Uncle Scrooge, Ninja Turtles, Superman: the new worlds of Jason Aaron

Active on the comics scene for now almost 20 years, Jason Aaron has had a big imprint in recent Marvel Comics story with series like Thor: God of Thunder, Avengers, as well as Wolverine and various Spider-Man miniseries, just to name a few of his most celebrated works. After writing virtually everything for the House of Ideas, in 2024 he returned to DC Comics, where it all began, when under the Vertigo label he published Scalped, one of the most highly regarded of the Vertigo productions of the 2000s. In addition to writing a quite peculiar Batman miniseries (Batman: Off World), he is among the main protagonists of the Absolute Universe, a reinterpretation of DC superheroes in a new universe, for which Aaron is writing Absolute Superman (together with Rafa Sandoval). But this year the writer didn’t stop to just this: in addition to writing the peculiar Marvel/Disney mash-up Uncle Scrooge and the Infinite Dime, Aaron is also busy with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles relaunch. Recently, thanks to these two works, he was one of the stars of Milan Games Week and Cartoomics 2024, where we caught up with him to talk about this prolific new chapter in his career.

Hello Jason and thank you for your time. You are present in Milan with the relaunch of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and also to present the story Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime. I would like first of all to ask you what your relationship as a reader has been with Disney stories.
With Uncle Scrooge in particular, I wrote a little introduction to the book that talks about my relationship with the character. It’s really about Don Rosa and all the Uncle Scrooge stories he did which were published mostly in the 80s and 90s. I didn’t read them back then, I read them with my son when they were all published in hardcover, as a bedtime story when he was little. He loved them, I loved them, he is now 19 and we still talk about how incredible they are. There were a couple of stories in there, I remember stopping and just wondering “Do people know how good these are?” Not just as stories about talking ducks, but just as adventure stories. They’re really, really incredible stories. I Googled back in the day when they were being published, and I found that some of the stories people hailed as maybe some of the best comic book stories ever written and drawn by anybody. I mentioned on a podcast one time, they asked me, what’s a character that you’ve never written that you would most like to write, and I said Uncle Scrooge. And Dan Buckley, president of Marvel, heard that podcast and made it happen because of that. So I can say that that book absolutely exists just because I read those Don Rosa stories to my son.

Talking about this, you went back to the past of Uncle Scrooge’s versions. Apart from the homage to Don Rosa, how many of your versions, how many of it, how particular is your version from the past versions, and what relationship do they have with the Carl Barks stories and the Rosa that you already said that you imagined?
The story is 100% a love letter to Don Rosa and to Carl Barks. The story opens with a twist on the very first Uncle Scrooge story by Barks, which was Christmas on Bear Mountain. I knew I wanted to do something that was very much inspired by those classic Uncle Scrooge creators, but this was a Marvel comic and I’m a Marvel Comics writer, so I also wanted to do something that was in that style. It’s a more sensational kind of story than we normally see Uncle Scrooge in, and it brings different versions of the character from alternate universes, and they team up and go on an adventure together, which is a very classic Marvel Comics-style story. Just starring Uncle Scrooge and using some of those other versions of the character from throughout history that we saw in Barks and Don Rosa, so with this we’re just making them their own alternate reality version of Scrooge. So the Wild West version of Scrooge, the Buckaroo of the Badlands becomes its own other reality version of Scrooge, and we get the Lord of Castle McDuck and all these different characters in the Scrooge timeline.
He was all those guys, right? He had all these different roles. To me it’s a little like something I’ve done multiple times in my career: from my time on Thor, I did multiple versions of Thor that travel through time and team up together. That was also kind of inspired by my love of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories, where every one of those stories was Conan at a different age, in a different country, doing a very different kind of job. I love the breadth of it, that this character lived this long, epic life. So I try to do that with Thor to a bigger extent, where this is a character who’s been around for thousands of years, will be around for thousands and thousands more. So I think you can see the threads of what I did with Scrooge through both the Thor and Conan stuff, because Scrooge is a similar kind of character, a guy who’s lived an unbelievably epic life: he’s traveled around all over the world, gone on so many different adventures, he was a prospector, he was a cowboy, he was a kid shining shoes on the streets of Dublin. He’s been all these different versions of Scrooge, which all funnels into making him the world’s greatest adventurer.  

