I’d like to welcome Paul Jenkins, whom I’ve gotten to know over the years through hanging out with him at various shows, one of which involved him jumping into a pool in nothing but his tighty whities. This, my friends, is not only a brave writer, but also a brave man. You know his work from Hellblazer, The Inhumans, The Sentry, Origin, Spectacular Spider-Man, and more.

Mike: Paul, thanks for joining us this month and subjecting yourself to my whims. This isn’t a fanboy column, so I’m not going to ask you specific questions about which of the Inhumans can beat up Wolverine or how many cars Colossus can bench press… (okay, well, maybe later.) But first, for those readers who don’t know, you are a Brit who lives in the states. When did you make the move?

Paul: I have been eating your food and stealing your women since 1987. It has been a fun-packed ride. Do you know you can’t be legally deported for having sex with a mule because mules are sterile? I know… it shocked me, too.

M: And I’m sure the mule’s still recovering, too! What instigated the move and when did you become a full-on citizen?

P: I was studying drama in Southern England and one day, I just decided to get on a frigging plane and go and teach in America. It was weird… I did it just like that. I came here literally with $50 and stayed. I am still a permanent resident, not a citizen.

M: Before you began writing comics, you got a degree in English? My grammar must make you want to vomit… Anyway, did you study English because you were an aspiring writer, or did writing come out of that?

P: As a matter of fact, I went to drama school. I found that I hated the acting thing because it was so fucking fake I wanted to scream. The last thing I need to be doing is dressing up in a fucking beret, listening to poetry in a coffee shop, and calling MacBeth “The Scottish Play.” I used to whistle backstage and wish people luck just to antagonize them. Basically, then, I wanted to write and direct more than act.

M: Did you write as a kid? What kind of stories; can you remember any details about them?

P: My mum tells me she just found my first comic, Alfred and the Egg Giants. I am dying to see it again. My memory of it is that Alfred goes up into the clouds and beats the shit out of the Egg Giants for no good reason. My one issue run on Spider-Man versus Dudley Moore is pretty well documented, but I can’t talk about it much because I am thinking of bringing Dudley Moore back as a Sentry villain.

M: What was your childhood like? When I was a kid, up until my early twenties, I thought nothing happened to me. Little did I realize how much actually did, and how much of that would become the backdrop for my ambitions and psyche. The little stuff, I mean, like daydreaming. How do you find your childhood has affected your writing?

P: Just incredibly fucked up, although I remember it quite fondly. My dad was out the door and living 500 miles away when I was five and my brother was eight. Apparently, my mum just took us away one day so that when he got home there was a note. We were missing for two weeks, during which time mum didn’t even contact her parents, which was pretty bloody stupid. I remember one time, before they got divorced, my dad threw a coffee cup at her and she ducked and it went all over the wall. They never bothered to take the stain off the wall. So it was this constant reminder that our parents hated each other. I put that in Hellblazer one time.

M: Do you find much of your early past working its way into your work in specific ways?

P: Yeah, absolutely. We lived on a farm and, I swear, we didn’t have a pot to piss in. There was a timer on the electric meter — it took fifty pence pieces and when mum was out of money it just shut off. I remember these enormous storms that would come over the farm on freezing cold nights. But you have to understand… this stuff is fertile ground for me now. I lived in a magic place with fairies in the orchard and castles nearby. Lots of corn and wheat fields… farm animals. I snared rabbits with an old gypsy when I was about seven because we needed meat. I used to get up and watch the farm badger at 3AM… I mean, I have written about this before but it still amazes me to this day that any kid could be privileged with such a mad upbringing. I believed in gypsy magic and I learned seriously important things such as how to use the land around you for food when you can’t buy any. Look at it this way: my mum could never afford sweets, right? She would buy a Mars bar and put it in the fridge and cut it into slices. This would last us for a week. If you think about it, the Mars bar slices would taste better than an entire one because of the anticipation. Children would probably do well to experience a little longing for things, just to be able to appreciate things when they have them.

