Welcome to Pageturners, a book I’m writing in which I share what I’ve learnt – and am still learning – about comic writing, film writing, novel writing and how new writers can sell their stories. I’ll publish a chapter or a section per week, available for free here on Iconoblast. And I welcome your feedback or questions, so do leave a comment below – and please share this post if you enjoyed it!
Missed the Pageturners intro? Read it here.
Pageturners 3: The Deep Dive
CREATING HEROES
Hero, in this instance, is not gender specific – the rules apply to either sex. And this term also includes the anti-hero and the protagonist.
Such heroes could appear in any media form, comics, novels or film.
This is how I set about it with all my heroes, including Nemesis, Slaine, ABC Warriors and the different Spacewarp heroes.
Hero check-list
1. Pick an iconic, and clearly defined hero that you want to write about. Secret Agent. Future soldier. Serial Killer. Assassin. Resistance fighter. Future cop. Detective. Wizard. Barbarian. And so on. The more defined the role, the more likely it will be successful.
2. Base it on someone you know, suitably amplified and added to. Thus, in the case of Rogue Trooper, the writer Gerry Finley-Day had a background in the territorial army. So he knew what he was talking about. It’s why his Rogue Trooper stories were always more popular than subsequent writers who took over his character. The same applies to his Fiends of the Eastern Front featuring German soldiers. And his V.C.s about combat in space. The readers sensed he knew what he was talking about.
3. If you don’t know anyone like your hero, but still feel compelled to write about them, then turn to a non-fiction source for inspiration. Thus, having an Irish upbringing, I was drawn to Celtic myths. For Sláine, I looked at accounts of ancient Celtic battles, and Celtic myths and legends, notably the legend of Cuchulain in The Tain. Draw on reality as much as you can.
4. To ensure you’re staying within commercial tramlines, read books and watch films in the same genre. Not to copy them, but to see what the current style and appeal is. And ensure you have something equally valuable and powerful to offer. Don’t be disheartened by other authors’ impressive writing: they’re not always as beyond your reach and capabilities as you might think. For example, read any fantasy story by Lord Dunsany, a writer at the turn of the twentieth century (available free online), and you’ll see how he influenced most subsequent fantasy writers. Everyone from H. P. Lovecraft to Tolkien to Michael Moorcock. I didn’t know about Lord Dunsany when I was creating Sláine and I’m glad I didn’t, because his work could have affected me. Instead, Sláine is a highly original character that owes little to other fictional barbarians or fantasy heroes.
5. Pick another genre – Westerns, for instance, which easily convert to fantasy, crime or science fiction. See how the ground rules are roughly the same and plot lines and sequences can inspire stories in a different genre. Thus there are elements of High Noon in my robot story The Terra Meks. A priest tries without success to find someone who will help Charlie, a giant robot, stand up to the Terra Meks who are about to destroy the city of Northpool. So Charley faces them alone.
6. The hero should go through an emotional story arc. Often they refuse the quest, before reluctantly going ahead, and are still obstructed by the flaws within them which they may or may not finally triumph over.
7. They have to be up against powerful forces of evil that will make life incredibly difficult for them. Great villains make for a great hero.
8. Once you have your hero, consider what you want them to say or do that’s unique. How they can look or act in a memorable way. Go for long walks or sit in crowded, noisy pubs, musing on your character. Expect your hero to go through endless changes and refinements, a process that could take two weeks to six months or even longer, but if you’re passionate about the character you won’t care.
Let’s now look at what kind of hero they should be in a little more detail. All my heroes – whether in comics or in text novels – are invariably working class and/or the underdog.
There’s Charley Bourne, the boy soldier hero of the anti-war saga Charley’s War. Defoe is an ex-Leveller and 17th century zombie hunter. Moonchild (from the comic Misty) fights an abusive mother and school thugs. Nemesis, an alien demon, leads the alien resistance against a tyrannical human empire. Cassy in Land of No Tears (from the comic Jinty) travels forward in time to compete with genetically perfect but emotionless schoolgirls. Old One Eye, an ancient T-rex, battles human time travellers in Flesh. Marshal Law, a humble hospital orderly, hunts and kills America’s greatest superheroes.
There’s a common theme here – my heroes are all from an underclass in one form or another and they all win. Old One Eye, for instance, dies from old age. Consider how many underclass protagonists usually lose. Bank robbers, for example. Or revolutionaries or activists fighting the system – such as Zola’s Germinal. Or good-time girls having fun but ultimately paying the price as in Bitter Harvest by Patrick Hamilton.
