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Of Gods and Men: Writing better superhero origin stories

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Every superhero writer ultimately faces the biggest challenge: writing the origin story. Origin stories are absolutely critical to get right for the launch of a new superhero character, or the reboot of an older one. Unfortunately, origin stories are also very easy to get wrong, descending either into cliché or tropes so well-worn as to become threadbare. Or, the origin story uses up all of the character’s motivation to be a superhero right in the first shot, leaving next to nothing for later stories.

Let’s take a look at how we can make sure that your superheroes origin story is one of the best stories that you tell, and one that you will be able to build into an epic saga for your character. We’re going to look at not only how, but when you should tell a superhero’s origin.

Unpacking the myths of superhero origin stories

Out of all of the various ways that superheroes are created, we can break the various origin stories into two broad categories.

  • Superheroes are created by the gods, or
  • Superheroes are created by men.

Superheroes that come from the gods are those who are empowered by destiny, gods, aliens, accident, meteor shower, mutation, or pretty much anything that is outside of human influence. Examples would include characters like Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, the Flash, Green Lantern, and Superman.

Essentially, superheroes from the gods are picked by external forces to be special and apart from the rest of humanity. These types of characters reflect of classic myths from Gilgamesh to Beowulf to Hercules – characters who are in some way divine or semi-divine and whom ordinary mortals can only gaze upon in wonder.

It’s not surprising that an awful lot of heroes followed this particular path, because this is actually one of the oldest story templates out there. Also not surprisingly, you can see traces of old world class structures in place, where the heroes being chosen by the gods are above and apart from the masses of humanity and exist show the rest of us great unwashed proles a better way. In some cases, like Superman, or Thor, we are dealing with characters who are better than human because of their alien/godlike origins. In other cases, like the X-Men, we’re dealing with characters who are considered on the fringes of humanity and who are generally disliked by the public because of an accident of birth.

No ordinary human is able to rise to their level and conversely, they are not able to bring themselves down to the level of ordinary human – no matter how much they might want to. The class structure for these characters is carved in stone, and both upward and downward mobility are impossible.

Let’s now take a look at the second type of hero: the hero that’s made by men. This superhero is the ordinary man or woman who, through their own talents, willpower, and determination, rises up from the masses and becomes a character who can challenge the gods. Examples of these types of characters would include Batman, Iron Man, Green Arrow, Hawkeye, Black Widow, and others who are little more than ordinary people in funny costumes, but who have the essence of being a superhero in them.

Where the heroes created by the gods reflect the old-world classicism, the superheroes made by men are much more new-world in their origin. In much the same way as anyone can rise to the highest levels of American (or Canadian) society if they are prepared to work for it, people can become superheroes if they are courageous, talented, determined, and crazy enough.

This particular origin path springs directly from the pulp era, where characters such as the Spider, the Phantom Detective, and others were ordinary, albeit rich men, who took up crime fighting as a personal crusade or simply because they were bored with their lot in life. A lot of the science-based superheroes (and not a few science-based supervillains) have this type of origin story. You could, if you stretched the definition of superhero, include some of the earlier detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and his contemporaries, or even the Gerry Anderson Thunderbirds as superheroes made by men.

This origin path does allow opportunities to delve deeper into character since the hero is motivated to step outside their normal life and take on the challenges posed by crime and disaster. Unlike the superheroes made by the gods, the superheroes made by men step out of ordinary life by their own choice, rather than being forced out by the gods.

Depending on whether you want your superhero character to be one that’s made by the gods, or made by men, you’re going to have to approach the origins a bit differently.

Superheroes made by the gods…and how to fix them

I have to admit, I’m not a real fan of the superheroes that are made by gods or “Chosen Ones.”

By giving a character a superhuman ability from an outside influence, be it scientific accident as in the case of Spiderman, alien technology as in the case of Green Lantern, or supernatural forces as in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you have already given them the tools to solve whatever world threatening problem you’re going to be tossing them. You’ve also immediately set them apart from the reader by saying these people are not like you. They’re special. This is one of the reasons why characters like Spiderman and Buffy end up being hit with so many real-world problems in order to compensate for this tremendous gifts they’ve been given and to make them more relatable to us poor slobs that have to live as mere mortals.

It also becomes very easy to screw up their origins stories.

Let’s take a look at the example of Luke Skywalker from Star Wars: A New Hope. As far as characters and storylines go, the story of Luke Skywalker from A New Hope maps perfectly onto Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey. We start with Luke Skywalker as a young man who has to progress through challenges, with the support of the supernatural, helpers, mentors, and undergoes a death and rebirth to become a hero of the Galactic rebellion. If you are looking at the movie from the perspective of the hero’s journey, Luke Skywalker is very definitely the hero of that film. But what do we remember about Luke Skywalker nearly four decades after the movie hit the theaters? Right. The whiny farm kid. Because Hans Solo is a more interesting character and undergoes a much more significant transformation, he steals the thunder from Luke Skywalker.