Speaking instead of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I would ask you again what is the relationship with the characters, from a reader’s point of view but also from a production point of view, given their particular publishing history.
For me it all goes back to that original Mirage Studios book from the mid-80s. That was when I was first getting into comics. There was this explosion of indie publishers, and Turtles was very much at the forefront of that. The first issue I read, I think, was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles number four. I started to follow the book after that. Before the movies, before the cartoons, before the toys, the Turtles were defined for me by that original book. I was the perfect age for that book. I was watching all the movies that were feeding into that. I was reading the Frank Miller comics. Everything that Eastman and Laird were riffing on, I was already obsessed with. It was a perfect time for me with that book. When I was asked by IDW to do a new series for the 40th anniversary of those characters, I only ever looked at that original series. I’ve loved the IDW run, it’s been 150 issues of really great comics that have expanded the cast of characters in the Turtles world, but to me, it made sense to go back to what spoke to me as a kid, what made me fall in love with those characters back then, what defined them for me, especially on the 40th anniversary. I was that kid back then in love with Frank Miller comics, in love with the Turtles. All that stuff that inspired me to want to write comics someday, that inspired so much of the stuff I’ve done, from gritty, mature books like Scalped, through all the stuff I’ve done at Marvel. This is kind of in the same way with Scrooge and Conan and all the other stuff I’ve done. So I took all that stuff that influenced me as a kid, mashed it up, and did a darker, grittier version of it. That’s what I’ve spent 20 years doing in my career. Turtles was not a book I’d ever thought about writing, or I thought I would have the chance to write. But once the opportunity came up, I realized I should absolutely do this book, because that is one of the things that kind of went into the sausage of what made me a comic book writer. And something I realized, I have a story I can tell with these characters. That, again, in some way, sort of like the Scrooge book, pays homage to what’s come before, but I think has a different twist on it in a way that we haven’t read this story before. We haven’t seen these characters in this exact light before. And I think that’s what people are responding to. They know these characters, they love them, but you haven’t seen them quite like this before.

Your approach has been described by many as rather grim-n-gritty: the first story features Raphael in prison, and the others focus on the different characters, a divided group searching for themselves. There is a lot of Eastman and Laird’s early Turtles in the atmosphere, as you said. How did you approach this relaunch? And in what direction will your run go?
Like I said, that original Eastman and Laird Mirage Studios book was a huge inspiration on what I’m trying to do, with this new series. I wanted to go back to the grittiness, the griminess of it, the rawness, the big action, big visuals, big fight scenes. And then also drill down into who those characters are, because I’ve learned pretty quickly from writing Ninja Turtles that every Ninja Turtles fan has their own favorite Turtle, and they can all argue about why that one is the best. I don’t have a favorite, or at least not one that I’m willing to tell anybody, because I love writing all four of them equally. These first four issues of this book have been a really great experience in that I love writing character-focused stories, and I love getting to work with different artists. These issues are pretty self-contained, focused on a different brother who’s somewhere around the world by himself, isolated in a weird, dangerous situation. Raphael’s in prison. Michelangelo is in Japan, he’s a big TV star, but life is not all full of fun and joy. In issue three we see Leo, who goes on this sort of spiritual quest along the Ganges River in India, where the soft-bellied mud turtles are used to eating human remains, so people would get cremated and washed into the river, so they’re man-eating mud turtles along the Ganges. And then issue four is focused on Donatello, who’s sort of trapped in this fighting pit in the United States, having to fight to protect these other mutants. The whole idea is really to sort of take these guys, split them apart, see how they’ve grown in different directions. They’re still the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they’re still teenagers, so they’re still kids in some ways, but they’ve been through a lot over the course of their lives. They feel like they know who they are, but the pieces of their family don’t fit together in the way they used to. It feels like they’re sort of the Beatles around Abbey Road, Let It Be, where they feel like four guys from four different bands that are still trying to make it work together. And with the turtles, they don’t know how to do that anymore. The first arc of this book is about establishing where these guys have gone when they split up, sort of tease why they split up, and then to throw them back together and kind of watch the sparks fly.
You know, my favorite part of the original Star Wars film is when you get those characters together and they spend 45 minutes insulting each other. So, to watch these characters who are brothers, who love each other, but also hate each other more than they do anybody else because nobody can push their buttons like their brothers can. So the fun of it is watching those characters sometimes literally fight each other, sometimes punching each other in the middle of fighting ninjas that are trying to kill them. The story is called Return to New York, it’s about them going back to their roots, back where they’re from, but also, again, in a way we haven’t seen before. Their relationship is different. Who they’re fighting is different. And where they go from here is going to be something new that we haven’t seen before.

 After a long time at Marvel, you moved to DC. Are there differences in the approach to the superhero genre that you felt, as a creator, in the transition from one to the other?
To me there is no real difference. I mean, every company is different. The way editorial works, the way things work internally, and certainly my relationships with the people I’m working with are different. I was at Marvel a long time. I have pretty close relationships with most of the editors and people in publishing that I was working with. So with DC it’s all pretty brand new. I don’t know most of the people I’m working with. But I think in terms of the actual job, in terms of me sitting down to write a script, the kind of stories I’m trying to tell are not different. I grew up with DC comics, really more than Marvel, their books are what pulled me into comics in the first place, made me a regular reader, made me a longtime fan, made me want to grow up and write comics someday. So coming to DC now feels like it was always destined to happen, I was always going to wind up coming to DC in a big way.
The first book I did for DC is Batman Offworld, which is kind of a weird Batman in space story, and it was me paying homage to some of those books that made me a fan back in the 80s. New Teen Titans, Batman Dark Knight Returns, those were seminal books for me. So it was Atari Force, a forgotten gem from the 80s.
Batman Offworld is me coming to DC Comics as a creator for the first time in a big way and paying respects to what led me there, what led me to DC Comics as a fan and set the stage for everything I’m going to do there going forward. Absolute Superman is kind of the first big book in my first DC ongoing series. So starting my DC career with Batman and Superman is not a bad way to get started. And there’ll be a lot more to come.

