Good Guy Team, Bad Guy Team, co-writing...

sunandshadow · Jun 12, 2008

I like anime, manga, and novels about a team of characters working together. I haven't had much success at making one though because I came up with a team of characters but then I couldn't think of any villains I wanted to send up against them. I realized this was because I don't like standard hopelessly innocent and stupid good guys, or standard sadistic insane and incompetent villains, so I made a team that was smart and sneaky and ambitious but usually kind and determined and competent. Which didn't leave any good traits to give to the opposing team.

Then I was reading a webpage about villain teams and I had an epiphany - maybe my team _was_ the villain team, a fairly lighthearted comic one, maybe one could even call them anti-villains. So what I was missing wasn't a villain team, it was a hero team, or maybe an anti-hero team to balance my anti-villains. I still don't have any ideas for an anti-hero team, but I thought, maybe I could find a co-creator who would want to make that team and sort of battle them against mine. Still one problem though - I would want my team to win about half the time, including in the end. The ending could be a comic one where everyone wins, but whoever made up the hero team would have to be willing to have them lose half the time.

Anyone have any thoughts about hero and villain teams? Do people even still do them or are they out of fashion now? Do you think asking someone to create an anti-hero team and co-write with me is a reasonable and workable thing to do?

caperaway · Jun 12, 2008

Howdy. Looking at the racks of at my local comic shop and knowing what some of the biggest sellers are right now, I'd say superheroes and villains and teams of heroes and villains are defintely still a hot property. That's the good news. The bad news is there are a lot of superhero books being made and published, which means you've got to be really special to stand out from the crowd. That goes for both writing and art.

As for seeking a co-writer, I think it's a reasonable approach, though you might be able to create your own hero / villain dynamic if you flesh out either the good guys or the bad guys and then try to create the perfect opponent for each. It's a formula that has been used throughout comic history. The good guys have a speedster, the bad guys have a speedster, the good guys have an telepath, the bad guys have a telepath. Another trick is to make them combatants opposites of a sort: For example, if you had a good guy that used the power of the earth then you have a villain that draws upon industrial polution. (Yeah, that sounds silly, I know, but I hope you get the gist of what I'm saying.)

sunandshadow · Jun 12, 2008

Well, I wasn't thinking 'super' anything - that's why I said anime, manga, and novels, and deliberately left out western comics. Somewhere in between the romantic approach of Fushigi Yuugi's red team vs. blue team, the comic approach of Pokemon's main characters vs. team rocket, and something more grown up like Bleach where the current arc is shinigami vs. espada... I guess the teams still have the equivalent of super-powers, but I would go for a non-earth setting, magic, shapeshifting, maybe magical martial arts combat, or people bonded to pet dragons...

I see what you mean about how the two teams have to be some mix of parallel and opposite. If my villain team has a cheerful pervert, the hero team would have to have an intolerant paladin and/or an innocent girl who's shocked by everything the pervert says and does. If my team has a quiet scary guy with an inner streak of honor and protectiveness, the good guy team should have a guy who's confident charming, an apparently a gentleman but with an inner flaw of some kind. If the villain leader is a grumpy creative genius who is magically powerful but physically weak, the heroes' leader should be cheerfully stupid, physically resilient, and respectful of tradition/prophecy (but then aren't all hero team leaders like that? lol)

Mumut · Jun 13, 2008

Could a subset of your team of intelligent, careful and competent bad guys have an experiance that turns them? Not like getting religion or something. Perhaps the evil of the gang has an unexpected affect on the family of a couple of brothers and they swear revenge. Just an idea. Good luck.

sunandshadow · Jun 13, 2008

Yeah they each have their own problems - collectively they are all victims of prejudice and bullying, although for different reasons and they reacted differently.

wordmonkey · Jun 13, 2008

Is it me or is the solution obvious here?

If you want interesting, non-2D, fully-realized and complex characters that don't fit the norm, WRITE THEM.

That's the job, isn't it?

Have your read WATCHMEN?

Who are the heroes and who are the villains there?

If it's hard to do and makes you sweat, then you know you're doing it right. Don't cop-out and look for help, do it yourself.

And I'm not being a smart-@ss here, or slamming you. You'll find the experience more rewarding and have something you are infinitely more satisfied with at the end. You'll probably find you learned more and became a better writer in the process.

FinbarReilly · Jun 13, 2008

1) If you want to look at good villain teams, I would suggest looking at American comics rather than manga; between the Thunderbolts, Planetary's The Four, and the various incarnations of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, there is a lot of excellent inspiration out there.

The key difference here is that manga villains need only last the series and/or only make a point; as such, they tend to be two-dimensional and more symbolic. However, American comic villains need to last years if not decades, and so tend to have far more developed personalities as well as defined group dynamics.

2) If you want to see a great breakdown of the sentai concept, track down a copy of White Wolf's Demon Hunter X. It's no longer published, but a quick reading would definitely be worth your time.

FR

sunandshadow · Jun 13, 2008

wordmonkey - I agree that that would be the smart thing to do, except the hero characters I have described don't really appeal to me, and I love co-writing but when writing alone I usually end up not writing at all due to lack of motivation.

