Superheroes and Supervillains

Superheroes and supervillains - the staple of comic book history. All in black and white (first literally, still metaphorically) and all about the eternal struggle of good and evil where good always wins. One might wonder why the villains still try…

 

Comics are not the only place where black-and-white sensibilities are common. Pulp stories also deal in absolutes, with good heroes and evil villains. It’s easy to portray the fight between hero and villain as a binary one - making one purely good and one purely evil. Fairy tales have done that a long time before pulp stories came about. A lot of our stories, no matter the genre, are based around the idea that someone is fully right and someone is fully wrong.

Yet, is that necessarily the case? Modern comics and comic book movies often give the villain a point - instead of having the purely evil villain, they have a person who uses the wrong means to achieve understandable ends. That is both good and bad, to be honest. It makes the villain more human, which is not a bad thing, but often takes away from the actual conflict, because the villain does have a point. On the other hand, heroes have often been replaced by anti-heroes - people who are not good for goodness’ sake, but do things for the sake of money or glory or other things. They, too, are not a classic hero any longer, even if that makes them more modern and more realistic.

 

Almost to the day one month ago, I did release “The Lives and Times of Isadora Goode”. It’s the only series I write (volume 2 is fully plotted, but not yet written) which is set in a world where both superheroes and supervillains exist and I didn’t go all ‘black and white’ for my hero.

Isadora was born into a family with a long history of heroic deeds. Her father is a legendary hero, her brother is training to be a hero, and her mother used to be a damsel. That was to be Isadora’s fate, too - becoming a damsel because her powers weren’t extraordinary enough to become a hero.

I could have made her story about becoming a vigilante at night and proving people who think a woman needs to be extremely powerful to be a hero wrong. Yet, that would have made her quite similar to Maddie Dempsey, the main character from my ‘The Eye’ series. In addition, I found another path more interesting.

Instead of becoming a hero, a damsel, or just a regular citizen, Isadora chooses the evil side. She’s my second necromancer and, unlike Gabrielle Munson, has chosen this path and worked for her powers. Isadora’s biggest goal in life is to codify necromancy as the first necromancer in over a hundred years, to make it more science than superstition. Research needs funding, though, and funding needs work, so she creates undead creatures for other villains, as workers or guards, and assists them like it.

I also created her equivalent from the other side of the battle - Lisabet Lewis, a woman from an old villainous family who decided to join the good side and become a damsel. Fate throws them together by making Lisabet the damsel assigned to Isadora’s brother Connor. Since Connor chooses Isadora as his nemesis, this also connects Lisabet and Isadora, as a damsel in the highly ritualized fight between good and evil is as connected to the villain as she is to the hero.

 

Why have I decided on this? Well, first of all, because it was fun. In addition, because I liked the idea of a society where the fight between heroes and villains has been going on for so long that it has become ritualized, that there are rules for how heroes and villains interact. There are two organisations, the League of Heroes and the Villains’ Cabal, which represent their members, codifying and ritualizing their relationship further.

At the same time, this has also given me the chance to show that underneath the headings of ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ are human beings. Neither are heroes all good, nor are villains all evil. Through Isadora’s eyes, people like Baron Asmodeus (her mentor and her father’s nemesis), the Master of the Deep, or Christian de la Croix are not evil at all - they are colleagues and friends. Through her eyes, William Goode aka Thunderclap and Connor Goode aka Powerhouse, her father and brother, are not all that good - they are prone to bending or even breaking rules to make sure the evil side never wins. I do enjoy that very much, because I’ve never bought that there are such clear distinctions.

 

Yet, I do like those ‘good vs. evil’ stories in general. I’m a big fan of pulp stories and I do love fairy tales, too (even though modern retellings are more to my taste). ‘Good vs. evil’ means high stakes, instant conflict, and can lead to very interesting stories. A lot of action movies are based entire on the hero being all right and the villain being all wrong, which means that audiences don’t have to think about any philosophical or moral questions. What the hero does is right, what the villain does is wrong, end of story.

I also do like the idea of pure evil villains, especially with people these days no longer writing so many of them. There is something very satisfying in having a villain who is powerful and competent and at the same time has no ‘understandable’ motive for what they are doing. We don’t demand of the hero to give us a reason for ‘doing good,’ so why should we demand a reason for ‘doing evil’ from the villain? Reasons can be found, of course - world domination or just riches always make for an explanation. Yet, the point about a pure evil villain is that they enjoy being pure evil. They don’t have a goal they want to reach, they enjoy wreaking havoc and causing misery. It can be a lot of fun to write them - as it can be a lot of fun to watch them or read about them.

 

Don’t take the whole ‘good vs. evil’ spiel for the only way to use superheroes and supervillains. There are a lot of other interesting and fun ways to use them. Try out making a pure evil villain and have fun with their unbridled evilness. See whether you can turn the idea of who is good and who is evil on its head. There are many ways to have fun with the principle of superheroes and supervillains, with and without cape and spandex.