Jen Krueger: Finite Possibilities

Jen Krueger

Jen Krueger is a writer and improviser living in Los Angeles. Ask her and she'll proudly tell you she hails from Chicago. Don't ask her, and she'll probably tell you anyway. Jen is the Associate Director of the LA Indie Improv Festival, and runs Friday night indie improv show The Manifesto Show with her team Penguins on the Playground. Jen also hosts PrePopCulture.com, a podcast about pop culture before it pops. She owns one Calvinball, two sonic screwdrivers, and has degrees in Curiosity and Advanced Curiosity.

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2 Responses

  1. Rene Narciso says:

    Maybe you’re right about Spider-Man, but not Superman. The character that debuted in 1938 has very little in common with the Superman of today. Actually, reading older versions of Superman may make one MORE confused, if care is not taken to study the out-of-story context.

    It’s more like the remakes of movies with iconic characters like Tarzan and Zorro. There is little continuity among the versions from different decades. And they also change to reflect the cultural environment of the day. Superman in the 1930s and early 1940s was a outlaw vigilante and a leftist activist, closer to a gentler V (from Alan Moore’s V from Vendetta) than to anything else.

    With the Marvel characters there is more of an attempt to mantain continuity all the way back to the 1960s, but even so, most Marvel characters have long stretches of stories that are almost always ignored for all pratical purposes. How many times someone refers to a Daredevil story from the mid-1970s, for instance?

    My tip to read the long-running Marvel and DC Characters is to focus not on the characters themselves, but on the writers. Every different creative team more or less brings a fresh sensibility to a character, it’s a “new story”, and what came before is prologue (that can be consulted on wikipedia, if you’re confused by some reference).

    For Daredevil, just read the origin story, then jump to the Frank Miller years and then jump again to Mark Waid. If you really love the character, then start to sample other creative teams, like Ann Nocenti and Romita Jr. in the 1990s, or Steve Gerber in the 1970s. That is a better way to read your way to a character than chronologically, IMO.

    Of course, it’s also very rewarding to read a series like SANDMAN or STARMAN or PREACHER, where there is a beginning, a middle, and an ending and the dramatic stakes are so much higher for that.

  1. January 28, 2014

    […] For the end of 2013, I get into why I like comics that end more than I like ones that go on for decades. Check it out here! […]