason’s character—his difficulties with personal connections, his badass training, his brooding hotness, and his violent approach to heroism.”
Yet, despite Turturro’s insistence that the book would be honoring the whole of Jason’s character, one wonders just how it will accomplish this goal given Felker-Martin’s self-admitted refusal to engage in any way with the hero’s established canon.
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Amidst a recent Red Hood-centric interview given to the general nerd blog Heat Death, Felker-Martin was asked as to whether or not she had prepared for her DC assignment by reading any of Jason’s past comic book adventures, to which the writer asserted, “I’m sure that many readers will be displeased to hear this, but no.”
“I did talk quite a bit to a good friend of mine who’s been following Jason Todd comics for 12 years at this point, and that was where I got most of my basic information, but I wanted to form my own impression of the character,” she explained. “Those previous comics aren’t literary traditions that hold a lot for me. And I respect that they are tremendously meaningful to a lot of people! But given that DC asked me [emphasis hers] to write this story, I thought that I would write it. I’m not a person who’s interested in continuity.”
Met with the observation from her hosts that “So it’s not just a fresh start for the character, but it’s you starting from just first principles: considering what the character has been through in the broad strokes, and going from there,” Felker-Martin affirmed, “Yeah, exactly. This is my approach. It’s not my version of anyone else’s approach.”
“I think that we see this relationship between fandom and fictional characters a lot where over time this sense of ownership develops, whether it’s through fan fiction or just sort of emotional investment, and also inevitably the ideas that live inside people’s heads diverge from what’s happening on the page,” she further opined. “And so you get a lot of people who have stopped understanding how to read a comic, or a story, and then continually frustrate themselves by trying, what they actually want is probably to create their own work.”
“And I encourage that!” the writer ultimately exclaimed. “If there’s some vision that people want to see executed, they should go and execute it. And although I know this is completely futile, I’d just ask that they understand that I’m intentionally not in conversation with those ideas.”
Featuring art from Batman: The Brave and the Bold Vol. 2 and Jenny Sparks Vol. 1 artist Jeff Spokes, the first issue of Felker-Martin’s Red Hood Vol. 2 is currently set to hit shelves on September 10th.
