Four Great Podcasts

June 26, 2013 by RJ Andron

One of the big changes that the Internet has created is this now anyone can have their own talk radio show. I’ve been following some podcasts lately, and I thought I’d share exactly which ones I’m excited about.

I’ve been following pulp author Barry Reese’s podcast The Shadow Fan’s Podcast ever since the first episode, and it’s only been getting better and better. This podcast covers everything you would want to know about the classic pulp character The Shadow in all of the different incarnations, including book, radio, film, and comics. Barry is a guy who is truly a fan, and it shows through in his podcasting. If you are at all interested in The Shadow and his impact on classic pulp and new pulp, then this is a podcast you should be listening to. A new episode is released each week. Check out the podcast on iTunes here:

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-shadow-fans-podcast/id573520467

Following on with the pulp theme, there’s also Pulped! The New Pulp Podcast. This podcast is put together by Tommy Hancock and his friends, and they talk with people who are making a splash in the new pulp arena. Although the podcast comes out irregularly, there’s a lot of great content, and a lot of past episodes to go through. Check out the podcast on iTunes here:

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/pulped!-the-new-pulp-podcast/id445323546

A fairly new podcast that I’ve just started following is The Regular Joes Podcast. This podcast deals with movies, toys, science fiction, TV shows, comics, and collecting. The three hosts, Dave Pisani, Barry Kay and Tod Pleasant, have been active in the G.I. Joe fan community for years. In fact, I remember first encountering Dave Pisani and Tod Pleasant when they were doing their Aesop photostory in the Lee’s Toy Review Magazine. The work that they put into creating the sets and photographing the characters was absolutely inspirational, and these three gentlemen bring that same work ethic and passion for the subject matter to the podcast. New episodes are released every week and run approximately an hour each. This podcast is one that I would very highly recommend. Check out the podcast on iTunes here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/regular-joes-podcast/id650342874

This next podcast is a little bit different from the previous three podcasts. Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio is an insider’s look at producing reality TV shows. Now, I find it interesting to have this behind the scenes look at the television production process, even though I very rarely watch reality television shows with the exception of the Food Network and History Television. The hosts have great sense of fun around production fun, and they do it in 15 min. bites that make it easy for someone like me to digest. Check out the podcast on iTunes here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/producing-unscripted-make/id659982254

I’m going to be adding more and more podcasts as I discovered new podcast series. Podcasts are a great way to learn new things while working on other projects, such as hobbies, coding, and so forth. If there any podcasts that you enjoy and think should be added to this list, then by all means list them in the comments below.

7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 7

June 14, 2013 by RJ Andron

Over the past few articles, we have covered a lot of different tips for creating your epic super villain, regardless of their plot, powers, or personality. All of these tips are designed to help you create a super villain that is going to be a real challenge for your superhero, or any other superhero you would care to throw at the super villain. We’ve been talking about building epic super villains.

These tips, from the past few articles include:

Tip 7. Never get caught.

And now, we’ve come to the final and perhaps ultimate tip for making an epic super villain: never let your super villain get caught.

The best villains are the ones who never let themselves be put in prison. Instead, they will always hover over the hero’s lives, and the hero’s world, like a menacing cloud. There is always going to be the anticipation for the next battle between villain and hero, because as long as the villain is never caught, the war between villain and hero is never ended. Instead the hero, and your readers, will always be tensely awaiting the next time that the villain chooses to strike.

And, if you have created your super villain properly, they can even continue to menace the hero long after the super villain’s death, giving proof to Shakespeare’s line that “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Consider it this way:

A villain who has been captured is brought down to the level of the rest of the prison population. There is nothing to distinguish the villain from conmen, car thieves, and murderers. Instead, he becomes just another number in the penal system. Now, granted, certain superpowered villains will need special handling, but the end result is the same.
A villain in prison orange is a subject for pity. In comic books especially, the costumes that villains wear project a sense of power and menace. In prison coveralls, there’s none of that. The villain is simply another inmate. All of the work that you have done to make the villain epic is going to be stripped away the second the prison bars clanged shut on their cell. They are no longer epic, they’re pathetic.

While getting caught is okay for ordinary, run-of-the-mill super villains, no epic super villain would ever let that happen.

