Why do they choose to do it in the first place? Why do they keep at it, week after week and year after year? (Always bearing in mind that some would-be heroes don't keep at it -- they die, or retire to get married, or lose their powers, or just fade away into comic book limbo for some reason without any clear follow-up being provided to the readers for the next several years!)

I'm not just talking about why our beloved superheroes often pull on masks and invent new names for themselves. The desire to have a "secret identity" and thus maintain some sort of "private life" is understandable, but I see the problem of choosing whether to have one as a secondary decision. The primary decision is whether to jump into the superhero lifestyle in the first place! If you decide you aren't going to do that, then the problems associated with a "secret identity" (or the lack of one) will remain purely academic points, right?

I asked myself those questions, and I pondered many superhero origin stories, and I came up with the following list of basic Motives. Of course, some superheroes change a great deal as the years roll past (and as one writer replaces another and imposes his own tastes upon the hapless hero he's writing about), so that a hero's Motive today may not be the Motive he had when he started. And -- human beings (and sentients of other species) being the complicated creatures that they are -- sometimes there may be several motives all tangled up inside a hero's head, whether or not he is consciously aware of each and every one!

14 Motives for Becoming a Superhero

01. Seeking Revenge/Justice
02. Family Tradition
03. Greed
04. Atonement
05. Self-Defense
06. Spokesperson
07. Patriotic Duty
08. Action Junkie
09. Rebellion
10. One Mission
11. The Power Goes With the Job
12. Glory
13. Public Service
14. Phony Heroism
( Read more... )

Sometimes a superhero gets dragged through the mud. He does something that, according to the traditional rules his fans hoped he lived by -- moral, legal, or both -- is awful, perhaps even "unpardonable." And yet some of those heroes later get "rehabilitated," restored to a heroic condition where fans are expected to cheer them on once again! Sometimes an "excuse" was planned all along, and in that same issue -- or at the end of a longer story arc -- the excuse was trotted out and waved in our faces so that we could relax, secure in the knowledge that everything important had once again reverted back to the Sacred Status Quo. But right now I'm mostly interested in cases where a writer really and truly intended to portray a hero "going bad," but much later, someone else (or occasionally the same writer?) said, "Hmm. It's Damage Control Time! How can I clean this mess up and put everything back the way it was before, good as new, so that he can convincingly function as a superhero again?" (Although I do cover a few other cases, such as when the "sins" of the hero are retconned in, long after the fact.)

14 Ways to Rehabilitate a Disgraced Hero

01. Impersonation
02. Mind Control
03. Working Within the Criminal Justice System
04. Death and Rebirth
05. Retcon-Erasure
06. Total Amnesia Retcon
07. Deep Undercover
08. No Evidence
09. Outside of Anybody's Jurisdiction
10. Mindwiped After the Fact
11. Second Thoughts
12. Extortion/Blackmail
13. Belated Awareness of the Problem
14. The Retconned Sinful Past
( Read more... )

Sometimes someone at a publishing company decides that a veteran hero "needs" to be replaced by a successor. By "successor," I mean someone who will use the same superhero alias, and sometimes the same costume, but will be (or claim to be) a different person. The reasoning behind this move can vary in different circumstances. Sometimes the plan is to give the old guy the boot to make room for the new guy in a hurry; other times the old guy has already been dead for years anyway! (Or just hasn't been heard from in any significant way for a long, long time, even if theoretically he's still alive somewhere.)

From the perspective of the other characters living in the same universe as the "old guy" and the "new guy," there are many possible reasons why the "old guy's" superhero role might be vacant, awaiting a successor. He could have died. He could have been injured badly enough (physically and/or psychologically) that he’s no longer fit for active duty; not now and maybe not ever. He could have voluntarily retired, either because of advancing age or simply because he discovered there were other things he wanted to do with his life -- such as getting married and raising kids -- without being distracted by every supervillain to hit town. He could have been fired from his superhero identity -- if his costumed role was actually in the nature of a “job” which he performed for an employer. He could have somehow lost whatever special powers or equipment made his heroic career possible (although otherwise he might still be in excellent health by any “normal” standards). He could have simply gotten tired of his old costumed identity and created a new costume and alias that he intended to use from now on (and he might be very frank about this and make it clear to the world that he was still the same hero --with a new paint job). He could have faked his own death in order to have some privacy from now on. Or maybe he just disappeared a long time ago and, as a new story begins, nobody seems to know which of the above possibilities is closest to the truth!

