MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 22

This chapter was unusually difficult to write, for a fairly stupid reason.

When I began writing stories as a child, I was usually pretty good at what I now call “character work.” I had a pretty good sense of how people felt and how they would react to the events of the story. Vividly realized characters were my forte, beginning with a large cast of imaginary friends who followed me to school and amused me by making faces behind any teachers who dared to bore me (which, sadly, was most of them).

But I wasn’t any good at complicated plots. I enjoyed reading them—I just didn’t have the sort of brain that naturally came up with them. It’s why I didn’t gravitate toward writing mysteries or thrillers. While I work very hard on my plots—a lack of natural talent is no excuse for mediocrity—it is work in a way that character work really isn’t. And every once in a while, I hit a complicated bit of plotting or design that just knocks me flat, because it really belongs in another genre.

This is a very long way of saying that I have a couple of consultants helping me design my deathtraps.

The design of Trevor’s prison—the tiger cage inside the shipping container—was the work of John Konecsni, author of the very complex and plotty A Pius Man, among other tales. It’s really one of the better trap designs I’ve used, given the resources I handed him and the needs of the project. Cobalt’s impromptu prison had to be something he could construct out of commonly available materials, for starters—when you’re trapping superpowered kids, you have to assume that part of the trap will get trashed from time to time, so you’ve got to make sure you can replace any damaged elements. The trap also had to be modular; because, as he says, he’s selling the kids to the highest bidder, he needs the ability to put kids in and take kids out without interacting with them too much, and also keep them from working together too easily.

And if you’re not impressed, just wait a couple of weeks; you haven’t seen the entire trap yet. Trevor will find out more about his prison when he actually has to get out of it. Remember, there’s a whole world outside that shipping container that could have anything in it …

This chapter also marks the point where Trevor finally starts to revise the way he thinks and acts. While I never intended Masks to be a navel-gazing sort of story, the changes in Trevor’s and Rae’s characters are a major driving force, and some of Trevor’s changes are particularly intentional. He’s going to work his way back to being more of a traditional superhero, and that process starts here, locked in a cage next to an angry werewolf. After all, what’s the point of self-examination if it doesn’t come with face-clawing?

Random note: if you’ve never seen Otter Pops, you can find out more about them here. I knew Cobalt wasn’t stupid enough to give Trevor anything hard to work with, so that meant his water couldn’t come in anything made of glass, metal, or rigid plastic. An IV line would be too much trouble, and for reasons you’ll see later, Cobalt can’t come throw a bucket of water over the cages on a regular basis. Otter Pops were my solution. And for the record, Sir Isaac Lime was my favorite flavor, so there.

This week’s soundtrack is (what else?) Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.”

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 21

I think this chapter speaks for itself, essentially, so I’ll be brief.

This is the first chapter where we really get to see the effects of Rae’s stubbornness and determination. We’ve known all along that she was determined to get into the alpha track, and that she wouldn’t let a little thing like her lack of superpowers stop her—but I can’t imagine the awkward, slightly hesitant girl we met in Chapter 1 threatening to call a world-famous superhero Tinkerbell. The last six weeks have changed her character dramatically, and not necessarily for the better.

The method Rae uses to trap John Lawrence goes back to an old comic-shop discussion I had years ago where we were all trying to come up with unusual but vital things that Batman might have in his utility belt. Finally, someone (I don’t remember whether it was me or somebody else) suggested, “A microrecorder with a tape of Lois Lane screaming.” The idea was that whenever Batman was in real trouble, he’d be able to hit the button and Superman would hear Lois yelling for help. He’d never be able to resist such a summons, and he’d instantly come crashing to the rescue—which, we agreed, might get a little awkward once he realized his lady love wasn’t actually in peril (or at least, not in peril right there). We had great fun imagining Superman covering his eyes with one hand and saying, “Bruce, how many times have I asked you to throw that thing away?” as the newly freed Batman is trashing the last of the bad guy’s goons.

Amusingly, a few years after the argument, J. Michael Straczynski used a remarkably similar device in an issue of Amazing Spider-Man, with equally hilarious results:

 

Now, I could have had Rae use a recording, but I decided John Lawrence’s super-ears would have to be able to tell a recorded scream from a real one (otherwise he’d be constantly swooping into living rooms to save people who were watching horror movies), so I went with the real thing. Screaming on command is no mean feat (I have real trouble doing it myself), so I gave the job to Tammy, that fount of previously undiscovered talents. And the rest is history.

This week’s soundtrack is “Urban Spaceman” by the Bonzo Dog Band (also called the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band), a novelty song that I’ve always thought would make a great soundtrack to a Superman fight scene:

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 20

This has always been one of my favorite chapters. I’m not sure exactly why—it’s not very plotty, and it’s a bit short on action, and even the funny bits aren’t my usual kind of funny. I think it’s just because I enjoy watching the way Trevor and Jude interact, even if it’s in a sort of strange, hallucinatory sequence.