Star Wars: A New Hope is one of the reasons why “the Chosen One” is not a compliment when applied to a character in most fiction. Yet, that doesn’t stop writers from going back to the monomyth well to see if they can bring that particular archetype into life with their own character.

If you want to see a movie that shows a perfect example of how a Chosen One can go really wrong, check out Green Lantern, starring Ryan Reynolds. Everything that could be done wrong on the hero’s journey is done wrong in that particular film.

If you want to see a movie where the heroes journey is done right, check out Man of Steel. Although many people outright hate this movie because of its ending, as a story where you have a hero gifted with wondrous powers undergoing a transformation towards becoming a superhero, it stands right up near the top of the list. Another film that you can look at which also shows the hero’s journey incredibly well for a chosen character is Captain America. This matches the mono-myth/hero’s journey nearly beat for beat.

So, what’s the main difference between Green Lantern and Superman or Captain America?

Simple: Superman and Captain America earn their hero like stature. Green Lantern never does.

Even though character may be chosen, they still have to earn the mantle of hero. By going through the work, the risk, the effort to face the villain or the challenge, this divinely created character is going to be made real to the audience, and the audience will be able to satisfy their own sense of justice that this character is worthy of the gifts that they have been given. In short, you gotta work for it.

How do you show the character working for it? There are a number of options:

One is the recognition of the limits of their power – that it can’t solve every problem that they face.

  • We see this when young Clark Kent is unable to save his adoptive father despite having these amazing powers.
  • We see this in Captain America when Steve Rogers, despite the super soldier serum coursing through his veins and a desire to fight alongside his fellow soldiers in the European theater, is instead chosen to headline a USO bond drive.

The powers have to be insufficient to the task, and the hero, through his own intellect is able to capitalize on the opportunities to overcome the challenge without relying on his powers. Clark Kent goes on a walkabout, saving lives as he goes to try to find his place in the world following his father’s death. Steve Rogers, on being told that his best friend is missing in action, disobeys orders and puts himself in harm’s way to try to save his friend. That both Clark Kent and Steve Rogers are successful in their quests defines them as characters, and endears them to the audience where they can then use their gifts to deal with the much bigger threat that faces them.

They’ve got to earn the mantle of hero. They may be given the powers, but they still have to earn the Cape.

Another option is that the character themselves is flawed and has to overcome the flaws to emerge as hero.

  • We see this in the movie Thor, where Thor’s arrogance and brashness is a weakness that threatens Asgard and calls into question his ability to assume Odin’s throne. Although not executed perfectly, the story of Thor’s willingness to sacrifice himself to save anonymous townspeople even lacking his powers does show him striving to overcome his biggest flaw to finally become the man he is destined to be.
  • We see this done rather poorly in the 1994 Shadow movie, where the character of Lamont Cranston has a dark past and must atone for his sins, and until he finds peace with himself, he will not have the strength to deal with his arch-nemesis Shiwan Khan.

The problem with the flawed character approach is that it becomes very easy to make the character unlikable. Although there is a market for truly unlikable characters (such as Ambush Bug and the Punisher), most readers will refuse to buy or follow a book starring such a character.

The flawed character moving towards redemption can be a very powerful story, especially if the character resonates well with the audience. Even more compelling is the character seeking redemption forced by circumstances to do terrible things, creating a pattern of rise and fall, only to rise again and then – at the climax of the story – choose whether to continue to walk in the light or to fall forever into darkness. As an example and even though he’s not a superhero, check out the character arc of Londo Mollari from Babylon 5 for a perfect example of this type of back and forth transition.

So, let’s quickly review:

  • A superhero created by the gods is one of the oldest templates for superhero origins.
  • Their superhero origin maps very well onto the hero’s journey template or monomyth.
  • The key to a successful origin is that the hero has to be seen earning their superhero status, either by overcoming problems their powers cannot resolve, or by overcoming an internal flaw to become worthy of the mantle of hero.

Anyone can be a superhero – if they survive the origin story

The other way that superhero origin stories are told is the superhero made by men. Again, just by being determined enough, smart enough, and resourceful enough – and combined with a willingness to risk their own life challenging godlike beings, anyone can be a superhero.

They just have to survive the origin story.

Scratch that. They have to do more than just survive. They also have to earn being a superhero.

One of the best examples of the hero surviving their origin and transforming themselves into superhero is in the movie Batman Begins. This movie is genius level in rewriting Batman’s origin story and showing the audience exactly what Bruce Wayne went through from the time that his parents were killed to the time he actually puts on the cowl and becomes Gotham’s dark Knight. We see this privileged rich kid, someone that we might think of as a chosen one because of his inherited wealth, actually go from a sniveling teenager who can’t even pull the trigger properly to holding his own in the middle of a riot in a Chinese prison to taking out an entire clan of ninjas before returning back to Gotham to wage his own private war on crime. Every step of the way, Bruce Wayne is struggling to become the superhero. He is earning the cowl, and the audience knows it.

