Jay Faerber - Career

Career

Faerber first broke into the comic book industry in the late 1990s. His first ongoing series writing assignment was Generation X, which he began with issue #45 (December 1998). Assignments on The New Warriors and The Titans would follow.

In 2002, Faerber began publishing through Image Comics the series Noble Causes, which follows the lives of the Nobles, a wealthy superhero family, and which emphasized their interpersonal conflicts over battles with supervillain enemies. The series until 2008, and concluded with issue #40.

In 2007, Faerber debuted the Noble Causes spinoff, Dynamo 5, which starred a group of five illegitimate of the assassinated superhero Captain Dynamo, who were assembled by Dynamo's widow in order to protect Tower City. Like Noble Causes, Dynamo 5 was also a monthly series by Image Comics that depicted the superhero family dynamics, but placed more emphasis on action, dividing its content between the team's battles with adversaries and its interpersonal conflicts. Dynamo 5 ended its ongoing run with issue #25 (Oct. 2009), and continued with a series of miniseries and one-shots.

In 2008, Faerber published a miniseries called Gemini, which stars Dan Johnson, an ordinary man who is unaware that at night, he comes under the control of an organization called the Constellation, who transform ordinary people like him into crimefighters named after star constellations, without any of these people retaining any knowledge or memory of these events. Although intended as a five-issue miniseries, the last issue published was issue #4 (July 2009), which featured a guest appearance by Dynamo 5.

In September 2011, Faerber debuted Near Death, a crime series whose lead character, Markham, is an assassin who sets out to atone for his past sins after capturing a glimpse of hell during a near-death experience. During the course of the book, which mostly consists of self-contained stories, Markham saves people's lives (some of whom are targeted by other hitmen working for his former clients), not because his near-death experience made him a more altruistic person, but solely because of his self-interested motive in avoiding hell, a point with which Faerber hopes to explore questions of moral character and the nature of heroism. In creating the series, Faerber was inspired by the work of Andrew Vachss, Robert B. Parker, Robert Crais and Lee Child, and 80s crime shows such as The Equalizer and Stingray. In particular, the lack of any known first name for Markham is inspired by Vachss' Burke Series and Parker's Spenser.

Faerber was also a writer on the CW TV series Ringer, which starred Sarah Michelle Gellar, and ran from September 2011 to May 2012.