M: Wow, man; that is really cool, growing up like that. Take the good with the bad, but that kind of environment is really special. I teach my kid about mythology and folklore — the real magic in the world that COULD be out there. We’ll take walks in the woods and make up stories about people living under the water in the stream and such. I think that stuff is important. My mother used to tell ghost stories, stuff she experienced and one great UFO encounter she had. That stuff fueled my mind. It was also a great escape — I suspect, like you, not having the best of times around you — to lose yourself in. I know that stuff fed my imagination, the seeds of becoming an artist or writer.

I also wonder a bit about my son. He has it so much easier than I did — he certainly doesn’t have the psych trouble people like us went through; stuff that made us STRONGER. Do you think these experiences made you stronger, not just as a writer, but also as a person?

P: Absolutely. Definitely. I can easily see why hardship can help with a person’s character. On the other hand, I could have easily gone a different way. I had a few brushes with the law in my younger days… lived in shitty places; that was quite natural. But I think one day I just kind of woke up and decided not to do that.

M: What about your family; were they creative in any way, or looking back, do you see things that they did that may have pushed you in a creative direction, either by accident or on purpose?

P: God, no. My Dad was the manager of the casino where he lived. My mum became a teacher eventually, but she had to work at some funky jobs first. The weird thing is, I just always wanted to do it. I did music, art, acting, writing… I will never know why.

M: Do you think your acting, music and such might have been a reaction to your parents’ way of life? What about music; are you a musician? I find many artists/writers are frustrated musicians…

P: I am a musician, yes… Not frustrated, because I did it for a while and it was the hardest job you would ever want. I still play, record, listen a lot, etc.

M: I find a good bit of trauma creates some amazing writers and artists. Most of my creative friends come from dysfunctional homes — that doesn’t always mean unhappy, though. Do you think you had a good time growing up, and do you think those times have helped you or hindered you in your life’s direction?

P: I don’t know… sometimes I am sad to think about how messed up it was because it really affected my brother. To this day he feels terrible guilt about things that have gone wrong in his life. Our grandmother used to beat us pretty handily… she was a cruel motherfucker who used to bully us mercilessly. My brother and I are very close because of it — it’s like two guys who have gone to war together. I write about insanity a lot but I feel abuse isn’t so much physical as mental: bruises heal in a couple of days but fear stays with you a lot longer. I always dealt with it just fine, but poor old Richard still acts as though he’s scared of something that’s about to happen. Imagine sitting at a table with some vile old lady who’s yelling at you that you blink too much, and that if you don’t stop blinking you’ll get the hairbrush around your arse. You just know it’s coming and there’s nothing you can do about it. The best part was she used to take us to church every Sunday and bully us all the way there, act like a saint in front of the vicar and then bully us all the way home. It’s why I don’t trust people easily just because they SAY they are a certain way. Show, don’t tell.

M: Yeah, actions speak louder than words, man. Talk is cheap. I find that if you’ve had that kind of background, there’s usually two ways to react about it — you grow stronger from it, become a better person because of it; or if you can’t escape those moments, you’re lost in them forever and grow up either living in that shadow constantly or even emulating it.

I hate to sound like I’m rummaging around through your past, but I know this is the stuff that, if you can tap into it as a writer, it will enrich your writing. I hate to say it, but I love the horrible things in my past. How have you dealt with these things in your life? Do you think your writings helped you any in that way?