Another example is the origin of Iron Man in the first iron Man movie. Tony Stark, rich billionaire playboy and weapons designer with issues, is stripped of his wealth, tossed into a cave with a bucket of spare parts, and he has to endure imprisonment, torture, and the death of his mentor all so he can escape and set himself up to face the main villain of the story. Although Tony Stark is a genius when it comes to technology, his gift isn’t going to help him survive captivity. Instead, he earns the mantle of superhero based on his determination not only to stay alive, but to help atone for the destruction that his inventions caused in the past. For the audience, Tony Stark definitely earns the suit.

Just like the “made by the gods” types of characters, the superhero made by men is ridiculously easy to screw up. You have to have a strong enough motivation to have them fight crime AND you have to be able to show that they understand the real challenge they face – to make the world right in line with their morality.

  • A perfect example of how easy it is to screw up an origin story is the Punisher. While it might be a (very slight) stretch to call him an Executioner knock-off, the similarities are certainly there – a soldier whose family was killed by the Mafia and who starts a war of vengeance on organized crime ad infinitum. Vengeance is certainly a viable motive for making a character step out from the normal life to fight super-villains, but if vengeance is all the character has (such as with the Punisher), then the character becomes paper-thin. Follow that with Garth Ennis’ take on the Punisher, which suggested that the character was created as a product of his Vietnam service. Combining vengeance and riffing on the “psycho-Vietnam Vet” stereotype unfortunately does not give the character more depth, nor does it make the origin any better.
  • Continuing with in the example of soldiers as characters, there are times that it seems there are more Navy SEALS active in the pages of fiction than there ever were in the entire history of the unit. If any readers of this blog admit to watching Baywatch you may recall that David Hasselhoff’s character, Mitch Buchanan, was a Navy SEAL prior to becoming a Lifeguard. Of course, this was mentioned more in passing or as justification for the some of the heroics required by the plot that actually being an origin worth telling. In short, Buchanan was never shown earning the mantle of Navy SEAL, nor was it ever demonstrated to have an impact on the show.

In giving the origin stories of both Batman and Iron Man, there is a moment when the characters realize the true nature of the world around them and how out of step it is with what their morals demand it be. In the movie Batman Begins, there is the scene where Bruce Wayne goes to face down the mob boss in the restaurant and realizes just how powerless he is in the face of what Gotham has become. In the first Iron Man movie, Tony stark is captured and tossed into a cave where he also realizes just how powerless he is against the insurgents his weapons were designed to target.

With the Punisher, on the other hand, his family is killed and so he falls back on his military training in order to take on the bad guys. At no point is he truly powerless. At no point in his entire story arc does he ever rise above the stereotypical “man with gun seeks revenge.” There is no real transformation for him – a point Garth Ennis drove home when he took over the character and showed him to already be the Punisher at the time the signal event of his family’s murder occurs.

As a further contrast, both Batman and Iron Man have ideals that go beyond the events that set them on the path to being superheroes. Batman serves Gotham. He wants to protect it, to save it, and rid it of the criminal element that has infested it. Tony Stark is a weapons designer who is now motivated to make the world a better place through technology, and to atone to a certain extent for all of the harm that his weapons have caused in the past. The Punisher, on the other hand, just wants revenge. He never aspires to anything higher.

So, let’s recap:

  • A superhero made by men has to choose to be a superhero.
  • As with superheroes made by the gods, they have to be shown earning the mantle of superhero.
  • In addition to surviving the process of becoming a superhero, and they have to show that they have been awakened to the challenge of making the world right, according to their own ideals.
  • The ideals have to rise above the events that made them choose to be superheroes.

When to tell a superhero’s origin story? That’s a mystery…

In most cases, writers choose to tell these origin stories at the point where the character is least defined, and at a point when the writer also has the least experience with the character. In short, they’re telling the origin story at exactly the worst possible time – at the beginning.

While it’s not unusual to delay an origin story for a certain period of time, readers expect an explanation fairly early on in a character’s career of how that character became a superhero. They want to know more about what motivates the character, the character’s DHA (Dreams, Hopes, and Aspirations), and what dark secrets the character hides that set him on his path to being a superhero.

There’s also the reader’s need to find out where the character sits on the classic literary “hero’s journey.” Ah yes, the infamous “hero’s journey” – the archetypal monomyth template shared across multiple codified by Joseph Campbell and passed down through generation to generation to generation…

You would think that the monomyth would be a great opportunity to lay down a character’s origin story in line with something that has worked time and again, over the centuries. After all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? A writer using the monomyth as a template would be able to bring every literary trick of the trade to bear to make sure that their origin story was among the best out there.

Every trick that is, except for the most important one.

Mystery.

We talked about the use of mystery to make super villains more compelling. The same applies in the event of a superheroes origin story. Your readers are going to have a need to find out more about the character that you’ve created. Once that need is satisfied, they may stick around to see what else you do, or they may wander off to find the next shiny object that catches their attention. If, however, you delay satisfying their curiosity and you tease them with hints, suggestions, and even the occasional red herring, then you’re going to be turning their curiosity into a burning need to know. And they will stick around to find out how this character that has been compelling them over these many stories actually came to be.