Now, at this point, someone’s going to mention the Joker who has been put in Arkham Asylum so many times by the Batman that I’m sure it’s crossed the authorities minds to simply install a revolving door on the Asylum wall so that the Joker doesn’t cause too much damage the next time that he escapes. The Joker continually gets captured by Batman. And yet, he still approaches the level of epic.

The thing is, death is the only way to stop the Joker, and since the DC Comics powers-that-be have decided that killing the Joker is the one thing that Batman will never do, putting the Joker behind bars has no meaning. Batman has never won against the Joker, at least not in modern continuity. Instead, the Joker continues on his killing sprees, pausing just long enough within the Asylum’s walls to catch his breath before escaping and killing again. Because the writers and editors at DC comics have decided to write the Joker in this way, it’s effectively the same as if they said that the Joker never gets caught.

As far as other super villains go, how do you make them epic without resorting to the revolving Asylum door that the Joker has? Here are a few suggestions:

Always have escape routes for the villains. Back in the days of the old pulp magazines and movie serials, the villains always had a means of escaping whenever the heroes came close to capturing them. Sometimes, it was a hidden passageway. Other times, a trap door. Still other times, they would escape in disguise. While an epic super villain appears to be unstoppable to the reader, he will still always have a contingency plan for when things go south.

Always find ways for them to cheat death. While this is a close parallel to the previous suggestion about having escape routes, it actually goes a lot further than that. The epic super villains can actually be killed, time and again, and yet they continue to return to threaten the hero and all the hero holds dear. In the simplest cases, it may be that the villain’s body is never found after the villain was shot/stabbed/blown up. In other, more elaborate cases, the villain can actually take over the body of another person. Or, perhaps they have a body double that gets killed in their place. Finally, at the most extreme cases, the villain is effectively immortal. Like the character of Brainiac from Superman, so long as one line of his code remains, he will rebuild himself and return.

Let the villain wins sometimes. We’ve talked about making the epic super villain seeming to be unstoppable, and there is no better way to drive this point home to the reader, then actually letting the villain achieve his goals. This can actually ramp up the dramatic tension of the story, because it shifts the hero’s focus from trying to stop the villain, to trying to undo the villain’s victory.

For some villains, death is preferable to imprisonment. From the classic movie gangsters of the 1930s who swore: “you’ll never take me alive, copper!” to the super villains who have come up with doomsday weapons that start the countdown the moment the villain’s heart stops beating, there is a long tradition of villains who would rather die than go to prison. Choosing never to be taken alive speaks to a level of fanaticism and desperation, and it can make the villain even more frightening. For the most hard-core of villains, they can express their hatred and spite of the superheroes by trying to reach a final act of vengeance upon them.

Let’s face it, for villains to subject themselves to trial and jury of commoners and be imprisoned for their acts? It’s not the mark of a real epic super villain.

The Mighty Christopher Lee as The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu.

Our final example for this series of articles is a classic, and somewhat controversial, pulp villain. The insidious Dr. Fu Manchu was the creation of writer Sax Rohmer who first appeared in the novel the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu in 1913, and would continue to menace Western civilization for another 13 novels, as well as several films, comics, and other works. Dr. Fu Manchu was the head of a large organization of spies, thieves, and assassins, all dedicated to the overthrow of the Western nations. He was as notorious for his exotic methods of dispatching his enemies, as he was for continuing to cheat death time and again. He is the perfect example of a villain who was never caught, and who was always assumed by the heroes of the stories to be hatching yet another evil plan that would strike the Western world. The doctor was controversial from the 1930s to the present day for stereotyping Asians,and is the fictional character perhaps most identified with the idea of the “yellow peril.” Fu Manchu’s creator had the following to say about his villain:

Of course, not the whole Chinese population of Limehouse was criminal. But it contained a large number of persons would left to their own country for the most urgent of reasons. These people knew no way of making a living other than the criminal activities that had made China too hot for them. They brought their crimes with them.

Regardless of the controversy, the fictional character and his actions in the stories portrayed such a frightening ability to cheat death again and again that he is the perfect, almost clichéd, example of the villain who always had plans to never get caught.