Finbar - Interesting reasoning. I am going to use a manga plot structure, where the series is a preplanned length, after which if I want to do a sequel in the same world it will be with a different cast of characters. I'm actually kind of worried about how to pack the most character and group development into only one or two plot arcs. But I agree that it's worth looking at particularly well developed villains and villain teams in western comics. I don't actually know how to get ahold of older western comics though, unless they were collected into a book, hopefully?

Edit: I looked up Demon Hunter X in wikipedia - kind of went ick at the fact that it seems to be horror in a contemporary setting, and I strongly dislike both horror and contemporary settings lol. So I don't think I could bring myself to actually read it, but I'll google around and see of there's a fan page talking about the main characters.

sunandshadow · Jun 14, 2008

Hehehe, I watched the first half of Ninja Nonsense and the ninja minions are hilarious! I've seen funny single minions before, but I've never seen a group of them done so well. *Makes a note to give the good guys some soldier minions in the concept I'm developing*

Carandini · Jun 15, 2008

It sounds to me like you are looking for heroes and villains rather than superheroes and supervillains. Would that be correct? I only ask because the advice seems to keep straying back to the super teams we all know and have seen over the years.

I'd say that to create any sort of team, you should have a real good understanding of your setting. Make the characters reflect that setting, whether it's 13th century Japan, Dark Ages Poland or modern Argentina, or something entirely fictitious.

I'll give an example. Here's a character I developed for a WWII-themed project that, hopefully, will evolve into a comic or graphic novel down the road. He's been on a few websites, so I don't think sharing him here is out of order:

Johnny Dingo

Name: Evan Aberthol

Location:

Group Affiliation: Churchill’s Hounds

Powers: Johnny Dingo is a fifth generation werewolf, able to change his shape from that of a human being into a half-animal monster. As a werewolf, Johnny Dingo is much stronger and faster than a human, and possesses exceedingly keen senses of smell and hearing. The werewolf’s claws are able to tear through sheet metal like tissue and its jaws able to snap through bone. The strange, supernatural metabolism of a werewolf makes Johnny Dingo immune to many normally lethal weapons, but highly vulnerable to those forces that attack his unnatural substance – fire, certain herbs such as wolfsbane and rose flowers and especially anything crafted from silver. Even in his human state, Johnny Dingo retains traces of his werewolf state, his reflexes are abnormally keen and he continues to exhibit unnatural senses of smell and hearing.

History: The Aberthol family can trace its roots back into the misty ages of legend. And for as far back as the line can be traced, theirs has been a cursed lineage and more than one of the family has found his end upon a gallows. The men of the family have been characterized as violent and intemperate, unable and unwilling to abide the restraints of society. There were always rumours about them as well, dark stories which were almost beyond belief, tales that were too fantastic to be believed. However, in the early 1800’s, an English magistrate took it into his hands to put a stop to the stories about what was responsible for dead livestock and missing animals in his district. Gawl Aberthol, the last of the line, was arrested following a drunken brawl in a local pub. The magistrate availed himself of the opportunity to remove the source of the bogey stories that had beset his community for generations. By order of the judge, Gawl was sentenced to the penal colony of Australia.

In Australia, however, Gawl soon escaped and set about taking a family and making a new life for himself in the Australian outback. The wide-open spaces of Australia soothed him in a way the increasingly industrialized and crowded environs of England could not. For the beast that lurked inside Gawl, that emerged each time the moon was full to hunt and howl needed such open vastness in which to prowl.

Evan Aberthol is the great-great grandson of Gawl. Like his ancestors, he too is marked with the sign of the beast. Like them, he was a violent and intemperate man, the spirit of the wolf clouding his every judgement, making him lash out with no thought of restraint or consequence. All that changed, however, when he, like Gawl, found himself in a barroom brawl. Unlike Gawl, however, Evan killed his antagonist, an aborigine labourer. The courts ruled the tragedy a death by misadventure, since the aborigine had instigated the fight. But the dead man’s fellow tribesmen saw things otherwise. The aborigine had confronted Evan over the killing of numerous sheep on the ranch where he worked, killings the werewolf was responsible for. The tribe’s shaman determined that Evan should understand what he had done, employing his tribal magics to open up Evan’s mind, removing the cloud that separated the beast from the man. Unlike his forefathers, the deeds of the werewolf would no longer be foggy dreams at the edge of Evan’s memory. He would know everything the monster did, everything for which he himself was ultimately responsible. It was a terrible punishment and something Evan found himself tormented by ceaselessly. He took to locking himself in a heavy iron box when the moon rose, trying to keep the beast from working any harm.

As time went on, however, Evan found that there was another change coming upon him as a result of the spell. More and more, he found his own personality and mind rising into awareness within the shape of the monster. He found that he could control the werewolf and even will himself to change forms. It took intense concentration and will power to keep the beast in check, but Evan knew that only by such efforts could he ever hope to face life again. His own personality experienced a change, losing the selfish impulses that had been the driving motivations of his entire life, the impulses that were not unlike the hungry urges of the werewolf. Instead, Evan was determined to do some good for his fellow man, to atone for all the hurt and horror his family had caused over the years. When the fires of war began to engulf the globe, Evan offered his services and unique powers to his government, becoming Johnny Dingo.

