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 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”:

Dear Superman: Please grow up (again)

[Note: Yes, I know Osama bin Laden is dead. This blog was written earlier. And frankly, my colleague John Konecsni at A Pius Man has more to say about it, now that he's done swearing under his breath that he's out a good villain. For now, my view is this: bin Laden is dead. Confirm the corpse’s identity, treat it with the respect he never gave us, and then act like the civilized nation we sometimes remember we are. He’s dead. Justice is served, as much as it will ever be. Now on to helping the living.]

As pretty much everyone on the internet has heard of late, the latest news item from the world of Superman comics has the Man of Steel renouncing his U.S. citizenship. The reasons aren’t as complicated as you might think: Superman shows up to peacefully support anti-government protesters in Tehran, the Iranian government interprets his presence as an act of war on the part of the United States, and Supes renounces his citizenship because he’s tired of having his actions linked to U.S. policies (and vice versa) and because “truth, justice and the American way [isn’t] enough anymore.” He is now a stateless, global superhero.

Leaving aside some of the more practical questions (since he presumably doesn’t have a Kryptonian passport, can he now enter any country on Earth without being a literal illegal alien?), I can’t help but be annoyed by this.

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t really care whether Superman’s a U.S. citizen or not. I support the right of any human being (or humanoid, or reasonable facsimile) to renounce their citizenship as they choose, and to take citizenship in any country that will have them. I think it’s a bloody stupid idea sometimes, but I support the right to be harmlessly stupid because, well, if humans can’t be stupid then they pretty much can’t do anything. But from a storytelling perspective, I think this move is a bad one.

Within about ten minutes of hearing the news, I had pretty much distilled my reaction down to one sentence: Did Superman leave his competence somewhere, and can we give it back to him?

There has been a string of stories in DC Comics over the last decade or so that have steadily chipped away at the image of Superman as a hero who knows what he’s doing. Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis had Superman either consciously allowing members of the Justice League to magically  lobotomize supervillains or just being too dumb to figure out what was going on and stop them. Succeeding storylines had Superman being mind-controlled by the villain Maxwell Lord, forcing Wonder Woman to kill Lord in order to save Supes; Superman taking a year off to get his head straight after screwing too many things up; and Superman taking a year-long walking journey across America to “reconnect” with the people he nominally protects, after failing to cure cancer (?!).

Most of these storylines, including the citizenship arc, appear to begin with Superman making a horrifying mistake of one kind or another, and then spend the next four to twelve issues dealing with his agonized guilt over the error in an attempt to seem “relevant” to mere-mortal readers. Once in a while, this kind of story is interesting, but after six or seven straight years of this stuff, I’m beginning to wonder if Superman hasn’t been replaced by Bizarro, given better grammar, and left to wreak havoc on our world. Seriously, it seems like the guy can’t do anything right. And it bugs me.

Here is what bothers me most: Superman has been a superhero for pretty much his entire adult life. Most DC Comics editors hew to the policy that, in any given story, he’s been flying around in tights for “about ten years” in comics time. Think about that. Do cops and firefighters ten years into their careers suddenly start making rookie mistakes? Is the ten-year mark the point where we normally expect human performance to drop off? No. In most species that learn and remember what they learn, we expect individuals to get better over time at things they do a lot, unless their physical or mental capacities degrade. Musicians get better as they train, unless they suffer damage to their minds or bodies. Athletes improve until age or injuries catch up with them. We expect poets and artists to produce better and better work, or at least plateau, unless something stops them. And nothing, as far as we can tell, has stopped Superman. So unless he suddenly turns out to have Kryptonian Alzheimer’s or something, it makes no sense for him to suddenly make a string of colossally stupid mistakes. He’s Superman. He’s been Superman for a while now. If nothing else, he should have basic coping skills for being Superman.

