Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #501: Jenny Sparks

You know, sometimes I pick these characters because they pop up again or are maybe a lesser-known character to outsiders, but every so often, someone comes back that maybe couldn’t or even shouldn’t.

Basically, I only have a vague idea why it happened, but DC brought back Jenny Sparks, the Spirit of the 20th Century.

Jenny Sparks first appeared in Stormwatch #37 in July of 1996 from writer Warren Ellis and artist Tom Raney.  A seemingly young British woman, Jenny was a “Century Baby,” one of a handful of special people born on January 1st, 1900 alongside more than a few characters from the series Planetary, also written by Ellis.  Jenny was reluctantly recruited by Henry Bendix to join Stormwatch, particularly a three-person covert team Stormwatch Black with future Authority teammates Swift and Jack Hawksmore.  When most of Stormwatch was wiped out during a crossover with the Xenomorphs, Jenny would start a new, rougher team, namely The Authority.

That’s actually about where I came in with the character, and only later was I able to go back and read through Ellis’s rather impressive Stornwatch series.  Yes, Jenny Sparks is a standard Warren Ellis protagonist, an often-British smoker, one who is generally an atheist, has issues with people in positions of power, and gets by with more than a little sassmouth.  That could describe any number of characters Ellis has created, so what made Jenny Sparks different?

She was the Spirit of the 20th Century, an electrical powered woman who could do all kinds of things with electricity whether it was to summon lightning or essentially teleport from place to place over power lines.  She’d stopped aging at 19, and as the Spirit of the 20th Century, she had encounters with more than a few famous figures from that era.  Ellis was responsible for most of that story, though when he left The Authority with issue #12 and Mark Millar took over, Millar did write a Jenny mini-series showing her first encounters with the different members of The Authority from before the book started.  Millar seemed more inclined to do things like show Jenny’s encouraging young artist Adolph Hitler to give up his mediocre painting and consider going into politics.  Ellis’s Jenny stories showed her having adventures that were often appropriate (and drawn in the same style as) the sort of stories that were told in that era, showing a Pulp Hero Jenny or a Golden Age of Comics Jenny doing things that had impacts on whatever stories Ellis was telling at the time.

However, as the Spirit of the 20th Century, Jenny died on December 31st in 1999 because…well, that’s just how it worked, and she seemed to know that.  No sooner did she die when a new “Spirit” seemed to be born in the form of a baby girl born in (I think) Singapore, later known as Jenny Quantum who had nuclear powers similar to Jenny Sparks’s electrical ones.  As the Spirit of the 20th Century, that should be the end of it, right?

Eh, not quite.

Ellis himself brought a version of Jenny back as Jenny Mei Sparks, an Asian woman with similar powers as the original in a reboot series called The Wild Storm, only this one wasn’t the spirit of any century.  Meanwhile, very recently, DC brought the original Jenny back, suggesting she was revived at the same instant as the 9/11 attacks and took up a new job as the metahuman who takes down superheroes when they go bad.  That’s in a new Black Label mini-series where, apparently, the entire Justice League is slaughtered by Captain Atom in the 3rd issue (DC Universe Infinite Ultra only has the first two), and it’s from Tom King, a writer whose work I generally enjoy but not so much here.  Keep in mind, I still think Ellis wrote Jenny best, but the real issue for me is…why is the Spirit of the 20th Century still hanging around, someone who won’t stay dead no less, in the 21st?

Eh, it’s a Black Label book.  It’s basically an Elseworld story, so it doesn’t really count except for copyright purposes or something.  I just think, narratively speaking, Jenny should have stayed dead.  She lived exactly 100 years and the “spirit” of what she was was passed along to someone new.

Oh well.

Huh.  I wonder if I need to do Captain Atom now.