Technically, I should still be talking about a return to DC, since your real statement came with Scalped for Vertigo, which debuted 17 years ago now. Now that the publisher has announced the label’s return, I’d be interested to ask you about your recollection of that period and the value to you of that series, which I consider one of Vertigo’s best products of the 2000s.
Scalped was really my first big series, my first ongoing book. It’s the book that kind of got me everything that came afterwards. Technically speaking, the first thing I ever did in comics was winning the Marvel Comics Talent Search contest in 2001, which did not lead to anything else immediately. Scalped really opened the door for me to go back to Marvel, I was exclusive there for 15 years or so.
I actually just went back to the book and, for the first time in years, re-read the first 30 issues of it because DC’s just putting out an omnibus, a new hardcover edition, collecting the whole thing.I wanted to go back, correct some spelling mistakes and wrote a brand new introduction for the book. And by rereading them, I was struck at how raw those comics are. I feel like I’ve changed and grown a lot as a writer since those days, but I think it sort of is overflowing with passion,  because I was so desperate and hungry to break into comics, and I tell people who want to break in, you have to get lucky in some sense. the right opportunity has to come along, but when it does, you have to be ready to jump on it and take full advantage of it. And I think that’s what you see in Scalped, is me writing this book like it is the only chance I will ever get, so itàs me just giving it my absolute all every page. I still love those characters that we created in Scalped, I still miss them. I think they’re characters that have stayed with me, that part of me would love to write again, but also I know I don’t ever want to write them again. I said what I needed to say with that series. I loved my time at Vertigo, and I think no matter how long I’m in comics, I’ll still think of myself as a Vertigo writer. I’m really proud to have been a part of that group of creators and to have had kind of one of the last long Vertigo runs. I think that for me it was like school.
I think I became so much better writer just over the course of Scalped by working at Vertigo, working with Karen Berger and Will Dennis and all the people I got to work with there.

In your comics, superhero and creator-owned, you have always dealt with important, current and social issues. At this precise moment in history, given the events of the last few years, not least the U.S. presidential election, what do you think comic book stories can tell?
Whatever story I’m trying to tell in comics, no matter how ridiculous the setup or concept might be, whether I’m writing the God of Thunder flying through space or I’m writing mutants or superheroes fighting aliens, if there’s not something that’s emotionally relevant, something that resonates with me, then it’s not going to resonate with readers. So I think you always have to put something of yourself in there, and part of that is just the state of the world, the state of our country. All the stuff I’m writing right now is something I’ve been working on or figuring out for months before the election. But I think you can see something like what I’m doing in Absolute Superman, in some ways, only becoming more relevant now that it’s actually out in the world. As a writer, I always feel like what I want to say, any sort of conversation I want to have about the state of our world, about how I see things, I try to put in the work. I’m much more interested in saying things with what I’m writing than I am firing off an angry tweet. 

We come to the last question, the one about the launch of the Absolute universe and your involvement with Absolute Superman. What does it mean to reimagine, in a rather radical way, a world comic book icon like this and what do you think this version of him might represent in relation to the current historical moment?
The whole thing that was exciting about the Absolute universe was to look at it like we were creating these characters today. If nobody had ever heard of Superman until now, I created that character, what would he look like? How is he different than if he was created in 1939?
With Superman, the core part of that was an immigrant story, it was written by two young immigrants, Siegel and Schuster, and it was this very idealized immigrant story. How is that different in 2024 than 1938?
Of course, there’s a darker edge to it, so once I had that piece of it, everything else kind of fell into place. The nature of Krypton, Kal-El’s time there, how that’s different, what happened once he came to Earth, what he’s up to when we first encounter him, where he goes from there. So I love the idea of doing a Superman story that to me feels quintessentially Superman. It’s very much about where that character came from, what he meant to his original creators, what he fought for in the 1930s and 40s, but also to do a story that we have not seen before, where so much of the Superman origin that you’re used to is radically different. So you can change so many of the pieces around that character, change what his journey has been like, but still the heart is still there, what he is representing, why he has endured for so very long.
So to me it’s like 110% a Superman story, but it is going to be filled with surprises. There are surprises in Issue 1, which people have seen. There’ll be big surprises in Issue 5 and 6.
There are surprises in Issue 12. So it’s an ongoing thing. We continue to shake up everything around that character, but to still tell a story that I think will show people why Superman is more important now than ever.
Thanks a lot for your time and answers Jason!

Interview done at Milan Games Week and Cartoomics 2024 on 22nd November
We acknowledge the help of Angelica for translation