Author: Jami Philbrick

When it comes to portraying the duality of a character, there are probably no better examples in the DCU than Victor Stone and Harvey Dent — otherwise known as Cyborg and Two-Face. With two new miniseries, Grounded writer Mark Sable intends to bring readers the back-stories of these two tragic characters.

With DC Special: Cyborg, the writer takes a look at the fan-favorite Teen Titan in a six-issue arc that began this week. Victor Stone was an Olympic athlete who, after being crippled, was resurrected with experimental prosthetics by his scientist father. Blessed with powers but cursed by his accident, he called himself Cyborg and became an important member of the Teen Titans. Created in 1980 by Marv Wolfman and George Perez and introduced in the pages of The New Teen Titans, Cyborg quickly became one of the most popular DC characters of the ‘80s. He even became a member of the Super Friends on the ‘80s Saturday morning cartoon, The Super Powers Team: The Galactic Guardians.

In Two-Face: Year One, the writer takes a look at one of Batman’s most dangerous villains in a miniseries whose first issue hits shelves just days before Aaron Eckhart takes on the big-screen role of Harvey Dent in July’s Dark Knight. The two-issue miniseries follows Dent as he runs for District Attorney and has the accident that changes his fate (and his relationship with Batman) forever.

I spoke with Sable about Cyborg, Two-Face, the characters’ respective miniseries and writing webcomics for the hit NBC television series Heroes.

CMix: To start with, tell us what fans of Cyborg can expect from your new series.

Mark Sable: It’s a six-issue series and the first issue is almost like a “Year One” in the sense that it gives you a lot of his origin. I’m not tinkering with his origin. I’m trying to be as respectful as possible to what Marv Wolfman and George Perez did, because I think Cyborg’s origin is one of the best in comics. There were a couple of things that needed to be slightly tweaked to make everything make sense. It’s done deliberately because I want people who aren’t familiar with Cyborg to be able to pick it up. It lays the groundwork for what this series is about. Without giving too much away, we really weave his supporting cast of human characters into the story as well as the Teen Titans, so it was important for people to know who they are. (more…)

It’s pretty safe to say that creator Dan Jurgens is responsible for some of the most popular characters and events in the last 20 years of DC Comics.

After striking gold in the mid-‘80s with his work on the original Booster Gold series, featuring the solo adventures of a character he created, Jurgens continued his streak through the ‘90s with his seminal work on the "Death Of Superman" story. It was in this project that he created two of Superman’s most popular villains, Doomsday and Cyborg Superman. No stranger to major, universe-spanning events, Jurgens penciled both Armageddon 2001 and Zero Hour, the latter of which he also wrote. In the late ‘90s he created the Tangent Universe for DC and currently writes the ongoing DC series Tangent Comics: Superman’s Reign.

Last year, Jurgens returned to the character he created, continuing as artist on DC’s ongoing Booster Gold series, but stepping aside as writer. The new series teamed him with superstar scribes Geoff Johns and movie executive Jeff Katz. Issue #9 hits stores this week, and continues the current “Blue & Gold” story arc. This arc recently saw the return of fan-favorite character Ted Kord, The Blue Beetle. And if Jurgens’ cover to this week’s issue is any indication, fans of the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis series Justice League International won’t be disappointed.

I spoke to Jurgens about his work on Booster Gold, Tangent Comics: Superman’s Reign and his career at DC comics.

COMICMIX: To start with, let’s talk about Booster Gold. What’s it like working with writers Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz on a character that you created so many years ago?

DAN JURGENS: There are times I just sit back and look at it and kind of have one of those “wow” moments. Just because it’s something that I probably didn’t anticipate doing.

CMix: Did you ever imagine when you were creating the character that he would last this long?

DJ: No. If you go back to those days, I hadn’t been in the business for that long. So any concept of what I might be doing, if anything 20-some years later, well it just was not anything that you stopped to consider. Whether it was Booster Gold, Superman or Spider-Man, or anything else. It just isn’t part of your thought process. At least it wasn’t part of mine.

CMix: How has the character changed since you first created him?

DJ: I don’t know that the character has changed a lot. If you go back to Booster’s first appearance, he was always supposed to be a fun, a joking sort of character, and he’ s still essentially that. I think his character’s become better defined. I think that his relationship with Blue Beetle is a really important element of who he is now, and of course that didn’t exist at the beginning. Like I said, I don’t know if his character has changed – and I think that’s part of the success. I think his character has been added to, amended and flushed out some but I think part of the reason we are succeeding is because his character has not changed.

CMix: How much are you involved in creating the story? Do they run ideas by you or are you completely surprised when you read a script for the first time?

DJ: Well, they write the script, send it and I take it from there. But we do talk reasonably often. We talk about ideas that we’d like to do and what we’d not like to do. So we certainly have, I think, a bit of give and take about the book and who Booster is. But that’s not to take anything away from them at all. The stories that are happening right now, certainly Booster’s journey through time, is absolutely due to Mr. Katz and Mr. Johns. (more…)