MASKs Commentary Track: Chapter 5

Thischapter was the  new twist on the very old idea that appeared in the last chapter. While the meeting between Rae and Trevor has always gone this way, what they do after has changed a lot. This time, I had quite a few people asking me how the characters might each establish that the other was one of the good guys. And when I thought back over all the ways that superheroes might prove their bona fides, there were really only two major ways. They can be introduced by a mutually trusted superhero (“Hey, Batman, it’s Superman. I want you to meet Captain Marvel. He’s probably not useless.”) or they can end up on the same side of the same fight.

For street-level heroes, that pretty much means stopping a street-level robbery, rape, or murder. I liked the idea of the convenience store that gets robbed all the time, especially since Captain Catastrophe is so much a creature of habit, so it made sense to have it get robbed again and have Mr. Chaidez be completely unfazed by the event, or even by Rae’s lack of a costume. This chapter gave me a chance to show off Rae’s relative discomfort with real-world criminals (this is her first real encounter with a gun) and Trevor’s easy facility with weapons.

Side note: the gun disarm Trevor uses is a real disarm, which I borrowed from krav maga practitioner John Konecsni, author of A Pius Man. John very kindly walked me through the whole process several times, and even sent me a couple of videos of the disarm. So there really is a solid, simple way to take a gun like this … I just didn’t include the precise details because it would slow down the scene and, since it took me three viewings of the video to catch what was going on, I figured Rae wouldn’t observe everything on the first try, in the dark, under stress. Character trumped technique here. (I also went with the simpler form of the disarm because it matched Trevor's mixed-style training.) But trust me, the gun disarm really does work.

This chapter also brings up, for the first time, the question of superheroes and guns. There are a lot of adherents of the Batman school in comics—good guys who will never, ever, ever use a gun. This may seem a little illogical for those who don’t have horrific childhood traumas involving firearms, but it makes life a lot easier for the writers. It’s hard to write the amazing adventures of Shooting-People Man without racking up an impressive body count. The Punisher already covers that territory, and any more principled use of firearms easily devolves into a standard cop drama. Unless you make the story about the gun—have your hero be a master of Gun Fu, etc.—firearms can really take the fun out of a written fight scene. So a lot of comic-book writers go out of their way to avoid making their heroes regular gun users, and that’s why Rae doesn’t know how to shoot. (This is also because I don’t know how to shoot, and don’t currently have the resources to pay for professional instruction for the sake of research—and I’m not stupid enough to pick up a gun and try to learn how to use it without an experienced professional helping me.)

Trevor, however, is pretty darn good with guns.

There are a couple of reasons for this. As the series goes on, you’ll find out more about his training and discover that he’s unusually good with projectile weapons of all kinds—his trademark weapon as a kid sidekick was a simple sling, and he’s an excellent shot with shuriken, throwing knives, etc. There’s something in his brain that works well with the physics of flying objects, and that extends to both bullets and arrows. (More on the arrows later.) 

The second reason is that I can’t imagine Jude training Trevor without making him familiar with guns. So much of their job involves gun-wielding villains and henchmen, plus the occasional cop with the wrong idea (because what superhero hasn’t been accused at some point of, say, murdering police officers in cold blood?) that they’d have to be experienced at avoiding getting shot, taking guns away from people, and (if necessary) using them. And Trevor, as you can see here, gets just a little scary when there’s a gun in his hands. Not all of his gun training came from his mentor. More on that later.

And oh, hey, this chapter marks the first time Trevor and Rae flirt with each other! Watch for the phrase “Blue Eyes” in later chapters … it will come to mean something rather different. 

By the way, I'm not a fan of the illustration on this chapter (and neither is Nicole), so it may change in the eventual ebook and printed versions. You have been warned.

