Andron.CA

Superhero Writing Tips – Superhero Battles that Jumpstart the Plot

by

As we discussed in the last Superhero Writing Tips article, superhero stories feature lots of action and combat between heroes and villains. Let’s dive a little deeper into writing about these kinds of battles by taking a closer look at how they interact with the backbone of a story – the plot.

This is where we get into storytelling theory. Don’t worry, we’re not going to be getting into the hero’s journey or anything like that – let’s keep this as basic and user-friendly as possible.

If we look at a typical story, we can identify certain points that are common across pretty much any genre.

  • There’s always going to be the inciting incident where our hero gets into trouble.
  • There’s going to be the midpoint at which our hero has been dealt enough trouble that their only options are either to succumb or fight back even harder. Sometimes, this is called the “point of no return” by some storytelling theorists.
  • Finally, there’s the climax where our hero stands up against the villain that’s been showering him with trouble, and then through a mighty effort of his own manages to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Although we’re using language that’s appropriate for adventure/thriller/crime stories, the same sort of pattern exists in romance, Christian, young adult, or kid lit. This is the pattern of rising action where the importance of events to the hero keeps increasing right up to the climactic moment where the hero either solves the challenges facing him, or is destroyed by them. With superhero writing, each of these three areas above are typically accompanied by battles.

Round One: Fight! Battle as the Inciting Incident in Superhero Writing

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the inciting incident and how we can use a battle scene to jumpstart the plot.

The inciting incident is the moment when the story itself really gets moving. Our hero is in his normal life, pursuing his existing goals.

Suddenly, our hero finds himself thrown into trouble and is given a new goal. If we’re looking at setting up a battle with the inciting incident, the battle itself has to be serious enough to change our hero’s direction without being serious enough to destroy the hero. This battle has to serve the purpose of intriguing the reader and inspiring that desire to see justice done to the villains that started the fight.

As an example, let’s start off our hypothetical story by our hero entering his apartment in his secret identity when they are attacked by an intruder. The intruder is able to more than hold his own against our hero, even when the hero reveals his superpowers. At this point, we have set up a situation where the hero’s secret identity is blown, where the hero is facing off against a mysterious person who is able to withstand the hero’s attacks, and where the hero and the readers have to discover the reason for the attack. Regardless of the reason however, one thing is clear: our hero is in trouble and his actions from this point are going to be determined by the outcome of this initial battle.

So, should we let the hero win this initial battle, or should we let the hero lose? A lot is going to depend upon the nature of the world that you’re in. In the classic superhero world of DC and Marvel comics, the villain delivering a beat down on the superhero is usually enough to declare victory. If, on the other hand, you are in a grittier, realistic world, defeat usually equals death. Since we don’t want our hero being killed off in the inciting incident – because otherwise there wouldn’t be a story – the hero either has to win or draw in this first battle.

Going back to our example, if we’re in a gritty and realistic world, then the mysterious villain that attacked the hero may actually have a different objective than defeating our hero. He may simply be looking to steal something from the hero’s apartment and once the villain has recovered that, he will escape.

Regardless of the outcome of the battle, the hero now has a new goal that flows directly from the inciting battle.

Superhero Writing Tips for an inciting battle:

Have the battle happen to someone other than the hero.

  • In action novels, there is a tradition of having a character introduced in the first chapter or the prologue that the readers get to know as a sympathetic character and who is attacked and killed by the villain. This may be something as simple as a stealthy ambush, or a heroic defense against overwhelming odds. The sympathetic character invests the reader in the desire to see justice done because this character they just got to know was killed in a brutal and nasty manner.
  • The inciting battle is a great opportunity to showcase secondary characters such as sidekicks and romantic interests. Lois Lane may get involved in a bank heist gone bad, and she grabs a pistol from a fallen cop to send fire back at the bad guys, or she ushers civilians to safety. Or maybe Robin gets targeted by Deadshot and is barely able to hold his own against the marksman. You could certainly use the trope that the secondary character needs to be rescued by the hero as the overall plot of the story, or you could instead use this inciting battle as an event that has the hero struggling on the knife-edge between justice and vengeance.