Tell the stories that you want to tell about your character. Explore the character and make him dynamic. As you get more and more familiar with the character, and more comfortable telling stories about that character, you will be able to decide the right point where that origin is to be made public. The mystery that you create along the way is going to keep your readers coming right along with you.

At some point, you do have to reveal the superhero’s origin. Curiosity needs to be satisfied because otherwise, the audience gets bored and moves on. However, if you do it right, you will satisfy the curiosity on one mystery, only to stoke the fire on an even bigger mystery. And that is one thing that will keep your readers coming back again and again.

About the Artwork:

I’ve been playing around with a pulp-style of artwork. Here’s the full version of the image from the start of this article. What do you think?

Magical Superhero Full

 

If you liked this article on superhero origins, let me know in the comments below.

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Three ways to Write Scarier Zombies

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With The Walking Dead TV Series leading the way by drawing millions of viewers, and the success of the Max Brook’s World War Z book and movie, zombies are big business.

The problem I have with zombies is that as currently portrayed, they are really not all that scary. I mean, let’s be honest, the modern ones lack any sort of intellect other than a primal need to go after prey. They move around at a shuffle, or run if they’re a scarier “rage zombie”, have no senses other than hearing, and their method of creating more of them is to fail to kill their prey.

To quote Dillis D. Freeman Jr. “You know what the difference between me and you really is?  You look out there and see a horde of evil, brain eating zombies.  I look out there and see a target rich environment.”

If we had a zombie outbreak today, given everything we know about them from popular culture, we wouldn’t have the Walking Dead. We would have an episode of Gray’s Anatomy or Wild Kingdom. The only way that the contemporary zombies that are shown on the Walking Dead actually manage to overrun the earth is if everything goes completely wrong for the humans. If the humans show one iota of good thinking or strategic foresight, the outbreak gets contained and covered up within a matter of 24 to 48 hours after being detected. If you’re interested in more, Cracked.com actually ran an article as to why the zombie apocalypse could never happen.

“You know what the difference between me and you really is? You look out there and see a horde of evil, brain eating zombies. I look out there and see a target rich environment.”

But you know what, I’m not here to tell you why a zombie apocalypse can’t happen, or why you shouldn’t be afraid of it. I want to take a look at ways where fiction creators can make it scarier.

As always, these are my opinions offered up for discussion. Your mileage may vary.

So let’s begin.

One of the first things that we want to establish before we start this exercise is that our zombies are going to be the creatures of science. Magical zombies are a lot of fun, and in many ways a lot scarier simply because magic breaks all of the rules, and your options for fighting them are based upon folklore and lost ancient knowledge. The scientific method really doesn’t work with them.

The second thing that I want to establish is that I want to stay as close as possible to the original concepts made popular as a result of George Romero’s films. If we go too far away from the mindless shambling corpse, we don’t end up with zombies. In fact, when 28 Days Later came out with its fast movers, a.k.a. rage zombies, there was a lot of debate in the fan community as to whether or not these were “real zombies.” So, with that in mind, we’re not going to go too far afield. We’re going to look at tweaks, rather than wholesale revisions of mythology and lore.

Zombies and Contagion:

According to modern lore, people become zombies when they are infected by a bite carrying a virus, a parasite, a fungus, or some other organism that reanimates and takes control of their corpse. In all cases, the infection is 100% fatal, and has a ridiculously short incubation time. People will succumb to the infection within a matter of minutes, and then proceed to attack the nearest living person in order to help spread the disease.

Sounds scary, right? You’ve got victims keeling over within seconds, dying, and then getting up to re-infect others within minutes. You’d imagine that the spread would be like wildfire.

Actually, not so much. As long as you stay away from the dead guys you’re pretty much immune. And if the public health authorities are even remotely intelligent, the contagion would probably be contained very quickly. Anyone who is potentially infected would be isolated until the authorities were convinced that they were in no danger. And let’s be honest, it’s pretty easy to identify the walking dead.

So, let’s change the setup. We’ve got two factors that we can play with here. First, there’s the method of transmission. Second, there’s the incubation time.

It has been a common theme through popular culture that the infection method has to be a bite. Out of all of the infection methods, this one is really not all that effective. The diseases that give epidemiologists nightmares are the ones that have airborne transmission. You don’t have to be touched, bitten, or otherwise have any contact with an infected individual – you just have to be breathing the same air. This is what makes influenza and SARS so contagious.

Now, as writers of horror fiction, we have a problem with this. Namely, if we are in a post-apocalyptic situation where the wlaking dead are running rampant, how do we keep our heroes from becoming infected?

So let’s dial this back a bit. Let’s say that rather than airborne transmission, the infection is spread by contact with bodily fluids. Now any good zombie hunter worth his salt is going to at some point end up slogging through hip deep amounts of gore and bodily fluids from the devastation that he rains down on the zombie hordes. Eventually, our hunter is going to become infected unless he takes proper precautions – but that’s another article.