This chapter’s musical selection is almost inevitable, since I privately refer to this chapter as “Everybody run, Trevor’s got a gun.” I give you Julie Brown’s timeless “The Homecoming Queen’s Got A Gun”:

Fist, meet face! Or, the beautiful nose-breaking

For Christmas, I received a copy of a comic book that got me thinking about one of the central tenets of superhero adventure: guys in tights whumping on each other.

The collection was Moon Knight: God and Country, written by Mike Benson and Charlie Huston. I loved Moon Knight as a kid—the shadowy world inhabited by a flawed hero in a silver-white costume (and the moody artwork that resulted); the fact that he had not one but three secret identities, and it made him kind of schizo; the serial encounters with his lycanthropic nemesis, Werewolf By Night, with their bizarre fusion of superheroics and horror. Moon Knight at his best was weird, and mysterious, and beautiful, and indefinably cool in a way that never really caught on (lucky for me—it meant I found a lot of good stories in the 25-cent bin).

Huston’s revamp of the character has been charitably described as hyperviolent. This version of Moon Knight is tormented by the Egyptian god who resurrected him in his origin story—except instead of demanding justice like he used to, Khonshu now wants blood and flying body parts, and usually appears wearing the form of a psychopathic mercenary Moon Knight killed (accidentally? During a psychotic episode? I’ve never been sure) in an earlier adventure. Moon Knight is now a government-sanctioned vigilante, and rapidly losing his grip on reality as he takes to carving his crescent-moon symbol into the foreheads of his bloodied and broken foes. I read Huston’s comics for a while, then finally quit in disgust because the story didn’t seem to be going anywhere interesting and pretty much everything I had liked about the character was now gone.

Reading God and Country, which picks up around the time I quit, reinforced my conviction that the comic had gone in an uninteresting direction. But it got me thinking about why I missed the old Moon Knight, and what it said that a take on the character that was (arguably) supported by the stories I loved was yet so repellent to me.

The answer struck me as I was typing those words up above—weird, mysterious, beautiful. There aren’t a lot of superheroes I consider beautiful, but as dark as Moon Knight’s adventures always were, I took a certain primal satisfaction in the fact that the character was trying to balance so many conflicting sides of his life, and more often than not managing to be a glimmer of light in his own darkness. That made the character beautiful. Huston lost that beautiful light in the spray of blood, and I lost interest in Moon Knight.

But let’s face it—guys in tights whumping on each other has always been a central feature of superhero comics. The first modern superhero comic featured on its cover a picture of Superman smashing a car full of gangsters into a boulder. Violence is part of the genre, and I don’t really have a problem with violence in my fiction. Heck, I do exhaustive research to get the violence in Masks right—to make sure Trevor’s fights, in particular, make sense in the context of the laws of physics, anatomy, and human behavior. I have described my book as “a love story and a coming-of-age narrative and a meditation on modern mythology—in which a lot of stuff blows up.”

And yet superhero violence, in my view, works best when it plays by rules, or at least when rules exist. In Masks, there’s an indelible line between masks who do their jobs with minimal violence—who never cripple or kill when they have a choice, who train to win fights without doing permanent harm—and those who believe in using the bad guys’ methods against them, who usually leave a trail of bodies in their wake. Rae and Trevor are in the first category; Cobalt is in the second, although he pretends otherwise. It’s what makes them enemies, really. The rest is window dressing.

Part of that conflict is rooted in the question of superhero morality—to have good guys and bad guys, you have to have at least a working definition of good and bad, right and wrong, and varying definitions lead to varying approaches. Most people who make the distinction at all agree, for example, that at least some forms of violence are bad—like murder. However, there are three major schools of thought on how to deal with the fact that violence exists whether we want it to or not. These ideas get dumbed down a lot for superhero fiction, but I’ll try to maintain at least a little of the necessary complexity.