Super Villain Catwoman Cosplay. Photo by RyC – Behind the Lens.

All trademarks and characters are the property of their respective owners. No challenge to any trademark status or ownership is made or contemplated. Any images used in this post are either Public Domain, or are used under Creative Commons licenses, or under the Terms of Fair Use under International Copyright Law which allows such use for comment and review purposes.

That’s it for the series on writing the Epic Super Villain. What did you think? Let me know in the comments!

7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 6

June 13, 2013 by RJ Andron

This post is the sixth in a series of 7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains. Check out the earlier posts below:

Tip 6. Never Make the Villain a Nemesis

As we’ve gone through this series on tips for creating epic super villains, we’ve run across a number of areas where the conventional wisdom is just wrong. This is one of those areas. Traditionally, we think of the nemesis as being the highest goal that a writer can have for a super villain. However, as we’ll see, making a character a nemesis can really limit the scope and potential of the super villain.

When we think of many of the classic super villains, the vast majority of them are nemesis of one of the classic superheroes. Consider: Batman and the Joker, Superman and Lex Luthor, Spiderman and Venom – all of these hero/villain pairs have had many battles together over the years and would be fair to say that each of those villains has dedicated his criminal career to defeating his superhero counterpart. In some cases, the villain is literally a mirror image or counterpoint to the hero.

When we look at Spiderman and Venom, we have a perfect example of hero and nemesis. Venom is an alien symbiont that Spiderman wore as a costume for a short time before realizing that Venom was actually turning Spiderman evil. Venom then found a new host and together, both of them are dedicated to destroying Spiderman. Where Spiderman wears a costume of blue and red, Venom is pitch black with a white spider symbol painted on it. Readers really enjoyed the clashes between Spiderman and Venom as these two nemeses went at it. But ask yourself this, would we be as satisfied reading a story about a clash between Venom and Iron Man?

When you make your villain a nemesis of the hero, you end up doing two things. First of all, you establish a very strong relationship between hero and villain that can make the conflict between the two very satisfying to readers. Second, and more importantly, you end up identifying the villain with the hero to the point where clashes with other heroes, or battles outside of the nemesis relationship, just don’t have the same dramatic weight that an epic villain would bring to the story.

In effect, when you make your villain a nemesis of the hero, you end up limiting the villain’s scope so that only the hero can ever effectively challenge the villain from a storytelling point of view.

Imagine what would happen if the Flash met the Joker. Now, there’s no question that the Joker is a very scary character. His homicidal mania combined with a brilliant, albeit deranged mind and his refusal to ever stop killing make him one of Batman’s toughest opponents. If there is any villain in Batman’s rogues’ gallery who deserves the title of nemesis, it’s definitely the Joker. But Flash would have the Joker stripped naked and tossed in jail in what? Two, maybe three seconds? There’s not a lot of dramatic tension in that particular story.

If anything, as you are designing your super villain, you are going to want to look at the whole range of heroes that this villain is likely to encounter in your world. And, you have to make that villain challenging enough, and scary enough, to make it look like he would win against any and all of them – hands down. If you are able to write your villain so that your mightiest superhero, combined with any other heroes in your world, would still lose in a stand up fight against him, then you are going to have readers salivating at the prospect of the conflict.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with establishing a relationship between hero and villain. But you want to avoid crossing over the line where the two of them become each other’s nemesis. At that point, your villain no longer becomes epic, and is condemned to facing off against the same hero over and over.

Let me emphasize that a nemesis is not a bad thing. There have been a lot of very successful stories written where the superhero faces his nemesis, and there is a lot of drama that can be mined out of that particular conflict. But at the same time, we are not looking at building a nemesis. We are looking at building an epic super villain. As we’ve seen above, there is a difference.

Kobra

As an example of an epic villain, we go back to the DC Comics villain Kobra. This villain is the leader of a snake themed cult of assassins and terrorists with access to high technology. Kobra was one of a pair of identical twin brothers, and was raised by the cult to assume its leadership. When he found out about his twin brother, he set out to destroy him, seeing him as a weakness. Using a Lazarus pit that he built, he resurrected his own parents to use them to kill his twin brother. He was ultimately able to kill his brother by slaying his brother’s fiancée, resurrecting her, and then mind controlling her to stab a dagger into his brothers back. Along the way, he fought against Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Superman, and the Suicide Squad. He was even able to defeat Batman in hand-to-hand combat. At no time did he ever become a nemesis of any of these characters, but he posed a significant threat to any and all of them combined. Although he hasn’t been used much in DC continuity, he is still one of the most frightening villains that the DC universe has created.

