Broken Frontier

On last Sunday's episode of Fanboy Radio, comic writer Paul Jenkins came baring gifts.  This was Paul second appearance on the three year old comic book radio show. He was the surprise guest of the first ever Mystery Show that had Internet listeners guessing up until the live broadcast.  About twenty minutes into an hour of /Batman: Jekyll & Hyde /and /Sentry /discussion and a bit of caller animosity, Paul announced that he and painter Paolo Rivera are working together again.  The following is a transcription of the show:

Paul Jenkins:  Paolo and I are working on a book for Marvel that's actually going to be a two or three year labor of love that's called /Mythos.  /The idea was - Tom Brevoort, who is such a great editor, called me up and said that 'we'd like to do something along the lines of /Origin /- like Origin of Wolverine.'  In /Origin/, we got to chance to make up the story but in this case the stories are already sitting out there - which is basically the origin of all of the major Marvel characters.  Now, I'm not going to mess with them.  Of course they've already been done and they're already been done perfectly because the perfect origin is the ones in the first appearance of the character.

Fanboy Radio:  Mr. Lee.  Yessir.

Paul Jenkins:  Yeah, sure.  And then they have this contradictory set of information which is the films.  And that is really, whether we like it or not, that's really where most people's level of awareness of the characters is.

Fanboy Radio:  Unfortunately.

Paul Jenkins:  Well, more people have seen the movie than read the comic for any of those characters - the future films as well.  So what I put on myself and Paolo was, we would take the origin that Stan had created and we would mesh that origin into a painted version.  So we would do a painted version of the origin of the X-Men, a painted version of the origin of Spider-Man.  And we'd stay very very true to what Stan had done, but we'd incorporate the better elements of the films and then we would throw in a piece of ourselves as well.  It might be one of the hardest books I've ever written but we're pretty much finish with the first issue.  Every time an issue is done they'd solicit it and come with it.  We're going to do at least eight.  If we get some success and people really like it, then we'll continue on with all the characters in the universe.

Many more details can be found about this groundbreaking "occasional series" and other Jenkins projects by downloading to the commercial-free, archived episode (show #224) through the fanboyradio.com website for seventy-five cents.

To celebrate Paul's return to the show, Fanboy Radio is offering his first appearance (a Summer 2003 - Show #97) for download for one cent.