Pageturners: Creating Villains Pt 2
‘Eyes without life, sundered heads, these are pleasing words to me.’
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 also talked about creating villains: clearly a big subject, so it needed to be split into two posts!
Slough Feg in Sláine is one of my all-time favourite villains. It’s a reader favourite too. There’s even an American heavy metal band named after him. In pre-internet days I spent a fortune on the Four Ancient Books of Wales, notably the Book of Taliesin, trawling through them, carefully noting the bard’s unique speech pattern. I didn’t want any golem speech pattern rip-offs in Sláine. These ancient tomes inspired Feg’s memorable phrases such as ‘Eyes without life, sundered heads, these are pleasing words to me.’ And, ‘Am I not a candidate for fame?’
Of course all villains have to look good, so they need an original, even a unique design and in this the writer is totally at the mercy of the artist who can make or break a villain. I always wanted Slough Feg to look like the sorcerer drawn on the wall in the Cave of Trois-Freres. The oldest sorcerer in the world, he is so memorably unique and, seemingly, impossible to draw.
I don’t care for bog standard, ‘off the peg’, evil sorcerers, as so often depicted in Conan, so I really pushed for this image. But no Sláine artists got him right – to my satisfaction at least. All too often he looked like a Womble. I still regret not asking Angela Kincaid, my ex-wife and co-creator of Sláine, to design him. Because she had an unacknowledged and un-applauded Sláine for making my ‘impossible’ requirements look possible and even easy, so that other artists could copy her. Somehow, she would have entered the soul of the sorcerer and brought this monster to life.
Take her depiction of Sláine and also her design for Finn’s mask (my eco-warrior character) – they’re both spot on and follow my directions to the letter. That’s the mark of a great creator. Carlos Ezquerra was a similar brilliant creator. Simon Bisley’s Feg in the Horned God is a truly fantastic villain but still a traditional one and he’s still not that guy on the wall of the Cave of Trois Freres. Ah, well. Sometimes it’s too much to ask of an artist.
Modern day real-life villains can be drab by comparison. Take Tony Blair for example – all he has going for him is the phoney sincerity of a double glazing salesman, so few writers are likely to cast him as a fictional villain. I personally would have no idea how to do it. And yet his war crimes in Iraq mean he really should be included in a pantheon of villains. I hope someone can figure a way.
I do think there is a case for knowing your villain personally, or at least carefully researching him. An obvious villain was/is Aleister Crowley. But great writers have beaten us to him. He appears as Mocata in Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out. And Oliver Haddo in The Magician by Somerset Maughan. And doubtless many more novels beside. But he does feature in Requiem as Black Sabbat, and I think the artist Olivier Ledroit has depicted him beautifully. I read a lot of Crowley’s life and writings to characterise him, focussing especially on his relationship with Leah Hirsig, the ‘Ape of Thoth’.
Anglo-Catholic Tom Driberg was named as Crowley’s successor and I’ve researched him exhaustively because he reminded me of similar dubious characters milling around in my youth. A look at his Wikipedia entry will show you the potential of Driberg. Unfortunately, he’s also revered by the literati and those who knew his numerous crimes have closed ranks, so I’ve had to give up on him for the time being. I must re-read A Little White Death by John Lawton, an Inspector Troy novel, where I recall Driberg featured briefly.
As one author of a how-to writing book put it, ‘Writers are thieves. We steal people’s lives.’
Another great choice for a villain, theoretically, would be Baron Zaharoff, the infamous merchant of death. Unfortunately he knew that only too well in his lifetime, and destroyed any incriminating evidence writers could draw upon. As one author of a how-to writing book put it, ‘Writers are thieves. We steal people’s lives.’
Zaharoff seems burglar-proof. Yes, he does feature in Tin Tin, and Troy Kennedy Martin did a great job characterising him, albeit briefly, in Reilly, Ace of Spies, where he was brilliantly portrayed by actor Leo McKern. He also appears as the greedy industrialist Sir Marcus in Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale. ‘A plausible villain for those days,’ Greene said. But as he didn’t know him personally, and there was so little information available, even to someone as well-connected as Greene, Zaharoff doesn’t come over as powerfully as the lesser villains in A Gun For Sale. Greene clearly knew them well and they absolutely leap off the page. By comparison, Sir Marcus is just ‘okay’.
After reading several biographies of Zaharoff for a second time, I think I’ve finally cracked him. So he will feature in one of my forthcoming projects.
No consideration of villains would be complete without referring to flawed characters rather than arch villains. Yet their flaws and their destructive impact on the protagonist means they should also be classed as villains, despite their often likeable persona. In John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, the protagonist’s father is such a character: the charismatic con-man Rick Pym, inspired by the author’s own father. Both Sláine’s parents are equally dysfunctional. I covered them in Sláine the Brutania Chronicles and how their aberrant and irresponsible behaviour left a deep scar on Sláine, just as Rick badly affected his son, the perfect spy.
And there is an appeal about Torquemada, with his hatred of aliens that surely touches a nerve of recognition in all of us. I very much doubt that intelligent alien life will be benign and kindly towards human beings. That’s just a comforting fairy tale in the original Dan Dare and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of The Third Kind. But in the remote possibility that aliens do turn out to be good guys, they won’t last long at the hands of humans, given our track record. So, loathsome as Torquemada is, he does bring out the potential xenophobe in us. It’s why I would endlessly mock him – just in case readers grew too fond of him and his foul but popular message: Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave!