Super Villain Poison Ivy Cosplay. Photo by greyloch.

Tune in again tomorrow for another tip. Same bat-time, same bat-channel. In the meantime, let me know what you think of the tips and the series in the comment area below!

7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 5

June 12, 2013 by RJ Andron

This post is the fifth in a series of 7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains. Check out the earlier posts below:

Tip 1. Forget the idea that “the villain is the hero of their own story”

Tip 2. Make the Villain Mysterious

Tip 3. The Villain has to Choose to be Evil

Tip 4. Make the Villain Credible

Tip 5. Make the Villain Scary

The most epic villains are always the ones that sent a shiver down your spine. As we’ve discussed, villains have to be credible, but they also have to be able to evoke fear in the reader.

Fear is a great emotion for a reader to experience. It gives readers a vicarious thrill and the excitement of experiencing what it’s like to be in the superhero situation without leaving the comfort of their own chair. We want to make readers afraid of the super villain, and to do that, we’re going to be taking a few pages from horror stories.

You make the reader afraid by telling him what happens if the villain wins. This is establishing the stakes, and telling as vividly as possible what’s going to happen to the hero, to the people the hero cares about, and even to the world itself if the hero can’t win. And, if you’ve made the villain credible, then you’re already starting out from the point where it looks like the villain can’t lose. If the villain wins, the hero dies. If the villain wins, the city is turned into a radioactive, smoking ruin. If the villain wins, the nation starts slaughtering its own people for being different, mutants, meta-humans, nerds, and so forth.

You make the reader afraid by showing him the true evil of the villain. One of the guidelines that we’ve talked about is that the character has to be evil by their own choice. Here’s where you have the chance to show the reader just how evil that character can really be. All of our normal rules and laws don’t apply to him. He is above the law, or so powerful that our police and military can’t touch him, and end up being slaughtered if they even try. If you want to make the reader really scared, make it so that even the laws of physics don’t apply to the super villain. He can walk through walls, kill people with his mind, turn a crowd into psychically possessed zombies, or make people explode just by looking at them.

You make the reader afraid by threatening the characters that the reader roots for. As a writer, you always want to have you reader emotionally investing in the superhero and the people in the superhero’s life. One of the classic reasons for the secret identity of superheroes is to protect their loved ones. If villains were to find out the superhero’s identity, then they could simply blackmail the superhero by threatening their defenseless family or friends. If you can make the reader care about the superhero and those around him, then you can scare the reader by having the super villain threaten those people. If you want to make Spiderman do something, you threaten Aunt May. If you want to make Superman back off, you threaten Lois Lane in a way that his superpowers can’t prevent.

One last trick from horror stories that can make the reader afraid is you take away every refuge from the hero, so that there is no safe place for the hero to hide, catch their breath, or plan a counterattack. This relentless stripping away of all of the hero’s defenses and sanctuaries raises the concern the reader feels for our hero’s fate. If the hero is not given a chance to rest, neither is the reader, and you can keep on ratcheting the tension higher and higher with every move the super villain makes and that the superhero has to respond to. If you want to make readers concerned about a classic character such as The Shadow, you have to start by eliminating or subverting the Shadow’s agents and compromising or destroying the Shadow’s sanctums and hiding places. This was used to great effect by the Shadow’s arch nemesis Shiwan Khan in the DC Comics series “The Shadow Strikes.”

Make the reader scared of the super villain, and you’ve taken a giant step towards making the super villain and epic super villain.

Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator

A perfect example of a truly scary super villain is the Terminator. This 1984 movie, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, has a cyborg come back from the future to kill a single woman. The terminator will not let anything, or anyone, get in the way of his mission. No matter what our heroes do, the terminator just keeps coming after them and kills anyone and everyone who gets in his way. He gets shot, burned, blown up, and yet he still keeps coming after Sarah Connor. And the really scary part is? That there are more like him in the future and they’re going to keep coming back until the mission is complete.