P: Well, I have completely dealt with any negative stuff that might have come out of those experiences. As I said, I look back fondly on my childhood. To me, the difficulty doesn’t seem all that difficult. I will give you a perfect example: Richard and I used to live in a farm cottage and because mum didn’t have a lot of money, she could only really afford for us to ride the bus HOME, so we had to walk to school. We went about two and a half miles, rain, snow or shine. In fact, a lot of times when it was snowing, we would be two of the only kids who made it to school! We saw foxes and deer and badgers… we found stoat pelts and weasel skins. We chucked mud at each other and stuff like that. None of the other kids would possibly be able to cope with walking… they just wouldn’t have been used to it. My brother and I still talk about the great little adventures we had on that walk. So while some would say not being able to afford a bus fare was a bad thing, I think it was a good thing. My mum did her very best for us. She is quite eccentric, so we grew up with this mad lady who thought so differently from others around her. And she wouldn’t conform to their expectations or take their shit, either. I get on great with my Dad and I curse my grandmother to burn in Hell every day. I feel I am healthy.

M: I had trouble reading books as a kid. I don’t think I ever read a book until my late teens — Hitchhiker’s Guide. I just didn’t have a push for reading, and no one introduced me to stuff I would have loved, like the Hobbit or whatever. Actually, it was my pal Adam Hughes (THUMP! Name drop.) who got me excited about Hitchhiker’s. What were some of the earliest books you remember reading; I mean really reading, really getting into?

P: Man, I used to read like a fiend. I was one of those psycho advanced kids and so I read, like, Treasure Island when I was six. The Hobbit, too. I loved that kind of stuff… I always wanted to read more complicated things because I wanted to be the best reader for my age in the world. This is a true story, believe it or not: When I was five, on my first day of school, I went up to my teacher and asked her what we were going to read. None of the other kids could read… remember, this is kindergarten in American terms. She asked me if I could read. I said yes, I was reading Doctor Faustus with my mum. She asked me, astonished, if I knew what it was about. I told her that as Faustus waits fearfully for Mephistopheles to take him back to Hell, he says, “O lente lente currite noctis equi!” Which means, “Oh, slowly, slowly run the horses of the night.” I think she probably requested I be transferred at that point.

M: Wow, I don’t know what to say to that… I wish I could travel back in time and beat you up… All I could quote in kindergarten was Gilligan’s Island “Lil’ BUDDY!!” My brain is just full of TV crap like The Brady Bunch and The Munsters. TV was another escape and I really wish I was pushed into books. But really, where did that come from, the reading thing; your mother?

P: First of all, I would have kicked the snot out of you. I was always the biggest jock in the school, captain of every team, etc. I was that fucked-up kid who spent equal time with nerds, geeks, jocks, girls, teachers and drug dealers. This lasted until I discovered LSD — I spent a year stoned on either acid or ‘shrooms (I am deathly allergic to marijuana). Then I just said, “Fuck this” and stopped.

M: Was your first work in comics really in Licensing with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

P: Yeah, pretty much. I was actually employed to do publishing stuff but that lasted just a short while because the licensing suddenly went berserk. I don’t think it is possible to describe even in one interview just how crazy that situation was. I was twenty-two years old. It was like giving a Ferrari to a snail and expecting it to learn how to drive.

M: Are you telling me you studied English, IN England, to schlock TMNT toys in the U.S.? Surely, you came to the U.S. for other reasons, right? How old were you?

P: I came here to do music and screw American girls. I taught disabled children music and drama for one Summer in the Pocono mountains. I still dabble with music but I just don’t have enough time with all the stuff I already do. I use my studio for sound design stuff for our film work, mostly.

M: This is true — my biggest writing influence was not Film, TV, Comics or books, but singer-songwriter songs of the 70s. For some reason, in my household, we listened to music all day, and night. We would go to sleep with music on. I would sit there and make stories out of the songs I heard. I’ve had that walk with James Taylor through the desert a million times, I swear. It’s a western story about a cowboy for me. I still find half of my stories come from music and lyrics I hear. I even steal Led Zeppelin lyrics on a regular basis as dialogue. Recently, I’ve been taking from the DOORS in my ARES mini because of Jim Morrison’s love of Greek Mythology. Blood and wine and all that…

Do you find that music and your writing relate much?

