So now I have two superhero comics to work on. I only recently returned to reading superhero comics, after about twenty years of ignoring them. It was a happy reunion, for the most part, because the quality of them has improved enormously since I gave them up in the nineties. There are some real writers working in the field now, and say what you will about independent creative freedom, I love reading a professionally-written comic. Nevertheless, I found that there were still a lot of tropes that bothered me about superheroes. I realized, once I started thinking seriously about it, that if I was going to create my own, I was going to have to deal with those issues. Changes were going to have to be made. So here’s what I did:
ORIGINS: Superheroes in the comics have outrageous origin stories. Lab explosions, radiation exposure, magic, ancient deities, aliens from other planets that somehow look just like humans… it all required a lot of suspension of disbelief. The comic book world was a crazy place, and you had to buy into a lot of bizarre over-the-top weirdness to have it all make sense. So in my comics universe I created a single source for all superpowers, a super-adaptive alien cell that Dr. Vandergrift attached to a virus and distributed amongst the populace to keep a power-hungry government organization from having exclusive access to superpowers. (More on that in a future post!)
CATCHING BAD GUYS: The odds of a superhero actually catching criminals in the act of committing crimes are low, even if they patrol the streets, rooftops or skies every night. The odds of catching them often enough to make the exercise worthwhile are astronomically low. So I created HEROES.ORG, a smartphone app that makes every citizen a watchdog and gets the heroes to the scene in minutes. Everyone has the app, and with a single click they can record twenty seconds of whatever they see happening, and it gets uploaded to the HEROES.ORG website along with their GPS location. An alert is sent to every phone in the area, some of which will be in the hands of superheroes, or ultraheroes, as I like to call them. The heroes can assess the situation from the video clip, note the GPS location on the provided map, and attend to the crisis while it’s still happening. Everyone else can take it as a warning to stay away from that location, though, human nature being what it is, many will undoubtedly flock to the spot to watch the fight.
POWER CORRUPTS: I believe most people would be corrupted by having a superpower. How many times have you seen someone, because of their job or position, gain authority over others and let it go right to their heads? All over the world, anywhere you look, power and corruption go hand-in-hand. kings and dictators abuse their power so frequently it’s a given, and politics is rife with corruption. Corporate CEO’s make money with a predatory greed that cares nothing for the damage they do or the lives they ruin. Police departments go to great lengths to filter out officers who abuse their authority, and still abuses occur daily. In the real world, more often than not, power corrupts.
Imagine, then, your neighbor suddenly gaining superpowers. Will he use them to make the world a better place? Possibly. But far more likely, he’ll use them to enrich himself, probably at the expense of others. That’s the world we live in. So if there were a virus loose in the world that caused a scattering of people, entirely at random, to manifest superpowers, what would happen? How many of them would become corrupted by their power? I think most of them would, eventually.
Thus it is that in my comics multiverse, ultraheroes are outnumbered by ultravillains twenty to one. Not only does this reflect real-life human nature, it also provides a practical reason for ultraheroes to exist. Ordinary police would be hopelessly outclassed by ultra-powered criminals, and only ultra-powered vigilantes could stand against them. Therefor, in my comics world, the entire purpose of ultraheroes is to counter the onslaught of ultravillains, and seriously, that’s what we want to watch them doing anyway, right?
SUPER-POWERED NON-HEROES: In superhero comics, nearly everyone who gains superpowers becomes a superhero and fights crime. Here in the real world, most people are not superhero material. Even if they manage to avoid becoming corrupt, most people are simply not heroically brave. In real-world emergencies, how many people have the courage and confidence to step up and do the heroic thing? Very, very few. It follows, then, that there will be some people who have the strength of will to resist corruption, but do not become heroes. They might keep their power a secret, or use it to earn a living. These people, too, will play a part in my stories.
SKIN-TIGHT COSTUMES: As an artist, I enjoy drawing physically-fit characters wearing skin-tight costumes that reveal every swell, curve and hollow of their bodies as they fight. While, admittedly, I like to draw men less bulky and women less busty than the comic-book norm, I pride myself on my knowledge of comic-book anatomy, and I want to show it off at every opportunity. While skin-tight costumes are a mainstay of superhero comics, it’s a little hard to justify them in a more practical setting. So I invented nano-fiber suits.
Thanks to the introduction of alien technology in the sixties (from the same incident that brought ultrapowers to the world), there are a few areas where my comics world is ahead of us technologically. Primarily, they are anti-gravity pods, quantum-flux power generators, and nano-fiber. Nano-fiber is a fabric made of millions of tiny interlocking metal smart-links, powered by body-heat. Each link is capable of detecting any incoming object moving at a dangerous speed, and reacting by magnetically locking together with all the other nano-links around it, forming a rigid surface for just a microsecond. That rigid surface can deflect bullets and other projectiles, distributing their impact over a large area of the body to prevent injury. When not rigid, nano-fiber is flexible as chainmail, and thin as paper. The links are too small to see without a magnifying glass, so the material looks like extra-thin spandex to the naked eye.
With all the ultras wearing nano-fiber, guns are mostly useless against them, so other forms of violence become necessary. This justifies the dramatic punch-ups we all love so much, and makes everybody look great at the same time. Win-frickin’-win!
CITY-STATES: I’ve made a few other changes to the world in my comics multiverse. About six years before these stories begin, a deranged, narcissistic megalomaniac with mind-control powers got himself elected president of the United States. One of the two political parties discovered his secret and tried to impeach him, but the other party refused to believe they’d been fooled and staunchly defended the mad tyrant. (Sound familiar?) Though the impeachment was decisive, only half of the government considered it legitimate. The entire federal government has been locked in a battle for power for five years now, and is completely dysfunctional. The cities of America, having to fend for themselves, have become autonomous city-states, the nearby towns fiefdoms. A few cities have been taken over by ultravillains, and that has become the goal for many of the most ambitious villains.
The corporations, who have been the real power behind the government all along, have taken advantage of the situation. They work to hold society together, providing communication, transportation and commerce between the city-states, because their profit margin depends on it. They thrive in the current situation, because without government regulation or oversight, they can do as they please behind the scenes. Corporate espionage and even corporate wars are common, but are kept secret by corporate-controlled media. It’s a cyberpunk world… and one that’s not so different from real-life America.
So there you have it, the basis for my ultrahero comics universe. I want to avoid boring my readers with a data dump in mid-story, so these items will be revealed one at a time when it becomes expedient, plot-wise. You, however, are now ahead of the game.