The second aspect – incubation time – can also increase the zombie fear factor. For a lot of writers, the faster the infection, the scarier because there is  no no hope for an infected victim to get any kind of treatment. However, I actually argue in the opposite direction. I think the slower the incubation time, the scarier this infection becomes.

If we have an infection that takes days, or even weeks, to have symptoms manifest, then that is a longer period of time where the infected can spread the disease to other people. Think of the number of people that you are in contact with every single day through your work, through leisure, and through relationships. A sexually transmitted disease, for example, can tear through a social group within a matter of weeks in direct relation to just how sexually promiscuous the members of that group are. Now imagine if the person that you are hooking up with had been infected with the virus – something that takes quite some time to reach it symptomatic phase, has a 100% transmission rate, and it 100% mortality rate and you won’t know for at least a week? Suddenly, that changes the dynamics of the outbreak to truly apocalyptic proportions. The walking dead at this point aren’t your biggest problem. Instead your biggest problem is knowing if you or other members of your survival collective are either:

  1. infected and waiting to turn, or
  2. carriers who will continue to unknowingly spread the infection on to everyone else they meet, kind of like an undead Typhoid Mary.

For hard science guys like myself, that’s how you make a zombie apocalypse scarier.

As an added thought, let’s assume that the zombie contagion can actually jump species. This way, anything can be a carrier or can ultimately become one of the walking dead. The cross species infection played a big part in the back story of the fungal monstrosities in the hit videogame The Last of Us.

Likewise, we have seen sporadic references to things such as a zombie dogs, and zombie cats in horror fiction. For human beings, one of the protection mechanisms we have against infection is that viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi have a hard time infecting across species. But just think of all of the mammals, both domesticated and wild, that live in and around your neighborhood. Everything from dogs to rats, skunks to rabbits, coyotes to bats – every one of those could be the carrier of a zombie infection. How would humanity ever be able to fight back against something like that?

Zombie Predators

Okay, let’s say that you’re just fine with the infection method as is. It was good enough for George Romero, so dammit it’s good enough for you. Besides, you want to write stories about lots of zombie killing, so you have the undead shambling hordes coming towards your heroes, and your heroes have enough brain cells between them to actually lure the undead into a kill zone. Suddenly your story loses all tension because the only dramatic question you’ve got is whether they run out of ammunition before they run out of undead.

Here’s the problem with the shambling undead horde: the lack of any intellect, other than an autonomous response to external stimuli, means that the zombies really suck at being predators. The only time that they become dangerous is if there are a lot of them and the humans are stupid enough to get caught in an area where walking dead have congregated.

We’ve become so used to the idea of the mindless, unthinking zombie that we really have sucked a lot of the potential horror out of them. These creatures then become part of the environment, and we’re reduced to watching the heroes make bad life choices in order to mine any dramatic tension out of the situation.

So, let’s change things a bit. Let’s actually make them into predators. We don’t need to increase their intelligence by a great deal. We can actually have fairly unintelligent predators who rely on hunting instincts and pack mentalities to pose a greater threat.

For example, coyotes are pack hunters. They will form groups that will harass and tire their prey, while at the same time shepherding the prey towards another pack that lies in wait. This cooperative hunting behavior could be applied to zombies who are looking to deal with their ravenous hunger for human flesh. Undead hunting bands could exhibit the same pack-hunting behaviors as coyotes and develop a few new ones.

Zombies need a little bit of intelligence that goes beyond just the stimulus-response reaction to noises made by victims. If we’ve established in modern lore that they need to attack humans to feed and to spread the contagion, then they have a motivation to seek out prey and that prey is going to be humans. They are going to find ways to get inside human havens, and, they are going to learn to work together beyond simply a mob mentality.

Without predator behavior, zombies are essentially a force of nature that is no different from fire, rain, or snow. Humans have been learning how to overcome forces of nature for millennia, and zombies of this type would essentially fade into the background noise. They would become just another aspect of the world that characters are dealing with, and they would not be a particularly scary threat. Those of us who used to play Dungeons & Dragons back in the day can remember the wandering monster encounter table and how little excitement it gave to the adventure beyond a simple interlude in the story. Unthinking undead would basically devolve just to that level.

With predator behavior however, zombies become a more active threat in the environment. They become the villains that are able to carry the weight of the story and provide the dramatic tension needed to make it a compelling horror story. With predator behavior, you remove any aspect of a safe haven for humans and you put the walking dead above humans in the food chain.

If we look at a movie like James Cameron’s Aliens from the perspective of a zombie movie, there’s a lot in there that a smart writer could mine to make his monsters much more frightening. The predatory instincts of the aliens map very well on to a predator zombie. There is the element of stealth where the undead would be able to appear in areas where the humans are not expecting them. Even the famous line from Private Hudson: “What do you mean, THEY cut the power”? How could they cut the power, man? They’re animals!” gives the audience a sense of just how bad the situation really is for our heroes. Imagine that line in a zombie story.

