Comic book characters

you mean like Marvel? DC? Image? indie comics?

What does this have to do with writing? You might want to steer the thread a bit more.

I'll try to make this relevent....

Why don't we see more books (not comics or graphic novels) about super heroes?

Outside of the Ex-Heroes series and a hanful of book adaptions of comic book characters, there seems to be a lack of novels about superheroes. I could be mistaken, and have just missed them, but that seems to be a niche that could be filled unless there is no demand.

DongerNeedFood said:

I'll try to make this relevent....

Why don't we see more books (not comics or graphic novels) about super heroes?

Outside of the Ex-Heroes series and a hanful of book adaptions of comic book characters, there seems to be a lack of novels about superheroes. I could be mistaken, and have just missed them, but that seems to be a niche that could be filled unless there is no demand.

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It's a growing market that I believe is a difficult but not impossible sell right now. On my read or to-read list are the following, only a sample of Superhero stories:

Carrie Vaughn's After the Golden Age
Russ Linton's Crimson Son
Our own S.L. Huang's Russell's Attic series
Tom King's A Once Crowded Sky
Nicole Burstein's Othergirl
Mur Lafferty's Playing for Keeps
Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible
V.E.S Schwab's Vicious
Not to mention George R.R. Martin's long-running Wild Cards anthologies

And those are just the ones I know of. There are certainly many more I don't. And of course those are published ones. Unpublished and short stories, even more, including from myself and our mod Sage which I had the pleasure to beta read. It's a genre that's getting written more and noticed more with the rise of the superhero movies, but it's also facing oversaturation because of those movies.

I know that there are some small publishers who're doing super-hero stories using either PD characters or else licensing some from AC Comics and/or Heroic Publishing.

My first professional sale was doing an Incredible Hulk short story for Byron Preiss Multimedia/Marvel Creative.

Joe Books are doing 60,000 word novels featuring Marvel Characters.

Selling super-hero stories not based on an established comic is much harder, but it can be done. Christopher Bennett sold one through Tor, but he was an established Star Trek author, so the editor was more willing to review his stuff than he might have been for an off-the-street approach.

My favorite is Wonder Woman. I wrote a book with her as the main character which I'm now shopping around to agents. About to send out the next wave of ten queries.

However, we can't use comic-book characters in our books without permission. This is almost impossible to get, so we have to create our own. Or change them radically. This is what I did with The Star Woman, shown here.


First I got rid of her ridiculous origin in Greek mythology. I chose the Superman route; she was born in a space habitant orbiting a far star and sent to Earth for reasons hinted at late in the book.

She has a body and mind like that of all citizens of her parent's advanced culture, gene-cleaned of all illnesses of both body and soul. And enhanced with extra strength and stamina. Which still leaves plenty of room for fallibility, a necessity for all interesting and relatable characters.

In fact, her superiority brings with it useful plot problems. She can't show too much of it without triggering backlashes (a common theme in comics and real life). She must develop disguises to shield her and her Earthly family and friends from those dangers. (Another theme of comics and real life.)

Another useful plot problem is her quick reflexes and great strength, three or four times that of ordinary humans. This means she could accidentally kill or greatly injure someone if she loses her temper. She has to develop restraint, which leads her on her 18[SUP]th[/SUP] birthday to join the Marines, where deadly strength UNDER CONTROL is a virtue. She hopes the outside discipline will help develop her inner discipline.

This succeeds but not perfectly. Later in the book while fighting terrorists her rage at them leads her to commit an atrocity. Which leads her to a form of self-inflicted PTSD. This leads her to challenge a rare possible threat: a superhuman computer which guards invisible subspace portals orbiting Saturn, unknown to contemporary citizens of Earth which is only a few years in advance of our own real-life Earth.

This realistic approach avoids the ridiculous costumes which infest comics, the worst of which are capes and flashy painted-on costumes, with high heels and lots of bare flesh inflicted on women superheroes. It does not, however, means we cannot use such when we want to. My character adopts several such personas when fighting superstitious baddies to instill fear in them, bad guys whose hysterical babblings will be disbelieved by ordinary people when they are caught and jailed.

I spent a lot of time developing technological substitutes for the supernatural weapons Wonder Woman has. This includes bullet-bouncing bracelets (a force field shield), invisible chariot (a stealthy aerospace craft), truth-telling lariat (reading of near-invisible clues such as iris-dilation and contraction, sweating, pulse rate), and the "Wisdom of Athena" (a computer and communicator made of nanobots residing in her brain). All useful tools, but with limitations built-in to keep them from being all-powerful.

So that's one approach to using comics-book characters in our books. I hope you'll find useful some to the tactics.

on a semi-related note: the PC game Starcraft....has a bunch of novels out.

Honestly, Beanie, I don't understand what you're specifically looking for.

However, working with licensed characters, you are limited by several factors as a writer:

A) Characters with long histories come with a lot of baggage. Trying to find something new with Batman, Superman, Captain America, or Sub-Mariner is tough because there's already 70+ years of stories out there. It's tough to find a fresh take on stuff, especially when writing long form. Much easier to come up with a short story that covers an event that could have happened between issues of a comic or between the serials/TV shows/movies.

B) Characters come with fan expectations. People are expecting them to talk certain ways, use certain pet phrases, react to situations in a specific way--and they're quite vocal if you don't meet their expectations.

