Jenny Sparks
1900 - Jenny Sparks is born in London. She is a techne, a manifestation of creation tied to the potential of the new century as the technology from the recent Martian invasion proliferates through England, building toward a new industrial revolution.
1905 - Jenny Sparks goes to a private school in Vienna.
1912 - Jenny Sparks father dies on the Titanic. Her family fortune lost, she leaves school and instead boards with her godfather Albert Einstein in Zurich who furthers her education.
1913 - Jenny Sparks powers begin to manifest.
1914 - Jenny Sparks, still a teenager, is forced onto the battlefield of World War I.
1916 - Jenny Sparks becomes an operative of British Intelligence
1919 - Jenny Sparks powers develop to the point where she has achieved complete mastery over electricity. Her aging all but stops.
1920 - Jenny Sparks helps Great Britain make first contact with another dimension when the remains of the Martian technology used through the Great War opens a portal through the bleed, the Phlogiston separating dimensions. This begins several years working as an operative for England in alternate realities, having a series of romantic adventures.
1921 - Jenny Sparks first meets Richard Occult & Rose Psychic, who assist her on a series of outlandish adventures.
1939 - Jenny Sparks serves in MI6 during World War II, focused on recovering magical or extra-dimensional artifacts, returning them to their source to prevent them from being used on Earth.
1941 - Jenny Sparks recruits secret alien powerhouse Augustus Freeman III to assist her on missions across Europe.
1945 - Jenny Sparks, in deep cover in Berlin, convinces Joseph Goebbels to commit suicide.
1953 - Jenny Sparks infiltrates the alternate dimension Sliding Albion, after it staged a chemical attack on Great Britain. She defeats their empire, but they lose the ability to successfully traverse the bleed.
48 years ago - Jenny Sparks creates Stormwatch, a secret organization designed to protect Earth and the barriers between dimensions.
40 years ago - Jenny Sparks retreats to Great Britain after the final battle with Tao decimates Stormwatch. She begins to work as a private investigator, regularly working with British Intelligence.
20 years ago - Jenny Sparks tracks down a young Manchester Black after he destroys the Blackpool train maintenance depot. She recruits him as a Checkmate asset, helping train him to control his vast psychic potential.
13 years ago - Jenny Sparks assembles a small group of powered operatives, including Manchester Black. When several of them prove to be homicidal, she and Black are forced to kill them. They resign from Checkmate with Jenny returning to America and Black becoming a Black-Ops British Intelligence Operative.
11 years ago - Jenny Sparks & Jack Marlowe are lost in a dying dimension. They meet Zealot, and join her ongoing battle with the Daemonites.
5 years ago - Jenny Sparks & Zealot see Jack Marlowe's android body almost destroyed as he attempts to traverse the bleed closing off Zealot's dimension.
4 years ago - Jenny Sparks leaves Earth with Zealot when she is exiled for defeating the Daemonites with a doomsday virus that wipes out forty percent of the Coda. They hunt for new access to the bleed.
3 years ago - Jenny Sparks & Zealot are able to return to Jenny's home dimension thanks to Bunny, a Rogue Voidship. They wrest control of Bunny from Manchester Black, and Jenny creates a new Stormwatch, using the Voidship to protect Earth and the barriers between dimensions.
2 years ago - Jenny Sparks & Stormwatch track the warlord Helspont to Zealot's home dimension, where he is preparing to stage an invasion. They consult with J’onn J’onzz, and together they dismantle the Daemonite armada, stranding Helspont in a dead dimension.
1 year ago -Jenny Sparks and Stormwatch make themselves public when they join the battle against Mageddon. Jenny receives a full pardon from the Queen.
It's really telling how dramatic a change we get when we add Jenny Sparks to our timeline. It's kind of staggering how much of the later Wildstorm continuity all came right from her. As we try to make an adapted version of Stormwatch that recreates the scope and history of this imprint, you wind up basically getting everything you need just from including Jenny. For a world with such robust worldbuilding built out of a genuine disregard of reader comprehension, that's pretty incredible.
*I'm going to include a small disclaimer here. Talking about the Authority in general and Jenny Sparks in particular means we're going to be talking about Warren Ellis. He's an incredibly prolific voice of the era and is responsible for a lot of what Wildstorm became in the early to mid 2000s. He's also genuinely a bad person who is thankfully no longer in the industry. We're going to have to try to separate the art from the artist here, but I just thought I should say SOMEWHERE; not a good guy.*
*I'm going to include a small disclaimer here. Talking about the Authority in general and Jenny Sparks in particular means we're going to be talking about Warren Ellis. He's an incredibly prolific voice of the era and is responsible for a lot of what Wildstorm became in the early to mid 2000s. He's also genuinely a bad person who is thankfully no longer in the industry. We're going to have to try to separate the art from the artist here, but I just thought I should say SOMEWHERE; not a good guy.*
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Jenny Spark's Comic HistoryJenny first appeared in Stormwatch #37, Ellis's debut issue in which he reshuffles and redefines the team getting rid of tons of characters and introducing several more. Team leader Henry Bendix is breaking up the team into three strikeforces, and he tracks down Jenny to get her to lead Stormforce Black. We find her drunk and despondent in a cool underground bar full of monsters (Clown is in there from Spawn), and we get references to other times she's been on superhero teams that have all ended badly.