P: They are completely intertwined. I CANNOT work without listening to music. Mostly soundscape stuff, because if it’s bands, I start dissecting the mix and listening to the lyrics. As I have said elsewhere, I don’t feel I get ideas from other people’s work… just watching real life. But I am totally inspired by music and creatively crippled without it.

M: What did you think about the U.S. before you came over, and how did it differ once you were here? Did your accent get you laid? If I were gay, I’d give you shot.

P: God’s honest truth: British kids have the strangest impression of America. I assumed you had cops all over the place armed with, like, AK 47s, and if you stepped out of line they would blow you away. All of your cops were either physically or mentally disabled. Kojak was bald; Ironside was in a wheelchair; Columbo was a sex freak; McCloud rode a fucking horse around San Francisco, for Pete’s sake! What a wonderland. When I got here, I found America to be even weirder than I could have imagined. Things like televangelists, lobbyists and George W. Bush are illegal outside of America. I mean Bill Clinton just pardoned all of his mates on his last day of office — these were convicted felons! I’m still amazed and delighted every day by how utterly strange this place is. My mates in Massachusetts used to beg me to go out with them to bars so that I could help them pick up women. You would not believe the power a British accent holds in this country. You know exactly where you stand when a girl narrows her eyes and proclaims that she thinks your accent is so sexy that she just orgasmed.

M: Hellblazer was when I first became aware of your work, but what did you do before that? Come on, there has to be something embarrassing in your closet. I drew some porn comics and the Child’s Play adaptations for God’s sake; come on, man up.

P: Well, Hellblazer was actually my first gig. If you look hard enough, there is an issue of TMNT in there somewhere. I haven’t seen it in years but it is probably crap.

M: Hellblazer being your first gig? How did that happen? I mean, other than the English accent. :)

P: I broke in the exact opposite way of how you should: I went to San Diego, walked up to an editor (my dearly departed mate, Lou Stathis) and said, “I hear you’re looking for a new writer for Hellblazer. How about me?” After I informed Lou that I had no experience, he took the unusual step of letting me write a tryout script. He and Karen read the script, made me rework it five times, and gave me the job. That will never happen to another living soul.

M: Tell me about your writing influences; outside of comics and in.

P: Ehh… I watch and listen. I mean I hear all the time how people should read books and watch movies and that sort of thing, but I just don’t think it works that way for me. I am moved by human emotion, so if you show me a person who has loved and lost and learned from it then I get everything from there. As a writer, I want to live life, not read about how someone else lived it and then copy that.

M: What are some things you learned from them? Things you use. I don’t mean “writers write, writers read”, I mean something useful. I need a magic button, dammit, come on!

P: I have this thing I always tell aspiring writers, which is that you need to be audacious, and that often means doing not what is expected but what is RIGHT for the moment. It is not bold to write about something exploding. It is bold to take, say, Cyclops from the X-Men and sit him down on a sofa to learn about his favorite type of sandwich. None of us has blown up a building with a laser beam… all of us have eaten a sandwich, see what I mean?

M: Yeah, I love books about eating sandwiches. Some time has passed, how do you look back at your earlier work, say pre-Marvel?

P: I don’t read it that often. It seems primitive. Still don’t understand why DC has never reprinted my Hellblazers, though.

M: Do you think it has something to do with you being a Marvel guy now? I got caught the in crossfire at one point…

That whole DC/Marvel war is so stupid.

P: God, I hope it isn’t that. Even though I have been a Marvel writer for ages I still have friends at DC. There may be a feud of some kind but I am sure as hell not a part of it.

M: Has your work process changed much since then? How you actually craft a story and such…

P: The same way since I began: I think of the story, write it down. Then I do research on aspects of it. Next come the breakdowns, drawn out in booklets panel by panel. Next come the panel descriptions and finally the dialogue, which I find easy. For what it is worth, I have no idea where stories come from. I have a theory that a lot of what I write is more intelligent than I am (apart from this sentence). I will write something and read it back and be kind of astonished because it is good, and yet I don’t know how it came to me. That ever happen to you?