Some people want to be zombies

So, we played around with contagion, and we’ve also played around with behavior. Let’s take a look at the next way to make them a little bit scarier. Modern lore treats zombies as a disease, with humans being either food or undead spawn. What if there’s a third option for humans? What if there were humans who wanted to become zombies?

The idea of humans wanting to become monsters isn’t new. Anne Rice’s romantic vampire stories inspired an awful lot of people to toy with the idea of living as vampires. The human living vampire (HLV) movement has adherents all across North America and in Europe, where real people choose to live their lives is if they were vampires – right down in some cases to drinking blood. In fact, it’s become one of the new tropes and horror fiction that people who are unsatisfied with their human lives seek out the power or the romance offered by becoming a vampire, or werewolf, or some other supernatural creature.

Werewolves and vampires are one thing. Just what kind of twisted do you have to be to willingly want to become a zombie? What would the cost benefit analysis be like in the mind of someone who willingly submitted themselves to the infection, who thought that the life they had was far outweighed by the benefits of being an ambulatory, unthinking, rotting corpse?

Here are a few options.

While most people would immediately make the connection with suicide, a scarier motivation would be if the people that wanted to do that were people that like killing and for whom the prospect of being an unstoppable, unkillable monster who could keep slaughtering victims forever appealed. We’ve already seen variations of this in films where a mass murderer is executed in an electric chair, and instead comes back as a revenant hell bent on revenge. Also, you can think of it from the perspective of someone who hated the world enough that he willingly wanted to turn himself into one of the walking dead just to be able to terrorize and kill the people around him.

We can push this trope a bit further to the point where we have cults or groups of people who all willingly want to become zombies. We also have real world tragedies, such as the People’s Temple in 1978, the Solar Temple in 1994, and Heaven’s Gate in 1997 where cult members committed mass suicide further to their religious beliefs.

Finally, we have the emergence of the new drug called Krokodil. News of this has been making the rounds of the Internet in recent weeks and this is a drug which is far more addictive and cheaper than heroin, but its manufacturing process generates impurities which cause necrotization at injection points, effectively eating the flesh of the still-living addict. Photographs can be located on the Internet showing people with their flesh rotting away, leaving exposed bones. The addictive nature of this drug is such that people understand what’s happening to them and yet they will still injected into their bodies to get the brief hit of ecstasy it provides and to stave off the terrifying withdrawal symptoms.

As humans, we grow up with a healthy aversion to death. For people to willingly decide to embrace undeath and visit that horror upon the innocent people around them, that’s something that can give even the most dedicated horror fan pause for thought. Now, the zombie apocalypse isn’t a public health concern, it speaks to a much deeper sickness within society. Done right that can chill anyone write to their bones.

So, this has been a way of looking at the conventions in the zombie horror genre and twisting them, just a bit, to make them even scarier.  Let me know what you think makes zombies scarier in the comments below.

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Dark designs, dangerous schemes…

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I want to give people a little peek behind the scenes and update them on some of the writing projects I’m currently working on.

Writing Projects – The Black Skull

Earlier this year, I had released my first short novel, The Black Skull: Accused. This was a lot of fun to write, letting me combine 1930s era masked vigilantes with some high octane run and gun type action. The Black Skull has been a character that’s been with me for years, and I’m really happy to be able to share him with readers.

I’ve been busy writing a follow-up novel to accused. This one, called Madman, takes the Black Skull and puts him up against a terrifying serial killer hell-bent on turning New York City into his own personal slaughterhouse. I’ve completed the outline on the book, and currently have the first couple of chapters complete. It’s going to take a bit more time to get it done, but speaking for myself, it’s going to be well worth the wait. Madman isn’t going to be your typical superhero/pulp hero book. Instead, expect elements of horror mixed in with the same action that is in Accused. Expect this book out in the early part of next year. Based on the outline, Madman is going to be several times longer than Accused and is currently budgeted at 90,000 words.

Writing for an Animated Webseries

Side-by-side with Madman, I’m developing a pilot for a web series that blends modern espionage, counter-terrorism, and superheroes in some rather…unusual…ways. I’m about halfway done the initial script, and expect to have it completed by Halloween. Production is going to start in December, with the pilot being released by late spring.

The rise in computer power and GPU-based renderers, such as Otoy’s Octane, make it very possible to do Pixar level animation on your home computer. I want to make this particular episode look as good as some of the highest quality animation that we’ve seen in television or film. Keep watching for still images and animations as we start getting closer to production and you can judge for yourselves.

National Novel Writing Month

Finally, I decided to take my first swing at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). As if I didn’t have enough stuff on my plate already, I’m going to turn myself into a cyber-hermit for the next month as I try to hit the target of 50,000 words in the first draft of a brand-new project. For those unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, it’s a form of self-challenge writing competition where there participants all try to writing 50,000 words in a single month.