I decided a very long time ago that if I was going to remain in comics, I would have to explore the real nature of evil and feature people who are true villains,
not just the traditional comic cardboard cut-outs, not just pantomime villains in dark cloaks with manic laughs whom I find insufferably boring. That search for the true nature of evil found its pinnacle in Third World War and the real causes of world hunger. The corporations responsible know exactly what they are doing and the consequences of their policies, and are far worse than the usual bad guys we see on screen, in novels or in comics. In the course of Third World War and Finn, I found a way to make the corporate bosses come alive and be every bit as engaging as the standard psychopaths and terrorists who I believe are deliberately designed to distract us from the truth. Generally, comics avoid such controversy and go for ‘safe’ villains. There was considerable opposition to Third World War from my fellow professionals, despite doing well commercially. I guess they felt this direction in comics was a threat to the safe escapism of science fiction and fantasy.
Ground down by endless negativity, I sometimes wondered if I had indeed gone too far. I voiced these doubts at a talk I did at the Gibraltar Literary Festival a couple of years ago. I quoted the episode where I featured the Nestle baby food scandal and the associated deaths, a scandal which is still ongoing to this day. Not the usual subject matter for a boys comic! And quite difficult at the time, as Nestle were a major advertiser for the publishing house. I talked to an organiser of the Nestle boycott and gained some insights into what makes these corporate villains tick. To my surprise, the Gibraltar audience said they remembered the episode well and had no problem with it as I’d found an entertaining way to put the villainy across. So I take heart from that.
Some time later, I met an Expat who’d been a senior executive at Nestle. I raised my concerns about them and he quickly responded, like a mantra, ‘But no one ever talks about all the good work they do.’ (A standard justification for the Catholic Church, too). He then went on to tell me that Nestle had been displeased with him because he had put serious concerns about his family’s health ahead of his work. They had wanted him to move to a part of the world where his family’s well-being would have been compromised. He refused, so they recommended he move on. He saw their shocking behaviour as perfectly okay. That tells you a great deal about genuine villains and how their victims accept their behaviour.
More recently, I saw a Nestle spokesperson appearing on a youtube to justify their acquisition of water. She was young and dressed all in white, so she seemed like a member of a new age cult. Unfortunately, her soft-spoken defence was directly contradicted by her corporate boss, who also appeared.
So if you’re interested in the nature of good and evil, there’s a lot to be explored here. To the credit of James Bond, they explored the issue of water being appropriated by corporations in Quantum of Solace.
Cobalt and lithium use in electric cars also bring villains to the surface. Notably Elon Musk who, in pursuit of lithium in Bolivia famously said: "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.’
Third World War and Finn have finally been reprinted, so they demonstrate other ways corporate bad guys can be exposed in comic fiction. I hope they will inspire others.
For instance, if I could find the right story vehicle and had the time, I would take a further look at transnationals. Thus Kelloggs are currently in the news because they are challenging government restrictions. According to the Daily Mail, ‘Kellogg's is taking the Government to court over new rules that would stop some of its cereals being put in prominent positions on supermarket shelves as they have high amounts of sugar. The Government says the rules are needed to deal with childhood obesity, with recent figures showing more than a quarter of 10-11 year olds in England are obese.’ The Road To Wellville covers some of the story of the company’s founder, but there’s so much more to him. Here’s Kellogg’s insane views on masturbation:
‘Kellogg strongly warned against the habit in his own words, claiming of masturbation-related deaths "such a victim literally dies by his own hand", among other condemnations. He felt that masturbation destroyed not only physical and mental health, but moral health as well.’
Kellogg is surely a gift to a writer, although I haven’t figured out how to use him yet. Maybe you will. If a writer digs deep enough, the heads of transnationals can make colourful, humorous and interesting characters to dramatise. They’re not just dreary ciphers in suits after all.
Similarly, I’d love to take a closer look at Big Pharma. Notably Burroughs, Wellcome and Co. who produced ‘Forced March’, the cocaine-based medicine which was given to the troops in World War One and scarred the generation that returned home.
Conny Braam, a Dutch author, has done extensive research on the subject and presents a negative picture of how the drug was supplied – rather different to the cosy, reassuring statements you will find in ‘official’ versions.
It’s a story that needs dramatising. Someone was responsible for Tommies returning from the trenches as desperate junkies breaking into pharmacies. Peaky Blinders hinted at the extent of the problem, but there’s so much more to discover; so much that has been wilfully hidden or ignored by our historians, to their shame.
Comics should be about real villains, not pantomime villains. Not crazy, one-off psychos or Italian Mafia villains of yesteryear, as in the last Batman movie. We need stories about truth, not bullshit. They can still be escapist and entertaining fun at the same time. Foundations of truth will make them all the more entertaining.
Blair is a great example of 'the banality of evil'. I have little doubt that he has the ability to convince himself of his own righteousness. against all the evidence. Likewise his henchman, Alastair Campbell, who literally forced his way on to Channel 4 News during the time of the Hutton Enquiry into the ridiculously-suspicious death of the Iraq weapons inspector, David Kelly. At least, with Campbell, we get the spittle-flecked lips and swivel eyes of a genuine lunatic. The concrete grin and terrified eyes of Blair suggests an unfathomable psychosis.
When Blair converted to Catholicism, I (as a former Catholic myself) was glad for him: Catholics have a proper hell for him to go to.