Jessica Jones Season 2 Will Smartly Depart from the Comics

Earlier this week, Netflix and Marvel Studios dropped the long-awaited full trailer for Season 2 of Jessica Jones, and it looks incredible. With David Tennant's Kilgrave having been dealt with in Season 1, Jessica now has time to delve into the mystery of her powers -- and her family's deaths -- all with a bit of help from adopted sister Trish Walker, now fully upgraded to the role of sidekick.

But while the trailer promises a look and feel quite similar to Season 1, the second season of Jessica Jones promises to be radically different in at least one way: It is breaking free of the comics and telling a largely original story.

While the first season of Jessica Jones inevitably took some liberties, it was heavily influenced its source material, Alias, by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos. Everything from Kilgrave's hold over Jessica to her complicated relationship with Luke Cage was drawn from the character's previous comic book adventures, to the point of several overt homages to panels from the comics.

Even the major exception -- adopted sister and sometime frenemy Trish Walker -- had something of a comics antecedent. Trish stands in for Jessica's comics pal, Carol Danvers, who was not available to Netflix for the series as she will soon be appearing in her own big screen adventures in Captain Marvel. Instead, Netflix and Marvel Studios swapped her out for Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat!, while transferring the fraught Jessica/Carol relationship over to the renamed "Trish." Even if comics Jessica never met Patsy until post-Jessica Jones, the dynamic between the two of them still felt familiar.

Season 2, however, will be much different. By exploring Jessica's origin in depth over the course of the season, the series will be going well beyond comics territory, adding significantly to the Jessica Jones canon. And that's a good thing.

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Since her creation in 2001, Brian Michael Bendis has had almost exclusive control over Jessica. While Bendis's work with co-creator Michael Gaydos—both the original Alias series and the more recent self-titled Jessica Jones—was often stellar, there was a long period where the character languished. Bendis' brief follow-up to Alias, The Pulse, alternated focus between Jessica's pregnancy and her worrying about Luke, effectively reducing her agency in her own book.

And that's to say nothing of Jessica's appearances over the years in Bendis' New Avengers, where she was consistently reduced to her role as mom and wife rather than a hero in her own right. His run even ends with a scene in which Jessica tells Carol that she's become "the wife who's making her husband do what she says instead of what he wants." (A page later, Carol somehow makes it worse by outright telling Jessica, "Your job is to raise this baby and keep it safe.")

Jessica Jones tells Carol Danvers that she thinks all of the other Avengers hate her because I'm the wife who's making her husband do what she says instead of what he wants. I'm suddenly that.

There's nothing wrong with superheroes leaning into the mom role (as Susan Richards has done in Fantastic Four) or even retiring from heroics altogether, but this never felt authentic to who Jessica was as a character. While she didn't necessarily need to be slinging back whiskey at 4AM for the rest of her life, she felt like the kind of person who would fight to maintain her identity and life post-child. Instead, she was repeatedly sidelined.

Under other circumstances, this would not have been a problem. But, with Bendis as Marvel's top writer for well over a decade (at least, that is, until his recent move to DC), Marvel editorial appeared to have an informal policy barring anyone else from using Jessica in more than a guest star role. Even after the success of the first season the Netflix series, it took Marvel nearly a year to launch a new Jessica Jones comic because Bendis was busy writing Civil War II and editorial was unwilling to give the book to another writer in the meantime.

A side effect of this neglect is that while Jessica Jones has been around for seventeen years, remarkably few stories have been told about her. And, since most of those stories involved Jessica investigating something hero related (whether it was a Captain America sex tape or the disappearance of one of the Spider-Women), almost none of them can be adapted for the Netflix series. Likewise, Jessica's stellar guest-starring roles in books like Hawkeye and Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat! are also largely ill-suited for adaptation.

Rather than a detriment, though, this is a huge opportunity. It means that Jessica Jones showrunner Melissa Rosenberg—and the all-women team of directors working on Season 2—will be able to put their own imprint on the character, making her more authentic in the process. And they'll be able to do it before the post-Bendis comics creative team comes on board.

Jessica's origin is a perfect place to start. Her comics origin was a deliberate Silver Age throwback, complete with Easter eggs referencing the origins of Spider-Man and Daredevil. This worked well for Alias, where she was a canon implant, but contemporary audiences typically want more than just "exposed to chemicals and now has superpowers." Where did the chemicals come from, for instance, and were others also exposed?

Jessica Jones behind Peter Parker at the science experiment where he gets his powers

In Jessica Jones Season 2, Rosenberg and her team have an opportunity to answer these questions, while also exploring other aspects of Jessica's life. One particularly fruitful avenue of exploration is how Jessica deals with the ongoing trauma of her experience with Kilgrave. Bendis largely treated post-Alias Jessica as if her trauma was "fixed" after her not-so-final confrontation with the Purple Man, but that's not really how trauma works. After all, Bruce Wayne is still haunted by his parents' deaths decades after confronting Joe Chill...

Regardless of approach they end up taking, Rosenberg and her team will ultimately have the chance to have the first post-Bendis take on Jessica Jones. That's incredibly exciting.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones, starring Krysten Ritter, will return to Netflix for a second season on March 8, 2018. The character was last seen in Marvel’s The Defenders, which is available now on Netflix. The final Bendis/Gaydos-helmed issue of the Jessica Jones will arrive a day earlier, on March 7, 2018.