C) There's only so much you can do with characters of on-going series. As a writer of novels or short stories about them, you can write whatever you want as long as you don't mess with continuity. In your story, you can't permanently revive Uncle Ben, or permanently kill off Lois Lane or anything that significantly alters the hero's continuity. Your stories have to compliment what is either currently going on in the series or perhaps fill in a continuity gap in an older story, but at the end of the day, you can play with whatever toys you want as long as they go exactly back on the shelf where you got them from. There are very few authors the comic companies would trust to actually alter continuity (and many of them are probably writing/have written for that specific series). Obviously, if the series have been cancelled, you have more latitude, but then again, cancelled series are usually cancelled for a reason, so temper your sales expectations accordingly.

D) No matter how good your story is, it has to go through several sets of filters if you're doing a licensed story. First, the editor has to approve your pitch, then the licensor must approve it, then the story outline gets approved twice, and then the actual story has to be approved twice. At any time, up to the day before the book gets printed, the licensor can say, "Nah, that's not something we're comfortable with" and kill your story. Why? Because it's their sandbox and they tend to be hyper-protective of their creations. It's the privilege of owning the character.

Now, the above does not apply to creating your own super-heroes to write about, but if you're wanting to do licensed books that aren't simply fan fiction, then these are the limits you have to deal with.

Research:

1. Trademarks

2. Permissions.

And consider inventing your own superhero characters.

caw

Beanie>

Gotcha.

Well, the superheroes I've been able to write for so far: The Incredible Hulk/Ant-Man/Wasp/Iron Man (Doctor Doom was there too but he's not a hero, except in his own mind)

Superheroes I pitched stories for but didn't get to write for one reason or another: Cyclops/Marvel Girl/Havok/Polaris, Captain America/Hawkeye, Black Cat, Werewolf by Night

Superheroes I'd love to get a chance to write someday in the future: Guardians of the Galaxy (original or current version), Raven, Argent, The Outsiders, Mon-el/Phantom Girl, Monarch Starstalker (now there's an obscure on for you - old Marvel Premier character), The Liberty Legion or The Invaders (love the WWII version of heroes), Justice Society of America

Well, not a superhero, but Hellblazer's John Constantine was the first thing that leaped to mind.

CameronJohnston said:

Well, not a superhero, but Hellblazer's John Constantine was the first thing that leaped to mind.

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I'd classify Constantine as a superhero.

FIRST, a superhero is anyone who is a hero, someone who is at least part of the time good intentioned. Which doesn't mean they have to be perfect, never to succumb to their Mr. Hyde side. Constantine is an example of that, a con man, cynical and ruthless, an antihero. But on balance, between evil and him, he is firmly on the hero side.

Heroes can also be confused. And make mistakes, maybe errors in judgment, or of action (hurting innocent bystanders, for instance, when their elbow is jogged while firing a bullet or throwing a fireball). They may be antisocial, or merely NONsocial - though I'd suggest we steer clear of the popular myth of really smart people being totally blind socially. To me it's a stereotype and a cliché, the sign of a lazy mind.

SECOND, they have to have a superpower. This can be something physical, such as Superman's strength and toughness. My Wonder Woman Rethought character is three to four times as strong and tough as an ordinary human, but this is not enough to qualify as a superpower.

The superpower can be mental, such as Sherlock Holmes supersmartness. It's explained as being the result of attention to detail and encyclopedic knowledge, but it's so extraordinary that it qualifies as super. Your favorite private eye or cop, though smart, probably does not qualify as having a superpower.

Of course, the line between super and not is inexact. So we as writers have to decide just where that line is for each story, and what that means for each story we want to tell. This is not an easy task. But that's part of our job - and why we're paid the big bucks!

Deadpool certainly got more popular once he got into a movie... but that's basically every comic character who gets into movies. He was hardly an unknown quantity before then

I think in the end, you'll find people like superheroes for the same reason they like other characters. Most people don't like Superman because he's strong and can fly, they like him because he's a guy who uses all the tools at his disposal in service to what he sees as the greatest possible good. They don't like Lobo because he's basically indestructible, they like him because he does what he wants as awesomely as possible and doesn't give a darn what people think.

More specifically, I don't like Booster Gold for his tech, I like him because he's a guy who screws up a lot but still really WANTS to do the right thing and help those in need and usually really tries. It's the same reason I liked Lucian in "Dust and Light," a character in a novel.

So, basically, make them people first. Their personality can and probably should be informed by their power, but their personality is the important part.

(As for the lycra costumes, I think you'll find most people may not like them, per se, but they live on from a combination of nostalgia (hence why you can't change Superman's suit without an outcry) and common sense (You want your costume to have as little to grab onto as possible, so more skintight is probably better) )

ETA: Also, Brandon Sanderson also has a superhero series. Not my favorite, but it's Sanderson, so they're the other side of the planet from bad.

my fav is Batman. I like that he acts tough and brooding, but actually has 5 sons and 3 daughters. he takes in every orphan he finds. amazing.

as for comics as a medium: art can capture a space ship on a much smaller budget than a movie, which allows stories that would never be made in film form to be made as comics. there are a lot of indie heroes, diverse heroes, and boundless stories in the comic world. it's a largely undervalued medium, but the only one where I consistently find characters that feel human alongside magic fights

on a personal note, I often have vision problems, so comics are a lot easier for me to read than a book. I barely read books anymore

DongerNeedFood said:

I'll try to make this relevent....

Why don't we see more books (not comics or graphic novels) about super heroes?

Outside of the Ex-Heroes series and a hanful of book adaptions of comic book characters, there seems to be a lack of novels about superheroes. I could be mistaken, and have just missed them, but that seems to be a niche that could be filled unless there is no demand.

Click to expand...

superheroes have a long history in the comic industry. a few have been made in book form, but there's something about the marrying of genre and medium that remains a fixture.

Cat Valente just released "The Refrigerator Monologues"