I realize I’m in danger of a hypocrisy charge here, what with my own John Lawrence being a Superman analog and, as longtime readers of my stories about him know, not exactly perfect himself. (For one thing, he’s a powers snob, looking down on Rae and Trevor because they can’t fly or punch through walls.) But the fact is, John Lawrence only works as a character because Superman is a competent superhero. Superman’s recent string of screwups makes John Lawrence look pretty good, and that annoys me. Because while I gleefully deconstruct Superman from time to time with old JL, I can do that only because I first put a real Superman analog into the Masks universe.

Believe it or not, there is a long history of superheroics in the Masks-verse, going back at least as far as the Roman Empire. (Really. Why do you think my main character has a superhero name in Latin?) The era of tights-and-flights superheroism really got going in the early 20^th century, and by the time the 1920s rolled around, the Black Mask was doing his thing in L.A. in imitation of earlier mysterymen in New York. By the 1930s, he was picking up superhero allies, including Eagle Eye, and a bunch of super-types were active in World War II and after. And while there were many well-known heroes in the U.S. and Europe, and later all over the world, in the succeeding decades, there was one who really defined the archetype. Before him, people argued about whether costumed heroes were a good idea, and they did it pretty much whenever a well-known hero botched something. But after Ascalon, there was always a quick end to that argument, because everyone agreed that he was the real deal.

Art by Nicole Le

On the sliding scale of comic-book time, Ascalon first appeared in the world of Masks about forty or fifty years before Rae and Trevor met. He was young then—late teens, early twenties—and not altogether sure of himself, but he was powerful and idealistic and passionate about doing the right thing. He had the standard superhero power package, what Aaron Williams refers to as the FISS set: flight, invulnerability, speed, and strength. This was because he was also an energy projector—he could produce blasts of violet energy, sometimes from his eyes but more often from his hands and occasionally, when things got really bad, in something like a full-body explosion. He used the energy to power a fast metabolism, to perform feats of strength, and to make himself bulletproof and fly. Most interestingly, it enabled him to “sidestep” or move from one place to another without crossing the intervening space. (The best guess is that this is how he ended up on Earth as a child, but where he started from he doesn’t know.) When he wasn’t too tired, he could take people with him, eventually enabling him to transport an entire superhero team to and from a battle.

Ascalon was never very open about his origins, mostly because he didn’t remember them. His earliest memories are of being about three years old, in an orphanage in Colorado, and being hungry—his alien metabolism couldn’t digest most Earth foods. He was in significant danger of starving to death until he met an eight-year-old prodigy who figured out one of the few foods he could eat: apples. The strange boy was soon adopted by a childless local couple who happened to have an apple orchard, and he grew up with your basic wholesome values. He also met that prodigy again a few years later, when the young man was embarking on his own career as a cape-and-gadgets hero named Sinister. The two became close friends, worked a lot of cases together, and eventually formed the nucleus of a superhero team with a third hero I’ll get around to describing at some point. Pretty much everything you expect a big-name superhero to do, Ascalon did—battling alien invasions and killer robots, leading a team, intervening in humanitarian crises—and Sinister was right there, backing him up whenever he didn’t have his own disasters to deal with.

And then Ascalon disappeared. About twenty years before Rae and Trevor met for the first time, about ten years before something wiped out all the superheroes in Los Angeles, Ascalon simply vanished. Other superheroes stepped up to deal with his usual disasters, and some searched for him—but even Sinister couldn’t find any trace. Some people said he’d finally found his homeworld, and gone back to it; some said his archenemy had finally gotten the better of him; some said he’d just decided it was time to retire. Either way, he was gone. And the world got a lot darker without him.

Art by Derrick Fleece

So when a young orphan boy discovered he could fly, and project golden energy fields, there was only one thought in his mind. He put on a cape and tights and set out to be the next Ascalon. It’s what makes the basic concept of the superhero work, even in stories where superheroes screw up—the notion that somewhere out there is a superhero who does get it right, at least most of the time.

So until I get enough Masks stories written to really establish Ascalon, it would be nice if Superman would grow the heck up and get back to saving the world.