Dan Jurgens is a comic artist and writer known for creating Doomsday and Booster Gold, and for his long run as writer/artist on Superman, including the “Death of Superman” storyline. His work has been featured in Legion of Super-Heroes, Green Arrow, DC Versus Marvel, Sensational Spider-Man, The Mighty Thor, and many other titles. Jurgens was recently a guest at Baltimore Comic-Con, and before the con started on Saturday morning, he chatted with Scoop about the con, his career, and creating characters.

Scoop: Good morning, Dan, are you having fun this weekend?
Dan Jurgens (DJ): Absolutely. It’s always fun to be in Baltimore, and it’s been a while so, it’s good to be here.

Scoop: What do you like about the Baltimore con?
DJ: It is very much an artist oriented con, and you know there are many different styles of conventions right now and this kind of has the… I hate to say old world, but sort of old world feel to it in that before we became more media oriented, when it was a lot of creators, a lot of artists, things like that. It’s really reminiscent of that.

Scoop: What does it mean to you to meet fans at shows like this?
DJ: It’s so nice to hear what they have to say. You know people. Come up and they all have – so many of them – have individual stories of why they read comics or what it meant when mom and dad let them skip school for a day and go buy Superman #75 when that came out. Or it was given to them by an uncle or whatever it might be. Everyone has those stories and it’s nice to hear them and they’re very unique in those stories. And at the same time, all share this common bond because I do hear them over and over again where the names change, but the stories are very similar.

Scoop: You’ve written some major characters like Superman, Captain America, and Thor, to name a few. They have years of legacy built in. Were those earlier stories and important character arcs helpful or did you find them to be a hindrance?
DJ: Each character probably is different in terms of the answer. What’s always nice about the earliest stories of almost any character is for me that’s where the true attributes of the characters were often established. I mean, right from Superman’s first appearance in Action Comics #1, we can kind of get a definite feel for who he is and why he does what he does and the uniqueness of the character. Batman is the exact same thing. You go back to his first appearance in Detective Comics #27 and say that first year of stories where Batman is so much different than, say, Superman, and you could definitely get a feel. That stretches all the way through, whether it’s Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy #15, or even the earliest Fantastic Four stories, or Thor stories. We see the essence of the character. So in terms of what I use, I go back and I look at these characters and try and make sure I get that essence right.

Scoop: What was your creative process like when you created characters like Doomsday or Booster Gold?
DJ: Well, with Doomsday it was… we were talking about who would kill Superman and we had a real question – should it a Brainiac, Lex Luthor, or someone new. I wanted to do some sort of a monster story anyway, and a big fight that would go through Metropolis. As we talked about it, and what Doomsday might be… In the room, there were a number of artists there – me, Jon Bogdanov, Tom Grummett. We all did a sketch, and everyone looked at mine and we kind of voted and said that’s the way to go. It was just wanting this bestial nature. Whereas for Booster Gold, that’s all so much built around the character and an idea of someone who doesn’t wear a mask because his identity is public and everything else that it meant. You know the goggles were just something to make him look a little more interesting. Kind of use that celebrities wear sunglasses sort of approach, and just a very recognizable bright costume. So again each character is different that way.

Scoop: What other conventions are you going to be doing in the next couple months?
DJ: This is it for 2024. This is my last one for this year and now we’re just starting to build 2025 out and get all those solutions there.

Scoop: Thank you so much for talking to me.
DJ: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.