Fallen Justice has been part of me since I was 4 years old. I learned to read from comics, and as such they played a very important part of my formative years. Four-color heroes kicking the beans out of this month’s villain was how I spent my childhood. I wanted to BE Moon Knight and the Flash! I kinda still do. (At least the Flash.) But the sad part of getting older and more experienced is that your tastes often change. When I was 4 it didn’t matter that Superman never changed, wasn’t married, wasn’t recognized by his friends and co-workers, and always seemed to end an issue the same as when he started it. I was just happy to have a comic in my hand.
Growing older, I wanted more. I’m a huge reader and have always devoured novels as well as comics, but with my comics I began to notice that all changes were superficial, and temporary. In my teen years I didn’t really get the whole corporate intellectual property thing, I just knew that no one seemed to be growing with me, other than Dick Grayson. It was weird. It still is, to be honest. What I did have was a very real sense of outgrowing these characters because of their lack of change. Batman gets his back broken and he’s fine in three issues? Really? I can suspend reality with the best of them but shouldn’t he at least get some physical therapy first?
Then the age of Image hit, right about the time I joined the Navy, and I had a much larger disposable income. I bought anything and everything I could get my hands on. I grew my collection by leaps and bounds and if it was put out from 1989 to 1994, I probably had it. Superman died during that period, and while I didn’t hate the way he came back, I kinda hated that he came back at all. I was a conflicted angsty twenty-something, sue me.
Then came acceptance. I got it. They couldn’t change the characters because of the money. Great. It sucks, but it happens, I’m old enough to accept the things I can’t change and I still love comics, so screw it, here’s my money. That phase lasted until they published Action Comics #775.
Not many people can trace their lives back to a singular life altering moment that wasn’t a car wreck or something else super tragic, but I can. That issue Superman should have died. It would have been perfect, it would have made sense, and it would have been such a sleeper insidious way to do it the shock value alone would have been well worth it, in my humble opinion. But they didn’t do that. They brought him back at the end, let him win, and all was good with the world, no changes, no side effects, no real change at all. Except that it pissed me off so bad I couldn’t sleep.
So I decided I had to create my own Superman, and then kill him. It had to be a meaningful story, it had to make sense, and it had to be permanent. No backsies, no big red reset button, and not a single apology.
I finally did drift off to rage sleep, and when I woke, I had decided to kill Superman. Not THE Superman of course, because even if I managed to kidnap the EIC of DC comics and force him into letting me do it at gun point it would never last. I’d go to jail, they’d bring him back, and it would all be for nothing. So I decided I had to create my own Superman, and then kill him. It had to be a meaningful story, it had to make sense, and it had to be permanent. No backsies, no big red reset button, and not a single apology. That was the day Fallen Justice sprang very nearly fully formed from my bizarre imagination. Since then it really hasn’t changed much. Some characters who were also supposed to die managed to survive and move on into stories of their own, like Dynagirl. Others have moved on into new webcomics like Hell Yeah in his own story Soul of a Hero. Some have yet to return, but they’re always there, lurking, waiting for their chance.
Fallen Justice is about what happens to the most powerful man in the world when he finds out he has three months left to live. It’s about the choices he makes, the things he does, and the consequences of those actions. You can buy the entire trade paperback right here, or you can catch it in the pages of Exciting Comics from Antarctic Press, beginning with issue #15 out in June of 2021!