I’ve talked in the past about trying to manage the flow of ideas. For some people, myself especially, we are cursed with an abundance of ideas and a sheer lack of time to deal with them. In order to help filter out some of the ideas that flow towards me like water from a fire hose, I’ve taken to simply outlining ideas and then putting them away into an archive to let them gel. The ones that still compel me after a year or so are the ones that have that X factor that can give me the momentum to take them from raw concept to finished story in the hundreds of hours it takes to refine and finalize them. Sometimes though, ideas hit you with the force of a tidal wave and they knock you over. That’s what happened to me with the idea for national novel writing month. I’m currently working on the outline for this and racing the clock to get the outline done by the end of this month. Wish me luck.

If I manage to hit my 50,000 word target for November, I expect it’s still going to take at least another 30,000 words to complete, and several months to refine and make it ready for publication. Expect to have this book released this coming summer.

Keep checking back for more information.

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Superhero Writing Tips – When Blowing up a City isn’t enough

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As superhero fans, we have had a pretty good year for movies. Man of Steel, GI Joe: Retaliation, Pacific Rim, and others have all brought a lot of our classic superheroes to the screen and added a few new ones as well. All of these movies that I’ve mentioned have had big set-piece urban destruction scenes where the heroes and villains tear apart entire cities, causing the collapse of buildings in showers of metal, glass, and concrete.

And they all really miss the point.

They’re all fun movies. Man of Steel and GI Joe: Retaliation have come as close to what my mind’s eye says these movies should be. I haven’t seen Pacific Rim yet, so I’m going to withhold my judgment on that flick, but I expect that the urban destruction of massive mecha fighting Kaiju that we’ve seen in the trailers means that the guidance in this blog post applies equally to that film.

Even though these are all fun movies, the devastation of Smallville and Metropolis in Man of Steel, and the wipe out of London when Cobra Commander drops a “Rod from God” from orbit on that ancient city were moments when I actually started checking my watch to see how much longer the films had to run. And I’ve come to the conclusion that for me – and for many other superhero fans judging by the internet chatter – blowing up a city just isn’t enough anymore.

Superhero Writing: When Blowing up a City isn’t enough…

Destruction of London from GI Joe Retaliation

Destruction of London from GI Joe Retaliation

Back in the old days, superhero writers would have mad scientists coming up with doomsday weapons that would level cities and that would be enough to set our superheroes on twenty pages of fights, chases, and action as they fought to try to save the city and its people from destruction. But this storytelling technique was really overdone even back in the 1980s.

So, superhero writers decided to get a bit more sophisticated. They decided to let the villains win. Coast City and its 7 Million inhabitants were destroyed in the DC Universe, turning Hal Jordan into the villain Parallax in his grief. Gotham City was devastated by earthquake and turned into a “No Man’s Land,” and in 2006, the New Warriors were involved in an incident killing hundreds of people that ultimately gave rise to the Superhuman Registration Act and the Marvel Civil War.

Yeah, whatever.

The thing is, in the world of superheroes we’ve been blowing up cities for decades and we still haven’t managed to do it in a way that is able to keep the audience spellbound. We have seen the death and destruction caused in real life whether it was the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, or whether it was the damage caused by the floods in Alberta and Toronto just this past summer. The real world is able to show us devastation that hits our souls in ways that computer-generated shattering algorithms and fluid dynamics simulations never will.

Looking at it from another perspective, as moviegoers, we have seen planets blowing up, whether it was Alderaan in Star Wars or Krypton in Superman and Man of Steel. Roland Emmerich did the disaster epic 2012, building on his penchant for planetary destruction displayed in Independence Day. And we can go on from there.

The act of destruction isn’t meaningful to us as viewers. We may watch it to see the spectacle, but we separate ourselves from what we see in order to protect out psyche. As children, we haven’t developed that ability as yet, so that’s why parents don’t normally let kids watch scary movies. It keeps them from having nightmares, and allows the parents a full night’s sleep.

For the rest of us, we know the destruction of cities is all fake. The people within are fictional, nameless images on a screen. This problem has only become worse with the advances in computer graphics. In the race to build more and more realistic scenes of cinematic urban destruction, viewers treat each new spectacle as just another example of geeks playing at pushing pixels around on a screen. Considering that I’m a computer animator myself, I know just how much that can hurt those of us in the industry.

So, what do we do?

As creators, and as superhero writers, how do we keep the audience on the edge of their seats tense with excitement? How do we make the stories we tell exciting and leaving the audience wanting more?

Stealing ideas from Romance Authors for Superhero Writing

Romance is one of the more popular genres of fiction. It has a ravenous fan base that consumes massive word counts of stories all spinning romantic fantasies. Though some “serious writers” look down their noses at Romance as being derivative and formulaic, the fact is that Romance outsells every other genre out there. In fact, according to statistics, 1 out of every 6 books sold in 2012 were romance novels.

