So, time for more sharing?
OK. My brain isn’t connected enough for writing fiction at the moment anyway.
Something you’ve probably noticed in my stories on this site (and which may disappoint some visitors) is that I don’t have much in the way of “Pow!” and “Bam!” stuff in here. There are fight scenes sometimes, but mostly, I’m dealing with the interactions and motivations of super-powered types, as well as the social implications of having people with superpowers in the world.
This isn’t going to change.
You see, what really kept me reading comic books even when I was a wee lad wasn’t the fighting or the colorful costumes. Certainly, those things helped, and I enjoyed them. But what always kept me more interested was the characterization. And the more I got to see of a superhero or supervillain’s mental workings, travails and personality, the more connected I was.
This is why I gravitated early to Marvel Comics, because when I started reading comics, it was the company that did the best job of mixing day-to-day life with superheroics. The Fantastic Four was fraught with in-fighting and arguments because they were, essentially, a loving but dysfunctional family. Spider-Man was constantly juggling the needs of his personal life with being a hero, and finding that the latter often ruined the former. Iron Man was an alcoholic genius who often hovered near the edge of disaster personally. And so on.
DC Comics didn’t resonate much with me early because the heroes didn’t seem very interesting. There was always this unrealistic “we always take the moral high ground” thing that didn’t seem very logical. Superpowered beings are going to all uniformly stick to the same rigid moral code? Really? People don’t work that way.
Gradually, DC got itself out of that mode though they’ve long been unable to completely rid themselves of that unrealistic “goody-goody” thing that is held to by almost every hero. But they’ve brought enough reality in to make their characters more compelling in my young adulthood and into my middle age years.
As I build this world of the Whethermen (a superhero group which hasn’t even officially formed yet, despite the number of stories I’ve written, but we’re leading up to that), I’m more interested in seeing how the world deals with transhumans and how transhumans deal with the world and with each other.
It’s sometimes the little things that catch my imagination, like how these folks would get their costumes. After all, most wouldn’t have tailoring skills or ready access to all the materials they might need. And so I envisioned how designers (both high-brow and knock-off types) might capitalize on a market to provide such things.
I also wonder about income. A hero would have expenses (medical, costume, equipment, etc.) but even if he or she has a day job, how would they fund that? To me, the answer seems obvious: Most would take what they need from the crooks they take down.
I also thought about other things, like how wearing costumes would actually work to the advantage of a villain, for example. (No fingerprints if you wear gloves, and your face is masked, so harder to tie you to a crime. Also, you can dress up other people like you so that you don’t get harrassed all the time in public.)
I also thought about how potential heroes might get “trained” since few people know even basic self-defense and fighting skills, much less full-fledged martial arts. And so I thought of how a variation on the Guardian Angels might fill that role.
My goal, in the end, is to create compelling stories and engaging characters, and to do so with the fantasy twist that brings extra color to things.
I hope I succeed.
I will try to resist the urge to deal with how a hero or villain might piss with all that gear on, though…