I believe this is an establishment edict and mindset that filters through most of the media: you must obey, you cannot win against our overwhelming authority. Know your place. Conan Doyle criticised Raffles, the gentleman thief, who was hugely popular. ‘You must not make the criminal a hero.’ Ignoring, of course, Sherlock Holmes’s use of cocaine. And there are modern exceptions – Peaky Blinders, for example – but even there the protagonist pays a terrible price for his defiance and victory over the establishment. Similarly, The Monocled Mutineer, Percy Toplis, although showing authority up for the arrogant idiots they so often were, to the fury of Tory MPs at the time, once again pays a price for his defiance and his rebellion.
My characters do not go unscathed: sacrifices are often made, just as in real life, but they don’t pay the heavy price demanded by society for bucking the system.
They win and survive and – wherever it is possible – live happily ever after. Because in real life, those who challenge the system do actually win time and time again. But the establishment hates that with a passion and does not want audiences to be aware that ordinary people can and often do defeat the system.
One abortive project I had with Channel 4 featured the 1920s true story of three sex workers taking cannabis in a Chinese laundry in a case that ‘scandalised the nation’ (well, it scandalised the Daily Mail, actually). The lead character’s final, fictional fate was up to me. To me, it would have been inconceivable for her to have suffered the usual typical Bitter Harvest fate and be left dead in the gutter or broken and imprisoned in the workhouse or the asylum. That would have been a deal-breaker for me. No, she became empowered, retired from ‘the game’, and ended up owning and running a successful teashop. The opposite of the usual Christian/State finger-wagging message about paying the Wages of Sin. Not in my world. And not in real life. Ex sex workers often become very successful business women.
Working-class heroes are relatively rare in fiction, apart from such series as Peaky Blinders, so this needs lingering on. Because I believe we are deliberately programmed and conditioned to think our own lives are not important and not worth writing or reading about. Instead, heroes are usually elitist. Invariably superheroes (often billionaires with ‘shock and awe’ super-powers) dominate our cinemas. Yet I’m not aware of any good-guy billionaires in real life. Gates? Musk? Bezos? There’s no Bruce Wayne there. It’s a fantasy of the elite. They are characters we’re meant to look up to. Given the misery they cause, we should be looking down on them.
Consider how the majority of classic heroes are middle class or upper class: Sherlock Holmes, Richard Hannay, James Bond, Ashenden, Scarlet Pimpernel, Batman, Superman and Iron Man. And this is deliberate: the media gatekeepers want it that way. And even today, they will stop you if you offer anything different, unless you find a way to ‘slip under the wire’. I once clashed with a Doctor Who TV script editor because he said I couldn’t possibly have a working-class captain of a spaceship (a huge abattoir in space). The space captain was a fairly rough character, based on the real-life working-class captain of a dredger, but that didn’t matter. We can’t have working-class captains. Roles of authority must be filled by ‘our betters’.
When there are working class protagonists, they are invariably desperate criminals like Graham Greene’s superb characters: Raven in A Gun For Sale, Pinkie in Brighton Rock and Harry Lime in The Third Man. And they are usually destroyed. So the relentless message is drummed into us: do not challenge the system. An extreme example of this is the film Never Let Me Go, where young people are harvested for their organs, and accept their fate. It’s the only film I’ve watched where a number of people in the cinema audience actually walked out – perhaps because they were so disgusted by the characters’ defeatism?
The common theme to my storytelling is the hero taking back their power, challenging the system and winning.
I believe there’s a huge appetite for this kind of story today. Many publishers will probably not agree with me, because they are generally gatekeepers, and instinctively react negatively to such stories. The 1970s era of New English Library with its hard-hitting titles and working-class heroes, aimed at a ‘down-market’ audience, is long gone. But today’s audience will still love such stories, even if the ex-public school boys now controlling the system don’t care for them. Hence Charley’s War, an anti-war saga, with a not very bright kid as the hero, was the number one story in Battle, a pro-war comic about World War Two and it still has a strong audience today, both here and in Europe. Today, it would be impossible to originate a story with such a strong anti-establishment message. It would never get past the gatekeepers. Believe me, I tried.
