Glenda Mark
71 years ago - Glenda Mark is born.
55 years ago - 16-year-old Glenda begins learning about ancient magical practices.
52 years ago - 19-year-old Glenda begins researching for a book about the occult.
49 years ago - 22-year-old Glenda meets mysterious demonologist Jason Blood. Together, along with famed mentalist Randu Singh, they uncover hidden magic within the tombs of an ruined English castle, accidentally restoring Morgaine le Fay's youth & power, but also unlocking Jason's connection with Etrigan. She is interested in Jason, but his life is far to chaotic for them to be together.
46 years ago - 25-year-old Glenda & Jason Blood track evidence of the connection between Etrigan & the demon prince Belial. Etrigan manipulates her to summon Belial and she is taken to hell, and is freed only when Jason agrees to go into hell along with Etrigan to find and save her.
45 years ago - 26-year-old Glenda meets a fellow author, Harry.
43 years ago - 28-year-old Glenda is married.
42 years ago - 29-year-old Glenda has her first child. She reconnects with Jason Blood, and soon Etrigan steals her newborn son to use as a vessel for his own offspring Golgotha. Jason manages to save him, nearly dying in the process. Glenda takes her child and refuses to ever see Jason again.
40 years ago - 31-year-old Glenda has her second child.
37 years ago - 34-year-old Glenda publishes her book on the occult. It is dedicated to Jason Blood, with instructions to stay away.
1 year ago - 70-year-old Glenda dies from an undiagnosed nerve disorder.
When we went back to redo Jason Blood's page, we found that we hadn't really done a great job of bringing in the character's solo adventures. We chose to go back and adapt a few specific stories into our timeline, but in doing so we found that we really needed to bring in a few characters that really drive those tales along with Jason himself.
Glenda Mark's Comic HistoryGlenda appeared for the first time in 1972 in the Demon #1 by Jack Kirby. The supporting cast introduced into Jason Blood's story was notably pretty thorough, displaying Kirby's deep understanding of the roles each part of the supporting cast was meant to fufill. Glenda was obviously Jason's romantic interest, and in the 16 issues of that original series she managed to faithfully perform a lot of the classic love-interest-of-the-hero roles one might expect.
Her character really started to come into her own in the Matt Wagner series in 1987, where she became a much more involved in the story, practically operating as Jason's partner. These are probably the most relevant appearances for her, because this is really where Glenda steps out of the box and becomes a player in Jason's story rather than just the romantic interest. |
|
|
The bulk of Glenda's appearances actually all come from the 1990 Demon series. The first half of the series under Alan Grant was full of playfully violent 90s shenanigans. Glenda was, sadly, reduced to a pretty generic girlfriend character at the time, depicted sitting around waiting for Jason to come back to her between quests into hell and punch ups with Lobo.
In the second half of the series by Garth Ennis, Glenda's role could arguably be described as even less empowered, in that she and Jason finally sleep together and she essentially is just relegated to being the pregnant mother of the main characters child... but she actually gets some pretty wild parts to play within that role. When her baby is taken moments after being born, she literally tears the city apart hours after giving birth. It's truely an insane sequence of events... but this was a Garth Ennis comic, afterall. |
Our Glenda Mark StoryWe've chosen to take some of Jason Blood's stories and move them back to much earlier in the timeline, just to give his life a larger sense of scope. This means that the supporting characters we're using are actually much older than you might imagine otherwise, so we get to make a much more complete version of the life of those characters.
For Glenda... in the comic, I don't know that I ever got a sense of what she does with her life besides pine for Jason Blood. We wanted her to be a person who would already be interested in and involved with the occult before she ever meets him, so we started her out as a young novelist and amateur occultist. She and Randu both play a part in helping Jason unlock his curse, allowing him to start remembering his long life and allowing him to start trading places with Etrigan. |
|
|
We're taking a lot of cues from the Matt Wagner series, as it's one of the most complete and well-designed depictions of these characters we've gotten. In it it's Glenda's personal research that triggers the events that lead to her being kidnapped and taken to Hell, which forces Jason & Etrigan to follow her. From that point forward. rather than force these two to be romantically involved, they actually make way more sense if they are sort of tragically estranged. To that end, we had her get married (to a character named Harry Matthews... which is a loose reference to the third supporting character introduced by Jack Kirby and by far the least useful one). This means that we can do a version of the final arc in Garth Ennis's series, where her child is stolen by Etrigan. This arc had some really insane twists in it, and ended with a great moment where Jason actually puts one over on Etrigan, resulting in the arrangement where the Demon can't hurt anyone Jason cares about. This is an insanely useful twist for us to employ early in our timeline, because it explains all the later interactions between the Demon and characters like Batman where the Demon DOESN'T flat out murder the good guys.
It also means that Glenda goes through the absolute torture of having her first child stolen by a Demon with the intention of turning it into a vessel for it's offspring. Even in our timeline, where the child is deliberately NOT Jason's... this would still be more than enough reason for her to actively choose to never see him again. We made this a core part of the rest of her story, where she knows that Jason is a decent person, but she simply understands that knowing him is far too dangerous. We actually get to extend her story all the way to her death, and that feels really complete. This is a fun use of a supporting character. |