Description: Evan Aberthol is a tall, broad-shouldered man with a powerful build and a sharp, narrow face. As Johnny Dingo, he is a lean, hungry shape, his body covered in light, sandy fur (matching Aberthol’s blonde hair) with his face stretched into the fanged muzzle of an enormous wolf. In both forms, Johnny Dingo wears the khaki uniform of an Australian infantryman, modified to stretch and expand when Aberthol’s body metamorphoses into the werewolf.

sunandshadow · Jun 15, 2008

Carandini, yes I have no particular interest in the 'super' genre, I'm actually not even all that familiar with super heroes and villains because my background is in science fiction and fantasy novel and manga/anime, I never really got into western comics beyond catching an animated batman episode here and there an watching the first X-men movie; my lack of interest is mainly because western comics are too dark and I like romantic comedy as well as intelligent sff worldbuilding not cheesy super and RPG stuff.

Erm, not to be insulting or anything, that's just my personal aesthetic opinion. I'm certain lots of people would consider some of the things I like to be cheesy, like star trek, anthros, dragons, school settings, empathy and psychic bonds, etc.

Anyway my setting is an entirely fictitious one, and I'm still developing it. Usually I create my setting to support my plot, and I don't have the plot outlined yet. I want there to be shapeshifters (the kind who can take any shape including inanimate ones, like Odo on DS9), probably mages (perhaps with color-coded abilities), and probably magic-enhanced martial artists and/or swordsmen. Two races with cultural tension, but not actual violence, between them. (Probably one aryan looking and one gothic looking just cause I like those two looks, not for any symbolism; could just as easily be dragon anthros vs dog/cat anthros.) The world is not Earth, but might be connected to near-future Earth via a magical or science fictional portal or journey. Probably the most important aspect is that leaders of teams need to have some reason to compete for social recognition, that recognition might be embodied in the deed to a clan territory or a military rank/commission for the leader's group, or some sort of official acknowledgment by a government.

FinbarReilly · Jun 15, 2008

sunandshadow said:
Edit: I looked up Demon Hunter X in wikipedia - kind of went ick at the fact that it seems to be horror in a contemporary setting, and I strongly dislike both horror and contemporary settings lol. So I don't think I could bring myself to actually read it, but I'll google around and see of there's a fan page talking about the main characters.

Actually, I was referring to the essay in particular. It goes through the basic five-man team, and the various roles that the characters take on (such as the importance of The Girl). It's a fascinating read....Even though I suggest just borrowing the book.

Oh, and as far as teams go: Track the Marvel Mangaverse trades (it explores several different types of groups), as well as Watchmen...

FR

sunandshadow · Jun 15, 2008

FinbarReilly said:
Actually, I was referring to the essay in particular. It goes through the basic five-man team, and the various roles that the characters take on (such as the importance of The Girl). It's a fascinating read....Even though I suggest just borrowing the book.

Oh, and as far as teams go: Track the Marvel Mangaverse trades (it explores several different types of groups), as well as Watchmen...

FR

What essay in particular??? I saw that there was a lore/history introduction to the White Wolf RPG book Demon Hunter X: World of Darkness, did you mean that intro or something else in the book?

Carandini · Jun 15, 2008

A good hook would be to tie all of your 'strangeness' into a common source. Maybe shapeshifting, kung-fu movie martial arts and outright sorcery are all manifestations of the same power source, tapping into the same fuel, as it were, but weilding it in vastly different ways.

FinbarReilly · Jun 16, 2008

1) If you have Vongo, track down Desert Punk; it starts out shonen, then turns shojo about episode 14 or so. By the last episode, if you can honestly say who is the bad guy and who is the good guy, kudos to you!

2) I wish I had my copy still..The book has about five chapters, plus the introduction. I believe that the chapter about "running a mortals' game", about halfway, right after the shih (sp?) chapter and before the Demon Hunter X chapter. There's a reasonably long essay that discusses why anime teams are usually based on five, and that each one of those characters has a role to fill, both in terms of skills necessary for success, as well as roles needed for the success of the series. What is interesting is that a lot of space is given for The Girl, and how the team wold fall apart except for her.

Here's a link.....

EDIT: It starts on page 86...

FR

Good Guy Team, Bad Guy Team, co-writing...

sunandshadow

Impractical Fantasy Animal

caperaway

sunandshadow

Impractical Fantasy Animal

Mumut

Well begun is half done...

sunandshadow

Impractical Fantasy Animal

wordmonkey

ook

FinbarReilly

sunandshadow

Impractical Fantasy Animal

sunandshadow

Impractical Fantasy Animal

Carandini

sunandshadow

Impractical Fantasy Animal

FinbarReilly

sunandshadow

Impractical Fantasy Animal

Carandini

FinbarReilly