As in the example above, where the hero is attacked in their apartment, have the hero attacked in such a way that the battle scares them:

  • Their secret identity is blown.
  • The villain throws them around like a rag doll.
  • The only way that the hero is able to survive is by surrendering.
  • The villain manages to uncover the hero’s hidden weakness, whether it’s something as esoteric as kryptonite, or precious as a loved one. If you’re writing children’s fiction, for example, it may be that the bully uncovers a secret that our hero believes would be disastrous if revealed to the wider world.

If the hero emerges victorious in the inciting battle, he discovers that winning it only brings even more trouble.

  • In the course of the battle, he may have injured the son of a famous super villain who then turns his wrath upon the hapless superhero. This was used to set Deathstroke as one of the major villains against the Teen Titans.
  • The villain that attacked the superhero ends up committing suicide rather than being taken alive. See Captain America: The First Avenger.

Remember, the inciting incident, whether it’s a battle or not has to start our hero on a different path which will take him through the rest of our story.

About the Featured Image for this post: This image is Rime 2 by Aaron Bauer and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License. The image is cropped from the original.

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 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.

More to come:

We’re only scratching the surface of using battles in storytelling. We’ll take a closer look at battles at the point of no return and much more in upcoming Superhero Writing Tips articles.

 

 

Related posts:

Superhero Writing Tips – Writing Superhero Battles Superhero Fiction Plot DeviceSuperhero Writing Tips – When Blowing up a City isn’t enough Batmobile PatentSeven Tips for Writing Superhero Stories Magical SuperheroOf Gods and Men: Writing better superhero origin stories Super Villain Mystique Cosplay. Photo by Madmarv00.7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 4

What makes a story pulp fiction?

by

You would think there would be an easy answer for this, but the reality is that trying to define pulp fiction is currently trying to define art. In a lot of respects, what constitutes pulp fiction is very much in the eye of the beholder.

If you were to ask anyone what pulp fiction was, you would very likely have them say that it was that Tarantino movie that starred John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson. This amazingly successful movie essentially took the concept of pulp and made it its own. The medium however has a much older history.

I don’t want to go too deep into the history – that’s another show – but I do want to get an idea across that this was designed as entertainment for the masses. If you go all the way back to Victorian England and you see the start of the “penny dreadfuls,” you will see that publishers found a market for stories among the common people of England. There were similar startups in France and the United States and elsewhere, but the common element was that publishers made money by selling entertainment.

Naturally, the literati hated this. The authors who believed that literature was intended to elevate and to challenge wanted nothing to do with this cheap, quickly written marketplace. Of course, that didn’t stop authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sax Rohmer from creating stories that entertained. Even Charles Dickens, before the literati claimed him as one of their own, wrote stories that would sell to the widest audience possible.

In the United States and Canada, we progressed through dime novels at the turn of the century up to pulp fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. These were magazines printed on cheap wood pulp paper and sold for a few cents at newsstands. North America, in the grip of the Great Depression, was desperate for entertainment. Entertainment exploded in this particular timeframe with pulp magazines competing with upscale, glossy magazines (nicknamed “slicks”). At the same time, we saw Hollywood ramping up its production as it circumvented the Edison Trust, and the new technology of radio actually brought live audio entertainment into people’s homes.

All of these entertainment companies prospered at a time when the United States and Canada were experiencing some of the worst economic conditions since their founding. They did this by providing their stories or movies or radio plays to as wide an audience as they could reach. In much the same way as William Shakespeare promoted his theater to Londoners as a whole, these entertainment companies wanted to get as many paying customers as possible to realize maximum profits. They saw their stories as ways to earn those profits by making them accessible to everyone for mere pennies, rather than producing solely for the literati and charging thousands of dollars so that only the wealthy could enjoy the entertainment. Pulp fiction was a wonderful democratizing expression of free-market capitalism at its finest.