The first school, which has become increasingly popular in the last 20 years, views violence (even in fiction) as a matter of proportionate response. If the bad guys are level-5 bad, then the good guys are allowed to be level-5 bad to beat them. If the bad guys are level-12 bad, you may need to keep a puke bag handy in order to root for the good guys. This is the same argument often advanced by people who advocate a “whatever it takes” approach to dealing with real-life violence—if the opposing force uses chemical weapons or suicide bombers, then we should be allowed to respond in kind. Anything less, this thought argues, ties the good guys’ hands. That’s where God and Country is coming from, and where Cobalt comes in.

The second school of thought is at the opposite end of the spectrum—if violence is bad, then the good guys shouldn’t use it, period. In the real world, this usually takes the form of pacifism—for example, Quakers who register as conscientious objectors in wartime because their religion prohibits war. You don’t see this portrayed much in Western entertainment anymore, partly because it really limits your fight-scene options. But you will occasionally see a pacifist superhero trying to make headway in a violent fictional world. Usually he doesn’t succeed; the best-known example of an attempt at a nonviolent hero in American culture is Shane, a novel and movie about a former gunfighter trying to give up the gun. It’s a deeply moving story, full of big ideas, but you can’t help noticing that Shane keeps beating people up in bar fights. Shane’s attempt at pacifism, noble as it may be, is a real problem for somebody writing a Western. There aren’t any heroes in Masks who take this view, although I’m experimenting with a pacifist hero in another novel just for the heck of it and it is as difficult as it is rewarding.

The third school of thought occupies the middle ground—the idea that violence is a necessary evil, but evil nonetheless, and should be limited as much as possible. In the real world, this basically boils down to the rules-of-war approach—things like the Geneva Conventions. This approach says that violence is sometimes the only solution to a bad situation (the Nazis are a classic example of a bad thing that needed stopping), and that violence should therefore be used only when absolutely necessary, and then only according to strictly defined rules, which are written out in advance so nobody is tempted to cheat. Soldiers wear uniforms; they don’t deliberately harm civilians; captured enemies are treated humanely and with respect. Most superheroes used to take this approach, although it’s less popular now as writers and editors have made villains ever more extreme—by the time the fifth school bus is blown to bits, it’s hard to understand why Batman hasn’t just strangled the Joker already.

Writers, of course, see problems and opportunities in all three approaches. It’s easy to give a pacifist hero the moral high ground, but stories need conflict, and it’s harder to create action and tension when your heroes avoid it. Competing with an already violent culture makes the proportionate approach tempting—when you’re trying to make your bones as a storyteller, nothing gets readers’ attention like the snap of bones breaking—but having to constantly make up new tortures is exhausting. And the middle path seems to be the best of both worlds, but it requires constant examination to balance the need for action in a superhero story with the need to avoid unnecessary violence.

Different writers have different attitudes toward this question. Part of it’s a question of temperament, naturally, and of how much you can get away with in a given story. But I’ve always found the most beauty in the balance—in the good guys who stay good guys, as much as they can, while the world goes to hell around them. They fight monsters without becoming them, or at least they try. Sometimes they’re outnumbered or outgunned as a result, but that just makes it more dramatic when they win. The balance itself is a good source of conflict. My favorite heroes abhor violence to one extent or another, but they won’t stand peacefully by while someone, for example, abuses a child. But neither will they beat the abuser into the ground just for the hell of it. The balance is difficult. It’s complicated. And when it’s done right, it’s beautiful.

(By the way, this is all completely separate from the question of whether violent art should be censored or restricted to certain audiences—although I do support things like clear and informative labeling so we don’t have six-year-olds bringing home God and Country by mistake. So if you want to know whether movies like Hostel should be in general release, you’ve come to the wrong window.)

At the climax of Masks, Rae and Trevor are forced to fight each other, with the fate of the world at stake. It’s arguably my favorite scene in the book because of the way their beliefs and their feelings for each other play out in their exchange of professional blows and personal words. It couldn’t happen if either one of them refused to fight at all, or simply pulled out a gun and blew the other away. What happens next is unexpected, and thrilling, and heartbreaking. And, to my mind, beautiful.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.