The usual hero story today is rather different. We are brainwashed into Orwellian thinking that the system, and America in particular, is constantly under attack by sinister forces, rather than the system having created those sinister forces in the first place. Consequently, so many authors produce mildly rebellious, but ultimately obedient establishment heroes. ‘My country right or wrong.’ They’re the stories most likely to get past the gatekeepers. Usually these heroes are dealing with ‘terrorists’, the designated villains of the 21st century, that actually goes back to the 19th century with Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Not surprisingly, Conrad’s book has been dramatised several times in recent years. The state is under attack by evil anarchists with the help of the dastardly Russians. The propaganda is that blatant. Is that really what you want to write? Commercially, you would be absolutely spot on. The gatekeepers will love you. But it’s bad for your soul and it will cost you in some way, unless you’ve got an angle that is somehow still heartfelt and sincere.
Meanwhile, there are more valid home-grown villains, perfect for drama, who are generally ignored because they have close links to the establishment. Corporate arms dealers and establishment paedophile rings, for example. Both are truly evil, yet they rarely feature in stories. People in the media have told me those subjects are usually ‘taboo’.
An example which illustrates some of these points is my series which began life with Kevin O’Neill as a proposed TV comedy: Read ‘Em and Weep. It features a working-class protagonist, comic writer and editor Dave Maudling, who fights back against the system. Like all interesting characters in fiction, he’s flawed, so we watch his progress from coward to hero.
Even more importantly, his young readers also fight back against their oppressors – an establishment paedophile ring – and win. Outside fantasy, this is unheard of in fiction. Kids are generally portrayed as senseless terrors, as in Lord of the Flies, or in Kids Rule Ok! –a strip in my comic Action. Neither of which I carry a torch for. Kids are not meant to take the law into their own hands. It’s taboo. It’s all right for the privileged billionaire Batman to be a vigilante, beating up underclass street scum, but it not okay for young people to carry out vigilante justice. Even though they do. I certainly did when I was a kid. It was very satisfying and cathartic. Whatever society claims to the contrary, kids are meant to accept their fate and become victims, such as in Never Let Me Go. Or, at best, turn to ‘wise’ adults for help who will intervene on their behalf. Really? Oh, you mean like social workers?! As you may be aware, social workers and their ilk have often ended up harming children, too, or turning a blind eye when other adults harmed them.
So, for me, this is something worth writing about – a hero fighting real life injustice and real life establishment villains. And what’s the alternative? For female protagonists, there are a range of possibilities, but for male protagonists, it’s most likely to involve two-dimensional but scary terrorists endlessly threatening America. Invariably they’re criminal scum, broken secret agents, or deranged psychopaths. If you believe in it and can make it work, good luck to you. I can’t. There’s still horror, science fiction, fantasy crime-noir and historical novels, of course, where you can disguise your message, but the possibilities in the present day are really limited.
SF or historical stories can regularly slip under the radar of the gatekeepers because it was all a long time ago or in a galaxy far away, so who cares? The success of 2000AD was based upon this premise. I consciously – and with huge sadness and regret – retreated from the reality of Action because we couldn’t win. The forces we were up against were too formidable and only certain stories in Action ticked the right boxes. But in the world of science fiction we regularly got away with some quite sensational and shocking stories because they involved robots, cyborgs or aliens, rather than humans. So our stories didn’t appear to be as hard-hitting as stories set in the present day. That said, I still personally see much of SF as a form of escapism and wish there were more film, comics and books focussed on modern times.
And it’s also possible to use a little subterfuge to get the green-light from the gatekeepers. I’m told writer-artist Bill Sienkiewicz got his wildly psychedelic series Stray Toasters past a Marvel editor by saying ‘It will be a bit like Die Hard’. Check out Stray Toasters and the comparison may well elude you! So there are ways. More on subterfuge later. After all, I did it with Marshal Law where the hero, with a deep hatred of superheroes, was published by Marvel and is currently published by D.C. Comics, both premier homes of mainstream superheroes. This was definitely a case of ‘letting the fox in with the chickens’. And Law still has the feathers in the mouth slit of his gimp mask to prove it.
It is a challenge to get past the gatekeepers and produce a story that has something valid to say without it being totally obscured by SF, fantasy or historical window dressing. All too often an audience will fall in love with the wrapping paper, rather than what’s actually in the box. But it may be the only way to get your message across. If you succeed, your Muse will love you for creating a genuine hero, rather than a phoney hero of the elite.
Because, as John Lennon said, ‘A working class hero is something to be.’
In my own writing the wealthy, powerful establishment characters are almost always the baddies, or at least at fault for much of what is wrong or bad in their world. You only have to read a newspaper to see those narratives played out every day.
Bang on.