M: I do a lot of my writing in the outline. It’s all about the outline first for me… Do you plot out your stories first, outline and such, or do you have it in your skull and work it out as you go along?

P: I am a preparation fiend. I love researching stuff. At the same time, I don’t enjoy reading a lot of old issues when researching comic book characters. It pays to be ignorant.

M: What about your work habits? What is your day like when you’re working?

P: I get up later, around 10AM and usually go to the gym or play golf. I play soccer still, despite my broken rag doll of a body. I sometimes type in the day, but it’s usually at night. I begin around 5-7PM and type until I am exhausted. I don’t sleep well, never have. I can only sleep with sleeping pills and even then only when I am literally dropping where I stand.

M: I have sleeping troubles, too — I find with me, ideas will run around in my mind, if I write them down, it helps, but other times, the ideas are completely random and make no sense, but keep me awake. Is that what happens to you — your body is exhausted, but your brain is keeping you awake?

P: My brain wakes me up, even. I will never lack for stories and new ideas… if I live to be a hundred I will probably not even cover all the ideas I have now. Maybe my brain thinks it cannot afford to sleep.

M: When you start working on a long-established character like the Hulk or Spidey, how do you deal with all the continuity baggage?

P: I am a sneaky bastard: I completely ignore it. A lot of people have said how reverential I am to the characters but it’s all just smoke and mirrors with me. If you don’t bring up past continuity you can’t contradict it. Besides, I don’t want to write about Hulk’s last battle with the Leader. I want to write about how Bruce Banner makes it through his day.

M: Do you do a lot of research on the characters you’re working on, or do you think of them as a blank slate?

P: They are an absolute blank slate, except for established characteristics that I can use. Spidey’s Uncle died… right. Fine. His Aunt May is old… right. Fine. That’s all I need. Leave me alone for a couple of days and I will give you a good story about it as it pertains to the character. I just see this stuff in my mind’s eye, like a movie that I am completely familiar with. I can see every camera angle, understand every emotion. I know it backwards and sideways and the typing of it is just basically a matter of if I can remember what I wanted to do and/or read my own notes.

M: One problem I have is some of these books have been around for forty years, and every time I think I’m doing something new with them, I find its been done in one form or another. How do you get around that?

P: It’s been done before, maybe, but I have never put my voice to it. So I don’t care if it has been done, I don’t worry about it. When Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet it had been done. It’s just that he hadn’t done it.

M: What was the most difficult job you’ve had writing? I don’t mean with a specific company or editor, I mean story.

P: Probably the Mythos books that have just begun to come out. We took Stan Lee’s origins and matched them with the movies or TV shows, and then added our own voices and ideas to it all. That is a very hard thing to do. I think we have at least succeeded with the X-Men story.

M: Now without naming names, tell me about one of your worst working experiences. We all have those.

P: Holy shit. Well, I have a few. I have always been good about being respectful to fellow creators… even the ones I know are tanking it because they are lazy. I think I could point to some of my Tundra experiences as examples of human greed, laziness and stupidity. A favorite example is the time one asshole creator was supposed to do an intro/title page that needed to be a graveyard. This was at a time when some of these people were just raping poor Kevin Eastman and his head was spinning so fast he couldn’t work out how to react to some of the behavior. Anyway, I get the so-called “Title” page in the form of a rectangular shape with a semi circle attached to make it in the shape of a gravestone. I also receive a full-page invoice for, like, $300. When I challenge the scumbag artist who submitted it, he informs me that the construction of the graveyard is a matter for the production department and that his contract specifically states he can rip us off, etc. God, I have a million of those Tundra stories. I am so fucking bitter about it, even to this day.

M: Do you find yourself standing up for your story when there are changes to be made, or do you roll with the punches? I find the story issues I fight the hardest on, if I give in to the editor, I usually, after much painful rethinking, find I have a much better story. Have you had that kind of experience or like Warren, are editors afraid of you?