Be that as it may, if we grant there is a vacancy to be filled, what sort of successor might we end up with? Here are the possible types that occurred to me!

10 Types of Superhero Successors

01. The Carefully Groomed Protégé
02. The Family Member
03. The Copycat
04. The All-New, All-Different Version
05. The Rookie Created Out of Thin Air
06. The New Employee
07. The Mandated Replacement
08. The After-The-Fact Retconned Replacement
09. The Impostor
10. The False Replacement
( Read more... )

At one time or another I have written all sorts of commentary on various aspects of the superhero lifestyle, but I don’t think I’ve ever said much of anything about the nifty costumes! So let's take a look at the subject. It occurs to me that there are many different possible parameters a superhero might want a costume to meet. Different heroes will have different priorities in choosing their wardrobes, and sometimes the poor costume is expected to perform several functions all at once!

The 14 Functions

01. Masking
02. Built-In Firepower
03. Restraining Power
04. Camouflage
05. Colorful Propaganda
06. Intimidation
07. Titillation
08. Team Uniform
09. My Appearance is Freeform
10. Natural Appearance
11. Continuing a Proud Tradition
12. Homage to an Inspiration
13. Body Armor
14. Artificial Body Parts
( Read more... )

Months ago, I saw someone on DC's own boards asking why villains so often capture a hero and then dump him into a complicated "deathtrap" instead of just chopping his head off right away so they'll never have to worry about him again. It was a good question! I responded with a few possible reasons at the time, and made a note to come up with a better list later. Which I did. Then I saved it on a floppy disk and lost track of the disk for awhile. Today I managed to unearth it and decided to spruce it up a little and post it for you!

Note: Not all of the traps that villains set for heroes are actually intended to be deadly, but in the name of simplicity I am sticking to the term "deathtrap" for any such situation.

13 Reasons to Use a Deathtrap

01. Crazy
02. Insecurity
03. The Pursuit of Science
04. Sadism
05. Sportsmanship
06. Cover-Up
07. Meant to Escape
08. Interrogate First, Kill Later
09. Patriotism and Other Scruples
10. Lack of the Killer Instinct
11. Proving a Philosophical Point
12. Greed
13. Conversion
( Read more... )

In Green Lantern #70, well after Kyle Rayner had taken over the Green Lantern title, had joined the Titans, and had been dating Donna Troy for a while, there was a scene where Donna complained about his bad habits and irresponsible actions. Some of her points may have been fair – but at least one of them I thought she was dead wrong about. As proof of his character weaknesses, she cited the fact that he had recently missed some Titans training sessions.

As I recall, Kyle’s excuse was that he was a freelance commercial artist with deadlines to meet and rent to pay, and sometimes getting a job done, on the timetable he had promised to meet, to earn a paycheck, took priority over getting together with some other costumed heroes to practice beating people up (without pay).

When I read that story a few years ago, I thought that was an excellent excuse. A man’s got to eat! And he should also honor his promises as a general principle. He had evidently promised an editor to have a certain project ready by a certain time. Had he ever promised the Titans, when he joined, that he would break off any other commitments on any day of the week, just so they could go hold some mock slugfests and suchlike to stay in shape? It seems highly unlikely that they had told him this was one of the ground rules when they recruited him.

(Donna, near as I can recall, did not pursue that particular point any further in their argument. Possibly she realized it was the weakest criticism on her list, and should be carefully avoided for the remainder of their discussion rather than admit she was being unfair?)

Thinking about that, and other scenes where heroes have had sharp differences of opinion over financial subjects, some time ago I started jotting down notes on the different financial situations of various costumed superhero types. Here's what I came up with.

Superhero Finances: 10 Situations

01. Independently Wealthy
02. Self-Sufficient
03. Supercop
04. Paid Professional with a Hobby
05. Freelance
06. Scraping By
07. Cashing in on Fame
08. Constantly On Call, Totally Unpaid
09. Living off the Land
10. Somebody Else’s Problem
( Read more... )

Lately I've been thinking about secret identities. For instance, how can a superhero's real name become known to the "wrong" people - without this fact permanently changing his lifestyle in the process? I've seen a lot of diferent ways used over the years, and I managed to break them down into a basic list of ten categories. It is likely that I've missed a few, however.