For the pulp magazines, they lived or died based on their readership. Naturally, they chose to try different markets ranging from romance to Western to horror and even into “spicy” stories. Pulp heroes such as Doc Savage and the Shadow got their start in this particular era, as did noted writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E Howard. If you could write a fictional story about it, odds are that there was a pulp magazine based on that.

So, the stories themselves had to be written quickly to allow them to get magazines out the door quicker. Naturally, this also meant that the stories had straightforward plots, little characterization, and for the major pulp heroes, little to no character development over the series of stories.

Because of the volume of stories needed and the rapid pace of development, multiple authors had to be used. Most of the stories were written under house names chosen by the magazine editors themselves, and ghostwritten by any number of scriveners under contract to the magazine, or freelancing. Maxwell Grant was the name of the author credited as writing the Shadow, but the books were actually written by Walter Gibson and in some cases Theodore Tinsley, Lester Dent, and Bruce Elliot.

Finally, the stories also had to be entertaining. There were a lot of magazines out there, and being able to convince the readership to plunk down their hard-earned money for your magazine as opposed to your competitor’s magazine meant you had to deliver the goods.

A lot of the enthusiasts for classic pulp fiction like to point out that pulp fiction is a medium, and not a genre. Genres would include things like hero pulps, weird menace stories, horror pulps a.k.a. “shudders”, Westerns, sea adventure stories, air adventure stories, sports and boxing stories, crime and detective stories, exotic adventure stories, and even in the more adult-oriented “spicy” versions of most of the other genres.

While it’s true that there are multiple flavors of pulp fiction, I would say that pulp fiction actually does fill a particular genre itself. To my mind, the pulps are:

  •  rapid paced,
  • exciting, and
  • compelling stories that demand the readers keep the pages turning to find out what happens next.

To these, I’d also add a fourth requirement as well. In the case of pulp fiction, the stories should be able to be finished within one or two sittings. This makes them shorter than most contemporary novels, which can require several sittings in order to read through the book. I’m a fast reader, and yet it would still take me a few days to churn my way through a 300 page novel.

Can you have a novel that has the hallmarks of pulp fiction, and yet exceeds 300,000 words? I think you can certainly have elements of that, but the longer the story goes, the more likely that the writer is going to have issues with pacing and maintaining excitement and keeping the readers interested. The more times the reader has to put down the book, the more opportunities there are for the reader to walk away from the novel.

Good pulp fiction can have a reader finish a 100,000 word story within a couple of sittings. Great pulp fiction can have the reader giving up sleep to finish that story in one sitting. And, if you can accomplish that as a writer, then you will have an audience for life.

About the Featured Image for this post: Parts of the image were made from cover scans by Will Hart of classic Pulp Fiction Magazines and are used under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Related posts:

There is a Call to Adventure in Pulp FictionMy Path to Pulp Fiction – the Call to Adventure

Dark designs, dangerous schemes…

by

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.

Related posts:

Breaking Radio Silence… Pulp-Noir Art Once Upon a Time, Heroes Had to Wear Masks…

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

by

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.

 

Related posts:

Superhero Writing TipsSuperhero Writing Tips – Superhero Battles that Jumpstart the Plot Batmobile PatentSeven Tips for Writing Superhero Stories Superhero Writing Tips – Writing Superhero Battles Magical SuperheroOf Gods and Men: Writing better superhero origin stories Super Villain Mystique Cosplay. Photo by Madmarv00.7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 4

7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 7

by

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.

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.

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!

Related posts:

Super Villain Poison Ivy Cosplay. Photo by greyloch.7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 6 Super Villain Harley Quinn Cosplay. Photo by Pop Culture Geek.7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 2 Super Villain Mystique Cosplay. Photo by Madmarv00.7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 4 Super-Villain Baroness Cosplay. Photo by Pop Culture Geek.7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 1 7 Tips for Writing Epic Super Villains – Tip 5

Pages