ProFile: Justin Jordan

Justin Jordan is the writer and creator of The Strange Talent of Luther Strode. He has also worked on Shadowman, Deathstroke and Green Lantern for DC comics.

What made you decide to work in the medium of comics?

I’d always loved comics. And I really do mean always; my earliest memory is reading a Popeye comic when I was maybe three years old. Well, looking at it, anyway.

And I’ve always loved telling stories, so it became a pretty natural fit for me.

What part of the process is the most challenging or frustrating to you?

Probably getting everything to work to my satisfaction within a 20 pages per issue format. I’ve not yet done an OGN, so I have to make sure that each of the however many issues I am using to tell a story each have their own narrative arc and are satisfying in themselves.

Telling a story for me is a relatively easy, telling a story in six chunks with each chunk being something people want to read is a lot more challenging, kind of like writing poetry.

If you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring comics creator, what would that be?

Finish stuff. People have a bad habit of starting writing something and abandoning it halfway through. Heck, I do this. I have at least ten novels in various stages that I have never finished.

Finishing what you start obviously isn’t enough to build a career, but it IS something you need to be able to do.