The genre publishers openly admit that there are formulas with plots that follow a very rigid structure that predict turning points to within 1 to 3 pages. Romance writers typically shorthand “HEA” for “Happily Ever After” as the necessary payoff for each and every book. Each set of characters in the romance sub-genres could be defined as stock characters: billionaire, rancher/cowboy, secret agent/cop, high-school sweetheart, sheik/prince/royal – and that’s just in the modern genres. Historical romance, from Regency to ancient has casts of characters from pirates to gladiators and all of them are instantly recognizable without varying too much from the template. I don’t think that too many Romance writers would be too offended if I said that Romance publishing puts the “mass-production” into “mass-market-fiction.”

So what are the Romance writers doing right that we Superhero fiction writers are doing wrong by blowing up cities? Why is it that as a genre they can move 16.7% of the book market and Superhero books languish in a publishing ghetto?

More to the point, what can we learn from them?

As readers, we like to become involved with the characters that make up our stories. We want to root for the heroes and what they stand for, and we also want our own version of HEA.

Our heroes have relationships – romantic and otherwise – and those relationships matter to us as readers. If we can get our audience to like our characters then by extension they will like the people our characters like and hate the people our characters hate. And, if you’ve done it right, then the audience will also root for those happy relationships to move towards HEA.

On the other hand, if you threaten those relationships as an author, then the audience’s tension level rises. If you credibly threaten the character then the audience is going to be on the edge of their seat.

Here’s an example: In Man of Steel, the highest point of tension in the movie was when General Zod appears with his Kryptonian guard at the Kent family farmstead and threatens to kill Martha Kent. The film had previously established that Martha and Jonathan Kent were loving parents who had raised Clark Kent to adulthood, and that Clark had a very strong familial relationship with his adoptive parents. So when Zod is threatening to kill Martha Kent – a character both the hero AND THE AUDIENCE LIKED – the only thoughts going through the audience’s head at that point in the film were whether Clark would get there in time, and, if he did, would his appearance be enough to stave off the attack by Zod and his guards. Any one of these guards would be more than a match for Clark. Zod more so. All of these bad guys together and at that point the audience cannot see any way that Martha Kent comes out of the encounter alive.

So, we wait on the edge of the seats as Clark rushes to the rescue, hoping that he’ll be in time but doubting that he could be.

I guarantee that no-one who had been watching the movie up to that point was checking their watch to see how much longer the film had to run. Compare that to how the audience felt when Metropolis was being destroyed.

What lessons for writing superhero stories can we take away from Romance writers and the Man of Steel movie?

  1. Give your hero the chance for a relationship the audience would like to see as a “happily ever after” type of relationship. This doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship – a relationship with a family member, colleague, police commissioner/detective, librarian – whatever. As long as this is a relationship the hero wants and would like to have continue.
  2. Threaten the relationship. Either the person in the relationship is threatened directly by the bad guys, or the person could be possible collateral damage when the bad guys threaten to blow up the city.
  3. The threat must be a result of the villain’s actions and not because of the target character’s incompetence. Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Pal, was always getting into trouble because of his own foolishness and is pretty much a joke character nowadays who is saved from DC Comics polling their readership on whether he should live or die only by the fact that they haven’t gotten around to asking yet. Even Lois Lane in the 1950s-60s got threatened nearly every issue and it wasn’t until John Byrne took over Superman in the 1980s that she actually became a competent reporter. Compare that with the Rachel Dawes character from Batman: The Dark Knight. She becomes threatened by the Joker not because she is incompetent – far from it. She becomes threatened because the Joker is very good at what he does.

If you’re going to blow up a city, give the audience a reason to care about it by making it personal. Put a character the audience cares about in the path of destruction. They’ll thank you for it.

 

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Someone Needs to Pulp this Up

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There are some real-life mad scientists working at Micro Magic Systems, a group of special effects artists and roboteers, and they’ve super-sized the hexrobot concept. Even better, they’ve made it ride-able!

For pulp writers and filmmakers, the Mantis Hexapod is an ideal chassis for all kinds of pulp storytelling. Imagine the Rocketeer or Sky Captain swooping down to do battle with an army of these things crawling across the city. For science-fiction fans, add a couple of miniguns and a flamethrower or rocket-pod or two, and you have some cool-looking urban assault vehicles. Yeah, I know they wouldn’t last too long in a fight against a peasant armed with a $200 anti-tank rocket in real life. Still, they would make for a spectacular battle.

And ultimately, that’s a large part of the fun of the classic and even modern pulp fiction – those of us who read and create it enjoy the visual spectacles that we paint. The great joy of taking a Supermarine Spitfire onto the deck in New York City and flying in between skyscrapers. The feeling of awe when you look up and see a giant flying aircraft carrier painted with a huge Jolly Roger on its hull. The desperate fumble for the fifty-round drum of silver bullets for the Tommy Gun to help take down the oncoming horde of Nazi werewolves. Or maybe the sheer joy of strapping on a jet-pack and flying around like Superman, or the Rocketeer, or Commando Cody, or… you get the idea.

The guys at Micro Magic Systems have taken pulp and made it real. That’s just too cool.

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