P: I am pretty sure editors are not afraid of me. I like to have my scripts remain they way I wrote them. If changes are being asked for, I want to know about it. I think it’s rude and counterproductive for an editor to write something into one of my scripts, although I do understand why it has to happen on occasion. If I stand up for something, honestly, I am usually right. I pick my battles.

M: You know who I’m afraid of? Mark Millar. He once gave me a donkey-punch so hard I almost complained. I didn’t know the Scots were like that. Speaking of true-life experiences, I read you once said, “Writing about yourself is ultimately the key to bringing your audience in.”

How do you write about yourself when you write something abstract like the Hulk or Inhumans?

P: The Hulk is about feeling angry and trying to keep that anger in check. We all do that. I also wrote about him having Lou Gehrig’s disease… how that relates to me is that after I fractured my neck I was extremely ill and fairly helpless. Inhumans is all about strangers living in a strange land… like me living in America. If it helps, by the way, I think Mark Millar is slightly afraid of me after I threatened to disembowel some dipshit internet columnist at a convention. I am pretty even-tempered but that guy was a tool and I probably would have done better just to kick his arse. Millar looked like a deer caught in headlights. His one saving grace is that he is a Celtic fan. But if you want to get a rise out of him, call him a Rangers fan. I guarantee this will make him genuinely angry.

M: When you read other comics, what is the most common mistake you see, something you see time and time again that makes you go, “Man, if he just didn’t do that, it would be so much better.” Like an ending. Too many great stories have no real endings, or worse, I find I love the characters, but the actual story lacks.

P: For me it is dialogue. I find myself cringing that a person would not speak a certain way as presented, even in an absurd situation. I think people can be quite lazy about this. Maybe it’s just that I find it easy… I dunno.

M: What about your own work needs help?

P: Action scenes, I think. I really do well with characterization and dialogue but I appreciate that in this medium, there needs to be a certain visceral display of action or power or what-have-you that some fans can just sit back and admire. I need to do better with that. I am trying. For a while I opened up the panel structure so that there were less panels on the pages with big action. I may explore doing that again.

M: For me, I love your stories — the actual story, above and beyond the character or dialogue, I think you craft great story. Not that the rest of it is so bad, you know what I mean…

What do you think you do best in your work?

P: It’s hard to assess your own work like that. I am, at best, sometimes satisfied with what I write. Occasionally, I know I have done something right; like maybe Generation M — that’s going to be a good book. I think I would say that if you gave me ten minutes and said you would like a story about table tennis, I would give you something halfway decent after ten minutes. It probably wouldn’t be about table tennis, but what can I say? I realize you can’t hit a home run every time, so fuck you, Oeming. Why must you always be critical?

M: You’ve written a screenplay or two, right? And you’ve done work for video games; do you see that as an extension of being a writer, or was that a specific move on your part?

P: A very calculated move. I am enjoying the video game work… I feel like the game industry is now the bastard child of comics and I like working for the underdog. The film stuff is great. I think I am learning screenplays pretty well. Let’s see what happens with my directing career.

M: Here’s a tricky question — do you think you can retire off of comics? I’m looking to extend myself into film and other fields because I don’t believe I can. After all, how many great artists and writers of 30 years ago are still working in comics today?

P: I can probably retire off of a combination of my three careers. I could probably retire off of video game work. And film. But not comics alone… unless they start selling more.

M: I’ve found I’ve gotten a bit too close with some of my readers. I’ve seen some breasts, had my drink spiked and have gotten the bird from people who thought they knew me and it was funny. There’s this chick, Taki, who picks me up at every show and drops me, usually on my hip, and I’m getting old, man. This one guy, Goddard, even faked being me at a show or two, so I had to push him in front of a car. Here’s a pic to prove it –

Anyway, what is your relationship with your fans like?