I'm skipping over a few special cases - such as the False Alarm where the cover makes it look as if the hero's secret will be revealed, but it really isn't. Or the Deliberate Revelation to someone "trustworthy," such as a parent, sibling, spouse, or lover would supposedly be. (Some such gestures of trust have turned out to be unjustified in the long run, but that's a different problem.)

My concern is with cases where the hero didn't intend for a particular person to find out, and probably doesn't have any solid reason to trust that person, but it happens anyway. Then a writer - either the same one who wrote that story, or a new writer who comes along later - starts looking for ways to do damage control and preserve (or restore) the Sacred Status Quo where the hero really does have a Secret Identity.

After the beans have been spilled, how do you unspill them? Here's what I came up with.

10 Ways to Unspill the Beans

01. Unexpected Virtue
02. Secret Agenda
03. Retcon
04. Disbelief
05. Throw Doubt on it
06. Fear
07. Killed in Action
08. Missing in Action
09. Amnesia
10. Mindwipe
( Read more... )

Months ago I was in an online discussion where I reacted to someone else’s question by suggesting, off the top of my head, that there seemed to be two basic ways to create a new superhero team at Marvel or DC: Sweep up an awful lot of existing characters who were currently available to work on a team, or invent a whole bunch of new characters who had banded together for some special reason, and then you could develop their personalities any way you liked. The latter course had the disadvantage that you were working with people whom the fans had never heard of before in their lives, but also the advantage that you probably had more elbow room in deciding what you could do with them for dramatic purposes if you had created your own cast out of thin air and didn’t have to “share” the use of them with the writers and editors of other books that were simultaneously being published, featuring the solo adventures of Superman or Spider-Man or whoever.

Someone correctly called me on that. I don’t recall their exact words, but the general idea was that I had oversimplified in the heat of the moment – after all, some new teams have started out with a good blend of “Old Characters” and “New Characters” as the team first goes into action. And, of course, the membership can fluctuate back and forth later on. Quite right. There’s no rule that says you can’t mix-and-match from different types.

That got me thinking about this subject in more detail, trying to organize the vague ideas I’ve picked up on team memberships over the years. I eventually decided that just labeling members in two categories, “Old” and “New,” doesn’t really make the necessary distinctions. I ended up with an expanded list of Five Types, and here we go!

5 Types of Team Members

1. Established Star
2. Newcomer
3. Retread
4. Shared
5. Reboot
( Read more... )

Spend much time on the comic book forums of the Internet and you’ll hear an awful lot of talk about “continuity.”

“That story twenty years ago established the 'new continuity' on this point, and it's remained the Official Version ever since.”

“That other story recently was tossed out of continuity.”

“This story is still in continuity as far as I know, except for the tiny detail that the controversial events in it have never gotten any further acknowledgement or follow-up in any way, shape, or form in the six years since that writer left the title. It’s as if all the characters who survived that painful experience have completely blotted out the painful memories! But don't worry - any time another writer wants to refer to that old stuff, he can still do so!”

“The new movie generally respects the 'basic' continuity of who these characters are supposed to be and where they're coming from, despite changing lots of superficial details here and there!”

And so on, and so forth. A relative newcomer may be forgiven for scratching his head as he tries to figure out just what all these people are talking about when they argue about good continuity, bad continuity, old continuity, new continuity, "basic" continuity that doesn't seem to refer to every single nitpicking detail of stories published 10 or 20 years ago, retcons, new retcons of the previous retcons, and all that other fun stuff.

One of the problems is that different fans mean different things in different contexts when they talk about “continuity” and whether or not a new writer is properly “respecting” what they see as the “basic" or "important" continuity of a particular character or team. Here is my best effort to break down the mysterious subject of "continuity" into smaller pieces.

9 Categories of Continuity

01. Continuity of Plot
02. Continuity of Personality
03. Continuity of Environment
04. Continuity of Relationships
05. Continuity of Appearance
06. Continuity of Abilities
07. Continuity of Background
08. Continuity of Theme or Tone
09. Continuity of Isolation

( Read more... )

As a general rule of thumb, the characters I think of as "classic" superheroes like to claim that they live by the rule: "Thou Shalt Not Kill." Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Daredevil, and so forth.