There's a thing at play here that we kind of need to reference; Ellis had a earlier big hit with the series Transmetropolitan, which features a gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem as it's main character. He's both a clear self-insert, and also a character that actually calls himself a bastard. You see him return to this characterization all over his career, so much so that this becomes a recognized archetype. Jenny is absolutely right in that vein, a syndical curmudgeon who operates with apparent distain for everything but has a hidden heart of gold and deep-felt compulsion to see that right prevails. Personally, I would argue that Jenny might be the only version of this character where you feel like her cynicism is actually earned and that the good person at her core feels genuine. I have this feeling that it's specifically because she's a woman rather than a white guy, but I doubt that was intentional. |
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Jenny did continue to feature in Stormwatch, but the team she led wasn't at the forefront of the action, with the book giving equal page time to a pretty big cast. She shows up in 9 of the remaining 14 issues. Then of course, most of Stormwatch was killed off in the WildC.A.T.S/Aliens crossover, and suddenly Stormwatch Black was the only Stormwatch in town. In a second series in 1998, we see this team transition into one operating without UN oversight, setting up the Authority.
It's really with the success of the Authority that we really start to see Jenny Sparks character and her vast backstory start to come to light. The Authority didn't put a lot of priority on the internal lives of most of it's characters; we knew the Midnighter and Apollo were in a queer relationship, but we knew literally nothing about their lives. Jenny, by comparison, was deeply explored as we learned about her history as a reality-jumping hero of the past before she became a cynical mess. Jenny is a 'Century Baby', a child born right at the start of the 20th century, a living construct made to preserve and advance life on Earth. After 12 issues of the Authority, we discover that she knows she will die right at midnight at the turn of the century. She finds herself confronting an enormous alien deity, the 'god' responsible for life on Earth who was returning to wipe it out, and apparently the source of her own power. She electrocutes it and dies in her teammates arms, with the words "Save the world. They deserve it. Be better. Or I'll come back and kick your heads in." |
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The series of course kept going (although you wouldn't be wrong to stop there). After Jenny died, she was apparently replaced by a NEW Century Baby, this one the spirit of the 21st century, Jenny Quantum, a baby born right as she dies, who the Authority has to find, protect and then RAISE. After the Worldstorm crossover event reset Wildstorm's internal continuity, we discovered that we had a new version of Jenny on our hands. Jennifer Mei Sparks was now explained to be a techne, a spirit of mechanical arts and crafts, empowered by the defining technology of her era. This rebooted timeline didn't last long, as Wildstorm was soon shuffled into DC's New 52 continuity, and a whole new version of Jenny appeared in DC's attempt at their own Stormwatch. This time it's back to Jenny Quantum, who is now 14 years old.
This was about where things stood with Jenny until very recently. Tom King did a new Jenny Sparks miniseries, although it's Black Label, which means it's non-canon. In it Jenny, the ORIGINAL Jenny, comes back. It's a really hard series to read, one of those times King really seems to be adamantly saying SOMETHING and it makes you feel bad that you can't follow it. It does give us a interesting new design for Jenny by series artist Jeff Spokes, something a little more superhero-y. Ultimately it doesn't really feel like a series or take on the characters we really need to think about, but it is interesting that it exists, at least. |
Our Jenny Sparks StoryThis has to start with a little housekeeping, because the way our timeline works requires a little thinking here; Jenny can be born on on the first day of the 20th century, and she doesn't age, so I'm comfortable just not recording her age and letting her just pass from our fixed past timeline to our sliding current timeline without requiring some sort of temporal incident, but unfortunately our sliding timeline doesn't allow us to have her die on the last day of the century, because we can't actually depict when that is. Thankfully, the Worldstorm origin of Jennifer Mei Sparks is actually useful here; we can call her a 'techne', and then get creative as to what that actually means. The end result is that we don't have to have to worry about her needing to die.
With that done, we had an absolute blast taking apart her canon backstory and rebuilding it inside our existing timeline. Once you accept that she's there, the whole thing just comes together in just the coolest way. We made a few small changes to the sequence of events when she was a young woman and an interdimensional hero. Rather than make the idea of shiftships a normal part of indimentional travel, we imagine it functioning more like Sliders, finding and opening portals and traversing the mysterious bleed into alternate dimensions. In the comics the war with Sliding Albion is a much larger ordeal, something that covers much of her early history, but we wanted that era to feature her jumping all over the place, so instead the war with Albion is a single event, most notable because in the aftermath, Jenny and her organization can no longer safely traverse the Bleed. |
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Our biggest goal with Jenny, of course, is to build Stormwatch around her, and this is the part of this timeline that I am really excited about. There are a lot of observable qualities you could say contribute to something feeling like Wildstorm, but one feature that I don't think we were aware of at first is that it feels OLD, with deeply imbedded lore. Our Stormwatch shouldn't be something new, it should have evolved over quite some time, and these characters need to have a deep history together, and we did all of that through Jenny.
With only a few exceptions, Stormwatch is built from characters that have all worked with her at one time or another. Each time we brought someone in her timeline just seemed to always have space for them, and in the end we have this dense tapestry of a character who feels like she really has been in the trenches of the DC universe the whole time. Also, because of her association with interdimensional travel, she has s certain aura of otherness, like she is operating just adjacent to the main continuity. This is the conceptual space that we get to build our Stormwatch in, and it's absolutely Jenny that unlocks this for us. I love this as a way to integrate these characters who deserve to have a place to thrive like this. |
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