In a lot of ways, Masks is about orphans. Trevor’s an orphan twice over—his parents died in a car wreck, and then his mentor disappeared on him. Rae is estranged from her family, as are many young masks. And of course, orphan stories are very much about either rediscovering family or building a new family. So Trevor gets a bit of both in this chapter, and seeing him finally get a moment of happiness, however awkward, makes me happy in ways I can’t quite express. I suppose this chapter exists just because it makes me smile.

Still, there’s some good stuff in here, isn’t there?

It was a surprise to me when I wrote this chapter that Jude was a fairly good parent. It really was a toss-up, and one of those things I didn’t know until I sat down to write him. I’d originally conceived the character as someone who would appear only in flashbacks and in Trevor’s memories. After all, by definition, he had to be gone—Trevor didn’t really work as a character if his mentor was running around in the story. Jude was the aching void in Trevor’s life, the hole that would never be filled. So it almost didn’t matter what kind of father he’d been to the kid, as long as Trevor remembered him as a good one. He could have been a real jerk. But for what it’s worth, I think this is very much the way Jude was in real life. Everything was a teachable moment to him, he was never completely without a sense of humor, and he loved his “son” more than he ever said.

The way he plays with Trevor, making him think the situation out, teasing him for being morbid and dramatic—that’s the sort of father Trevor would need to become the man he’ll eventually be. A lot of what went into Jude in this scene was the idea of what Trevor must have lost. I knew when I created him that he’d become a sidekick to protect someone he loved, so I had to make Jude worthy of that kind of devotion. And a kid whose parents have just died isn’t going to become a wisecracking, happy-go-lucky sidekick unless he feels relatively safe and secure in his new family situation—he can’t constantly be worrying that Jude will abandon him, or he won’t have been the kind of kid he was. So while Trevor is very much like Robin in some ways, Jude is very unlike Batman. He’s much more of a dad, and a good one.

That much was intentional; I always thought that most of the kids Batman trained would be pretty solid adult heroes when Batman was gone, but Trevor was so shattered by the loss of his mentor that Jude had to be a different kind of person. He’s much more emotionally involved, wiser and more foolish at the same time—more human, basically. The kind of solid, moral man you’d want defending your city against supervillains, especially because he wouldn’t take himself too seriously. This is not the kind of father you want to take away from a kid like Trevor when the kid is thirteen years old; they’re too good for each other. I knew when I wrote the early drafts of this scene that I would have liked to hang around with Jude before he vanished, and by the time I finished the chapter I missed him just as much as Trevor did.

And that, ultimately, is why not-exactly-Jude was the perfect person to deliver the lesson Trevor needs to learn at this point in the story. As several readers have pointed out, Trevor has been on a very dark path through this whole novel. Even when I was playing around with the possibility that either Trevor or Rae was a murderer, Trevor always seemed like the stronger candidate, and with good reason. All those rules in his head—they could be telling him anything, couldn’t they? What kind of person would teach his surrogate son the things that messed Trevor up so badly? And now you know—Trevor didn’t learn all his lessons from Jude. Like most of us, he has to sort out the good things he’s learned from the bad, and decide for himself who he’s going to be.

Of course, he’s got quite a head start, hasn’t he? His true self looks and sounds remarkably like the man he thinks of as the perfect hero. And he’s not such a bad guy. Trevor might just make it out of the shadows after all, if he survives what Cobalt has in store for him.

And yes, I do know why Jude passed his mantle on to Rae instead of Trevor. It’s an answer worth waiting for, too.

Fun random fact: Nicole’s illustration is loosely based on the Canadian actor Sebastian Spence, who recently appeared in the Canadian drama Sophie. I ran across him when he starred in the sci-fi series First Wave in the late 1990s, and I used him as a mental model for Jude when I first created Trevor. I mentioned this to Nicole in passing, and the next thing I know she’s dug up his current headshot and used it as a starting point for the painting. They didn’t look very much alike by the time she finished, but it amused me to watch her work. So if they ever make a Masks movie, I’m calling it now—Sebastian Spence is my first choice to play Jude. It’s only fair.

This week’s soundtrack is “Famous Last Words,” off Captain Tractor’s new album of the same name, in honor of dead people saying portentous things:

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 19

Well, what do you guys think of this one, huh? Tell me I surprised you at least a little. Go on, tell me. No, seriously, I’ll cry otherwise.

Oh, all right. This chapter is one of those points where the differences between Trevor’s point of view and Rae’s become really apparent. Trevor’s actions in the previous chapter made perfect sense to him, but to Rae they were absolutely crazy. And of course the explanation only makes the whole situation worse.

I enjoyed bending genres in this chapter. I deliberately wrote Rae creeping through the tunnels as if she were in a horror movie. One of the things that always intrigued me about superhero comics is the way they combined genres in utterly insane ways. They’d have team-ups between kung fu masters and wizards and secret agents and vampires and space aliens and cowboys and time travelers and God knows whatall else. You never knew when your favorite superhero would find himself in the middle of a horror movie, or a spy thriller, or a cosmic odyssey. And the superheroes mostly take it for granted that these things happen. So the horror overtones in this chapter were my way of reminding everyone that in a book with a ghost cowboy, a teleporting super-commando, a were-tiger and the last son of a dying planet all running around, anything can happen. And it usually does.