Naturally, this means that seeing such a superhero kill someone anyway (or at least appear to be doing so) has great dramatic potential and can look shocking on a cover. Various ways have been found to contrive such a situation. Of course, sometimes it turns out to be a False Alarm for one reason or another, or there may have been very good reasons for the action. And there are some categories that I'm not even counting for my main list.

First I will quickly offer a list of 6 Exceptions that don't really strike me as being as controversial and exciting, then the main list of 22 Ways to arrange for such an image.

THE 6 EXCEPTIONS

Very quickly, here's a list of the type of scenes that don't interest me here.

1. Standard Operating Procedure

Cases where a "hero" kills so frequently that it comes as no great shock to see him do it again. (Punisher. Wolverine. The Authority. "War hero" characters in general, and others who never claimed to be superheroes - Tarzan and Sergeant Rock and that sort of thing.)

2. The Bluff

Cases where a hero threatens to kill, but doesn't do it and probably never intended to. (Batman has been known to hold people over the edge of the roof while he interrogates them, but they always survive the experience.)

3. "The rules were different in those days."

Golden Age cases from the very early days, before it became more-or-less firmly established that conventional comic book superheroes believe that "Thou Shalt Not Kill."

4. Elseworlds (and any other stories set way outside of the normal continuity of the main universe)

For instance, Judd Winick could get away with lots and lots of "superhero killing" material in "Exiles" because it was happening to different versions of old familiar Marvel characters, in different timelines, where it would usually have no perceptible impact on the regular continuity of any other Marvel title.

5. "I wanted to kill him, but they talked me down."

Cases where the superhero was very angry and was thinking about killing an enemy - but either restrained himself at the last moment as a matter of conscience, or else was restrained by friends, before a murderous shot was fired or a murderous blow was struck. A recent example was the scene in the middle of "Hush" where Batman thought the Joker had just killed one of Bruce Wayne's oldest friends and was punching him and thinking lethal thoughts . . . but Jim Gordon managed to talk him down. (Granted, Gordon had to shoot him a couple of times to really get his attention - knocking off one of the pointy ears from his cowl, and then burning his arm with another carefully aimed shot, but hey, what are friends for?)

6. "I'm a war veteran, but that was a long time ago."

Cases where we learned that a man deliberately killed people for one reason or another way back when, before he became a costumed superhero - for instance, in their early appearances in the 1960s, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were originally stated to be seasoned veterans of World War II. It seems likely that they had killed people from time to time (Ben was an ace fighter pilot, I believe). But that's ancient history and has nothing to do with their superhero activities during and after the Silver Age.

THE 22 WAYS

01. Pure Accident
02. Sabotage
03. Mind Control
04. Dream Sequence
05. Mindwipe
06. Negligent Homicide
07. Retcon
08. He was so powerful there was no other way!
09. Impostor
10. Doesn't really qualify as "human or the equivalent"
11. Insanity
12. Act of War
13. "I was sure he was bluffing! Oops!"
14. The Ambiguous Killing
15. "Lethal force" doesn't mean the same thing to my target that it means to regular human beings.
16. Legal Execution
17. Self Defense
18. Shooting Blanks
19. Suicide
20. Kamikaze
21. Fake Death
22. Felony Murder
( Read more... )

This was inspired in part by the old song “Fifty Ways to Leave a Lover" by Paul Simon (although he didn't actually list fifty different ways in the lyrics of the song). For my purposes, the best I could do was Nineteen, but I imagine I'm missing a few! Let me know!

Let us suppose that you have just been offered the chance to do a long run (at least two years, say?) as the regular writer on a monthly title featuring that great superhero, Character X. You are bubbling over with happiness as you start jotting down ideas for story arcs, changes in old supporting characters, introduction of new ones, running subplots that will take 15 or 20 issues to come to fruition, et cetera. So far, so good! This is your chance to tell the stories you've always wanted to tell about Character X, ever since you got hooked on his adventures at the tender age of ten, many and many a year ago!

But first there are one or two loose ends that need to be tidied up. Character X has been dating someone lately and it seems to be getting serious. He may have already said in dialogue (in stories written by your inferior predecessor, of course) that he is definitely in love with her.

This is terrible. You want to write a story about Character X falling head over heels in love with a really neat girl, and obviously your ideas for such a story are far better than those of whoever was writing him before you came along. Perhaps you have a brand new female character you want to introduce into his life, or perhaps you always thought it would be really cool to see him meet and flirt with some obscure female character from a different corner of the same large superhero universe whom he has never (or hardly ever) met before "in continuity," or perhaps you are one of those who yearns to bring back Abigail Airhead, his First Girlfriend from the Silver Age, whose name has scarcely been mentioned in the Character X monthly title for at least a decade!

(Hey, why limit yourself? Perhaps you want to do all of the above at once, with three gorgeous babes throwing themselves at him while he tries to pick and choose which one he really feels serious about!)

The point is that first the old girlfriend has to go. Especially because a bunch of those pesky fans (what do they know?) have been getting so excited about Character X's relationship with her that they're sending in a tidal wave of letters demanding to know when he's going to give her an engagement ring and schedule a wedding and get married and settle down to raise super-powered children with her, giving him a nuclear family to come home to after each stirring slugfest with the supervillain of the week.

If the fans have gotten so excited that they actually think there is a real possibility of Significant and Permanent Change in Character X's life, then clearly it is your duty to set them straight by crushing their foolish hopes. Eventually they may realize that "stories about Character X, set in his 'regular continuity'" and "stories in which the major character experiences Significant and Permanent Change" are two mutually exclusive categories, now and forever.

This list is based on the assumption that the superhero is male, and the Significant Other is female. The law of averages favors that assumption, given that the vast majority of superheroes who get their own titles are male, for some reason. But it could be the other way around, or we could be dealing with a romance between two characters who are just part of the cast of a team book featuring many different superheroes. Bear with me. If it will make you feel better, feel free to cut-and-paste this into your word processor and replace every use of “he” with “she” and vice versa, ditto for “him” and “her” and so forth.

THE NINETEEN WAYS

01. Kill, kill, kill!
02. Have her marry someone else
03. Break her heart
04. Forced separation
05. Abduction
06. Psychological Flaws
07. Secret Villain
08. Impersonator
09. Mind Control
10. Mindwipe
11. Wrong Body
12. Cheating
13. Never Apologize; Never Explain
14. Irreconciliable Differences
15. Divorce
16. Flashback Romance
17. Pesky Curse
18. A Matter of Honor
19. Retcon!
( Read more... )

[This version of this text was first posted elsewhere in summer of 2006]

Last month I posted 12 Motives for Killing a Comic Book Character, an updated version of a post from two years ago. That one dealt with motives the creative team might have for killing off a character – whether he was a hero, a villain, a well-established member of the supporting cast, or whatever.

Now I offer the revised version of the sequel from two years ago, discussing Excuses that can be used in a story to bring back the character who’d previously been killed. I think I’ve covered all the basic possibilities, but if I forgot any, let me know!

The 17 Excuses
01. Missing In Action – PRESUMED Dead
02. Somebody Else’s Body
03. Exact Replica
04. Only “Mostly Dead”
05. Act of God
06. Parallel World
07. Massive Retcon – It Never Happened!
08. Dead But Still Active
09. Didn’t You Know I’m a Professional Corpse?
10. The Original is Dead; Long Live the Clone
11. Reincarnation
12. Time Travel
13. Continuing a Proud Tradition
14. Body Switching
15. The Flashback Option
16. The Ambiguous Return
17. Never Apologize; Never Explain!

[This version was first written in summer of 2006.]

Two years ago, in June of 2004, I posted an earlier version of this: "10 Motives for Killing a Comic Book Character." I invited feedback on any other basic motives the writers and editors might have that I had overlooked on the first pass. Several people were kind enough to offer such feedback - and now I'm finally getting around to reacting to it with a new version!

12 Possible Motives

01. Cannon Fodder
02. False Alarm to Raise Sales
03. Let's Make Room for Someone Younger and Cuter in a Similar Role!
04. The "End of the Romance" Fatality
05. It's Time to Shake Things Up in This Book - Which Regular Cast Member Shall We Kill?
06. Let's Spice Up An Epic By Killing Someone Incredibly Obscure!
07. Housecleaning to Get Rid of an Embarrassment
08. The Professional Corpse
09. The Series Was Getting Cancelled Anyway - Let's Go Out With a Bang!
10. Punishment for Sins
11. The Mystery's Gone Out of Our Relationship
12. "I'm Back and I'm Badder than Ever! (Watch me prove it!)"