P: I get on great with the fans. I have a great time at conventions. I once signed a breast and the girl cheerfully informed me she was going to have my signature tattooed. That was bizarre. I think the tough thing, maybe, is that we are not trained to do this. I treat the fans with respect and expect the same. Sadly, I see some creators who treat the fans badly. I think that is extremely crappy given that they’re the people who pay our wages.

M: So, What goes on with Paul when you’re not being creative?

P: A lot of sport: soccer, golf, poker! I am always being creative, jackass.

M: What do you hope to be doing in the future, in and out of comics?

P: Got a little kid on the way — that will be different. I do a weekly column at Newsarama now, so we can all watch him gestate together. I want to do the film stuff with Good Cop/Bad Cop, obviously. I want to write a couple of novels and I want to get drunk with Neil Armstrong and talk about walking on the moon.

M: Okay, your sitting in a pub and you see some guys walk in wearing comic book shirts. They look over and think they might recognize you. Do you:

A: Make no eye contact

B: Head out the door?

C: Walk up to the bar and hope they speak to you.

D: Walk up to them and tell them who you are for free drinks.

Mark Millar will answer D when I ask him, so you can be just as honest.

P: I am with Mark on that one. Free beer just tastes better; unless it is Budweiser. That stuff is shite.

M: That reminds me, who do you like better, the Irish or the Scottish?

P: I am an honorary Scottish Anglicized Welshman, having worn a kilt to Scotland matches and even been interviewed as a Scotland fan on the BBC. My Glaswegian accent, I have been informed by no less than a Glaswegian himself, is about perfect.

For extra credit.

These 10 questions originally came from a French series, “Bouillon de Culture” hosted by Bernard Pivot, whored off by James Lipton have been improved by yours truly…

1. What is your favorite word to hear in a convention?

I like the word Byrne, because I know something interesting is about to happen.

2. What is your least favorite word to hear in an editor’s office?

“BLOWME.”

3. What turns you on sexually?

Humungous tits. The bigger the better. My wife has some big cans. She wants a boob job after we are finished having kids. I told her that would be fine as long as she added a little extra since she was getting opened up anyway. She thinks I have a breast fetish. She is right about that.

4. What turns you off sexually?

Hmm… probably women who are completely silent in the sack. I don’t know about you, Oeming, but I need some noise. Screamers are great.

5. What is your favorite curse word your mother used?

She always used Yiddish swear words for no apparent reason. I never understood anything she said beyond the word c**t.

6. What sound or noise do you love when you’re kicking someone in a dark alley?

I love it when prostitutes beg for their lives. That is always funny.

7. What sound or noise do you hate when running from the police?

The sound of fear coursing through my veins. I cover it up by yelling, “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

8. What profession, other than urine-stained coke whore, would you like to attempt?

Teacher, probably. No, check that… I would like to be in retail. I believe I could do this. Especially selling shoes or handbags. Drug dealer, maybe… is that considered retail?

9. What person would you not like to do?

So many to choose from. I would have to say the most repulsive human being alive is probably Martha Stewart, but I would do her just to hear her scream. How about Gwen Stefani. Everyone wants to do her. I think she looks like an alien.

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to say to God when he rejects you at the Pearly Gates?

“Reject me, would you? Well then… I reject YOU!” Then I would pull his beard and run away.

---

Paul and Jack Richard Jenkins

Paul: Born March 9th, 2006 at 1.34PM. 6 Pounds, 2 ounces, if you care
about that sort of thing. Melinda is doing really well… she was
amazing.

I never thought I would enjoy it so much to have someone puke on me.
Check out the gangsta punk look — he’s coming over your house to
smash it up as soon as his legs work.

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Paul Jenkins is currently writing The Sentry, Generation M, and Mythos for Marvel Comics, and the recently completed Revelations for Dark Horse Comics.

Check out more Mike Oeming at www.mike-oeming.com. Join the Oeming newsletter for previews and announcements via email to: oeming @ aol.com.