Super Villain Dark Phoenix Cosplay. Photo by Rob Boudon.

Tune in again tomorrow for another tip. Same bat-time, same bat-channel. In the meantime, let me know what you think of the tips and the series in the comment area below!

7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 4

June 11, 2013 by RJ Andron

This post is the fourth in a series of 7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains. Check out the earlier posts below:

Tip 1. Forget the idea that “the villain is the hero of their own story”

Tip 2. Make the Villain Mysterious

Tip 3. The Villain has to Choose to be Evil

Tip 4. Make the Villain Credible

So, what do I mean by making the villain credible? In order for readers to be able to take your story seriously, they have to be able to take your villain seriously, and so do your heroes. Your readers and your heroes have to believe the villain is a major threat to your setting and the people in it.

We have all seen a lot of cases of what I would call a joke villains. These are the super villains in name only. They are the ones that superheroes fight without much risk, and they are typically the ones that get caught through their own incompetence. Examples would include COBRA commander from the cartoons, Dr. Light, Batroc the Leaper, the random thugs that are beat up by Batman at the start of just about every Batman story, and dozens of others who barely rate the term C-list. If your villains end up spending more time in jail due to their own stupidity instead of committing crimes, then I would say that they’re not credible villains.

For a super villain to be seen as credible, his goal and means of accomplishing that goal have to be plausible within the rules that you’ve set up in your superheroes’ world. Not only that, but I would say that the super villain is assured victory even if the superheroes get involved.

Wait, what?

Look at it this way: if you write a story where the superhero has a very good chance of defeating the super villain, then you don’t have much dramatic tension. The readers know that the hero is going to win. They only stick around to find out how he wins. And, if the victory doesn’t take a lot of effort, then the readers aren’t going to be terribly satisfied.

But, if the villain has set things in motion such that the readers can see no way that the superhero wins, then you’ve got readers who are compelled to find out what happens. In the readers’ mind, you’re threatening to break one of the classic rules of morality plays: that good has to triumph over evil. That burning curiosity on the part of the readers to find out if you’re going to break that rule, or if you’ve come up with a solution where the hero wins in a way that the readers could never imagine, is going to keep them turning pages.

Make it so that the villain is guaranteed to win at the start of the story.

Make it so that the villain is able to see to the destruction of the hero, by whatever definition of destruction you want to use – physical, spiritual, legal, moral, or any other form of destruction. Your villains don’t have to kill the hero. They just have to destroy them.

Trigon the Terrible

Here’s an example of a credible villain: Trigon the Terrible from the New Teen Titans is the demonic father of Raven. He is evil incarnate, and he has spent years searching for his daughter to convince her to join him. Now, writer/creator Marv Wolfman was able to build up the tension over several issues in the series. By the point that Trigon enters our dimension, he literally brings Hell to Earth, complete with pits of sulfur, firebreathing demons, and the city transformed into a terrifying replica of Dante’s Inferno. Not only that, but our heroes have been possessed by Trigon’s demons and have killed Raven. For all intents and purposes, evil has won. There is no way that a reader could conceive how are superheroes could actually emerge victorious. You can bet that the time from Trigon’s victory, to the release of the next issue the following month, was the longest 30 days ever for Titans fans.

Super Villain Mystique Cosplay. Photo by Madmarv00.

Tune in again tomorrow for another tip. Same bat-time, same bat-channel. In the meantime, let me know what you think of the tips and the series in the comment area below!

Four Great Podcasts

7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 7

Tip 7. Never get caught.

7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 6

Tip 6. Never Make the Villain a Nemesis

7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 5

Tip 5. Make the Villain Scary

7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 4

Tip 4. Make the Villain Credible

Pages

Subscribe to RSS

Share this:

Related posts:

Tip 7. Never get caught.

Share this:

Related posts:

Tip 6. Never Make the Villain a Nemesis

Share this:

Related posts:

Tip 5. Make the Villain Scary

Share this:

Related posts:

Tip 4. Make the Villain Credible

Share this:

Related posts:

Pages

Subscribe to RSS