Moving on!

I know I’m going to get asked about this, so I’ll mention it now: the “artist’s impression” Rae mentions was planted waaaaayyy back in Chapter 5, when Rae was griping about her bad press. Yeah, I plan that far back. Anything can happen!

Once again, the conflict in this chapter comes down to whom you believe. We’ve seen in Trevor’s flashbacks that he’s haunted by the train bombing, but do we believe his version of events—that he screwed up—or Rae’s—that he’s a murderous terrorist? And do we believe Rae’s story about finding the Peregrine costume in a box, or do we think she had something to do with Jude’s disappearance? Don’t worry, we’ll get into all these issues in later chapters.

The Masked Rider makes another appearance in this chapter, but you might notice the change in Rae’s behavior—for the first time, instead of hiding from him, she tries to chase him down. I think this is the first scene where we see how reckless Rae’s capable of being. We know she’s scared of the Rider, but that doesn’t matter when someone she loves is at stake. She’s willing to literally chase after the angel of death. She doesn’t do the greatest job of it—there’s no way she’s going to catch that horse on foot—but this is a major turning point for Rae, and you’ll see how it affects her as we move into the last third of the book. This won’t be the last time she does something crazy because she’s run out of non-crazy options.

The next chapter gave me an interesting bit of trouble. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but the chapters in Masks alternate points of view—Rae gets all the odd chapters and Trevor gets all the even ones. Trevor’s just been kidnapped by Cobalt, so the next chapter would logically show what happens to people after Cobalt takes them. But … well, what you see isn’t always what you get, okay? Just come back next Wednesday for a guest star you won’t forget …

This week’s soundtrack is “Reason to Breathe” by Acacia Sears. (Personally, I prefer the recording on her album, "Dialtones", but I couldn't embed it here.) Something about this song speaks to the misunderstanding between Rae and Trevor: “Couldn’t we please just try this again from hello? / Take back the history, make believe we just didn’t know …” 

Reason to Breathe

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 17

In my head, this chapter is labeled INVISIBLE CLOWN ATTACK. With the caps and italics. This is partly because I changed the title of the chapter about five times and partly because I just think invisible killer clowns are hilarious.

I honestly don’t remember how I decided that Tammy would distract people by screaming about invisible clowns. I don’t think the real Tammy suggested it directly, because it sounds just a bit more like something I’d do than like something she’d do—she might come up with the screaming, but I don’t think she has a particular thing about clowns. Well, actually she does, but only as it concerns my friend The Puppet, and he’s entirely visible. I think.

I really liked the way this chapter brought out the unexpected sides of all the characters involved. Tammy, who might have come across as a little thick in previous chapters, turns out to be smarter than anyone expects. Soleil, who’s been playing the bitchy mean girl for most of the story, shows her vulnerable side, and Rae, the perpetual bullying victim, expresses sympathy for someone who looks and acts a lot like one of her tormentors. Trevor’s not the only character with secret corners inside him, or skeletons in his closet, and that’s what this chapter is about. (Well, that and invisible clowns!)

But man, Trevor’s skeleton is pretty big!

Before I delve into Trevor’s secret, I’d like to acknowledge the contributions of perhaps the most useful reference book I own. It’s called Howdunit: How Crimes Are Committed and Solved, and I received a used copy as a gift a couple of years ago. The description of fingerprint analysis in this chapter comes directly from that book, in a chapter by Anne Wingate. If there’s a writer or an aspiring writer in your life, and his or her genre involves crime or police activity in any way, this is the best Christmas gift imaginable. Seriously. Go buy it. It’s also just plain fascinating.

As far as I can tell, this scene pretty accurately reflects how crime-lab technicians would process the bottle, and the results Soleil and Rae get (only one usable print from their “suspect”) are not a reflection of their limited skill; sometimes even the most careful analyst will get only a limited result. Of course, there’s another reason for Trevor’s lack of fingerprints, too, but we’ll get to that later. [Evil smile.]

So—Trevor’s secret! What did you guys think of that one, huh? I know Rae will need a little time to process it. This is, of course, the source of the snowy mountainside and the burning train seen in Trevor’s nightmare waaaaay back in Chapter 2, and in a few flashbacks since. Obviously he’s haunted by the events of that day, but exactly how he got there and why he did what he did … well, that’s a story for a later chapter. For now, suffice it to say that we haven’t seen all of Trevor’s secret past, but we’ve definitely unearthed something he’d rather leave buried. This book is called Masks for a reason; everyone’s hiding something, whether they know it or not. This is the first of Trevor’s really big secrets, and I hope it’s piqued your interest enough to bring you back next week, because another of Trevor’s secrets will be coming out then …

This week’s soundtrack was a no-brainer. Tom Smith wrote the best scary-clown song ever, so with no further ado, here’s “Coulrophobia”: