Pageturners: Creating Villains Pt 1
Basing a villain on a school teacher, a cleric or anyone else that you loathe is an excellent starting point.
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 publish a chapter or a section per week, for free here on Iconoblast. And I welcome your feedback or questions, so do leave a comment below!
Missed the Pageturners intro? Read it here.
Last week I talked about writing and editing comics.
I started with Heroes, so I should really end this first section with Villains. What kind of villains and where to find them. In 2000AD, the greatest villains are undoubtedly Judge Death and Torquemada. Creating a dark version of a hero, like Dredd, is definitely a good way to go. Not only Judge Death but also my Rico Dredd came from flipping a hero over to his dark side. In a similar way, Blue Eyes and Grim Reaper are dark versions of the hero American Reaper that appeared in the Judge Dredd Megazine.
Basing a villain on a school teacher, a cleric or anyone else that you loathe is an excellent starting point. Especially if you have good reason to loathe them: it can be a tremendous catharsis writing about them. Torquemada (and Judge Dredd himself) was inspired by my teachers Brother Solomon and Brother James as I’ve previously related in Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! 2000AD & Judge Dredd: The Secret History. And my last Defoe story has a villain based on my old chemistry teacher.
There was a darkness about the latter that I never really understood, probably because I was too young: all I knew was that it was there. But such a mysterious darkness can be enough in and of itself to create a villain.
In fact, I don’t think I’ll ever run out of teachers, catholic priests, monks and nuns to feature as villains! There’s so many and they need very little amplifying to turn into fantasy villains. Their costumes and appalling behaviour were already verging on the fantastic.
Even in reality stories like Read Em and Weep they work so well as bad guys. The nun headmistress who has a confrontation with young Dave really was that sinister. Here’s a scene from the second book in the series, Goodnight, John-boy, where she gets her just desserts. So to speak.
Mother St Vincent’s bat sisters were also present to intimidate the hell out of Dave and ensure he never spoke of the Canon’s behaviour. Yet, already, she could see from the impertinent expression on his face, his horrid little eyes gleaming with delight, that this little monster was somehow enlivened by the thought of three nuns dealing with him. The very opposite effect of what she had intended. He was meant to be awed by being ushered into the Holy of Holies and yet, perversely, he was enjoying every moment of it. As far as Dave was concerned, the more nuns the better. Ten nuns would have been good.
This made the headmistress afraid and somehow the child knew it; he sensed her fear. He couldn’t articulate it in his mind, couldn’t vocalise it with words, but the animal in him felt it intuitively and it gave him that slight smirk of triumph that also brought out the inner animal in Mother Saint Vincent. She was a small, Napoleonic woman, so she couldn’t tower over him, in fact, they were almost head to head, her features convulsed with rage behind her silver spectacles.
And yet she was afraid as she seized him by the throat and squeezed. Afraid of just what she might have to do silence this child who was endlessly talking about Konrad and the Canon and things that must never be spoken about. Because she had to protect the Church; nothing must ever damage its reputation. And that need and that fear drove her to violence, so, in that moment, she definitely wanted to kill him.
And the boy knew it. And he didn’t seem to care.
And so she squeezed, until he finally felt fear, causing her to increase her grip on his throat.
Now, at last, he was getting the message.
And, as his eyes bulged, he knew she was going to kill him and that was how it should be. St Sebastian looked down on him, glorying in his own pain. There was an inner calm and resignation about the boy that matched the martyr, but yet owed nothing to him, only to his inner being.
Because he knew his death would destroy the nun.
The accompanying nuns warned her, ‘Mother… Mother… Please…Stop…’ And she realised she had almost gone too far.
But that didn’t actually stop her. Because it still had to be done. He had to be silenced. For the sake of the church.
It was the expression on Dave’s face as fear turned to resignation and now to triumph. She wouldn’t be able to hush up his murder as they had hushed up Konrad’s.
If there was a word in Dave’s brain as his young life slipped away, it would have been… ‘Gotcha’.
It was that final defiance that brought her to her senses. Coughing and spluttering and breathing deeply, Dave returned to the land of the living.
And there was an inevitable gag reflex with unfortunate consequences for Mother St Vincent standing directly in front of him.
His school dinner was ejected in all its splendour on her black robes. Semolina: a pallid pink, after he had stirred in the little dollop of jam they put on top, diced carrots, mashed potatoes and spam luncheon meat, all thoroughly consumed, following the exhortations of the school dinner lady, and already partially digested. A second unidentifiable vomit, erupting from even deeper in his guts, also splattered all over her robes and crucifix.
He caught a treasured memory of the horrified expression on her face before he blacked out.
…All super heroes have a seminal experience in their youth that they look back on and realise that the inciting incident – sometimes forgotten, yet secretly motivating their actions – is what makes the man.
So Dave, too, had an experience that confirmed the role destiny had chosen for him. He had vomited on a nun.
It was a seminal moment as well as a semolina moment.
No prizes for guessing who another villain in Read Em and Weep, Fabulous Keen – TV celebrity and national treasure – is based upon. But he’s more than a composite of newspaper and TV accounts about a national treasure. Considerable research went into Keen; notably the curiously under-reported role of semi-masonic organisations in the Catholic church. In my story, Keen is a Knight of St Pancras, the patron saint of children, a fictional fraternal organisation. It was only after I received confirmation from a number of people that I decided my own negative boyhood recollections of similar knights had more than a basis in reality and it was time to write about them. Of course, I’d already been writing about them in ‘safe’ fantasy terms for years as Torquemada’s dreaded Terminators.
But I’ve also had to search elsewhere for villains. You would imagine that colourful, foul-mouthed and nasty individuals would make perfect bad guys. But it’s not always so. I faithfully featured in a screenplay an American producer who was very unpleasant and who I personally found fascinating. To my surprise, my script editor said they found the character too horrible, too cruel, too appalling and wanted them replaced with a ‘milder’ villain. The character in question wasn’t Harvey Weinstein, by the way, who I recall was featured in fictional form in the TV series Entourage, but it was someone of that ilk, well known in film circles. So this is something to bear in mind when you’re casting your villains: sometimes they can leave too unpleasant a taste in the mouth!
Gangs seem safer and more acceptable as villains in comics, no matter how appalling their behaviour. There’s John Wagner’s brilliant Angel Gang in Judge Dredd. And my own Gangreen in Marshal Law, led by Suicida, who was so popular there were plans for him to have his own spin-off series. I came across the name ‘Suicida’ while I was researching guerrilla war in Central America. He was a real life gangster/terrorist – the kind who regularly turns up in TV series like Narcos. I added to him with a student rant I overheard and by reading Class War.