One does not emerge from water magically dry.

Dead is dead. A bullet to the head causes death. And unless the death isn’t completely obvious (for example, if there’s no body in evidence), no one comes back from the dead. Unlike Superman, or more recently, Captain America. We knew they’d be back. And how many times have Magneto, Doctor Doom and The Leader “died”? Too many for death to still be truly believable or for resurrection to surprise anyone.

In movies or TV shows, it may be tempting to make simplifications to make it easier for the target audience to understand. For instance, how many Nazis actually spoke English with that ridiculous German accent? This may have been acceptable 40 or 50 years ago, but in our global society, this type of shortcut can be a little ridiculous. On the TV series “24,” you see Arab bad guys talking English even when they are alone together. We use different languages in the webcomic not because we want the viewer to feel lost, but because we want to give the story setting more credibility.

In his preface to the works of Ian Flemming, Francis Lacassin criticized the author of the James Bond stories for having created such black-and-white villains—bad guys that the police feel compelled to shoot on sight the first time they are seen in public because they are just so ugly, ridiculous or flagrantly tasteless. But some heroes can be ugly, just like some villains can be attractive. The same goes for their personalities: heroes as much as villains can display some flaws (like cowardice, for example). Our goal isn’t simply to turn all of the clichés on their heads, but rather, to have characters that offer a wide range of dramatic motivations, rather than just reactions that too often seem contrived.

Our scenes often begin by specifying the location and the date and time. Several months after the first scripts had been written, we reread James Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy, and noticed that he starts each chapter by specifying the city and the day where the action takes place. Surely, this was a subconscious influence on our approach.

Still on the topic of James Ellroy, we love the way he integrates his small plots into the grand scheme of History (with a capital H) and we take something of that away for our own scripts. So even if the action in our story is taking place in a contemporary setting, our heroes won’t affect the course of history. In fact, they are much more likely to be affected by it.

When you reread Marvel Essentials stories from the 60s and compare them to DC Showcase from the same era, you really appreciate the genius of Stan Lee and his cronies. The idea of anchoring characters to a known time and place was a real departure from DC’s approach, where characters lived in the fictional Metropolis or Gotham. However, Marvel’s great idea eventually headed south, somewhat. Spiderman, who started off as a teenager in 1962, watched the Twin Towers crumble when he was only in his twenties. 

We want time to be a strong dimension of our narrative framework. This implies that our characters age, and consequently, that they evolve because they are aware of their own mortality or because they feel time pushing them in the back, which forces them to accelerate their actions.

We want to avoid situations where our heroes stumble upon illicit transactions, completely by “accident.” It’s far too common in comics that, no matter where the hero goes, there happens to be a villain with a plan. We want our heroes’ missions or adventures to be based on information that was painstakingly gathered on the ground, sometimes over several long months. That implies the existence of an infrastructure and a lot of agents who are gathering and analyzing information.

You can’t launch a project like this one without having at least some pretension. We don’t consider ourselves comic experts, but we know enough to feel free to play with the genre’s limits (not to say its clichés). So when we started the project, we determined a series of principles or tenets that would order the world of our stories. We’ll be describing these axioms in coming posts.