We’ve been reading on blogs that some comic book fans (G.I. Joe and some  of the Marvel series) are starting to lose faith. In writing, we noticed that we can’t limit ourselves to scenarios in which our heroes confront increasingly large robots or monsters, or face larger and larger armies. We want to avoid the problem that plagued the TV series 24, where, every season, the stakes were higher than in the last. This approach is a dead end. Readers know the heroes will pull through, and they know that there’s a limit to just how big the challenges can get.

We were aware that the world we were creating was almost exclusively made up of male characters. We didn’t want to introduce a woman character just for the sake of doing so. A weak female character would not have made our world more interesting. Readers aren’t stupid. They know right away when a character is only there to fill demographic or ethnic quotas. So we tried to give Eva a personality and attributes that would make her a strong, interesting character, who would contribute to the story and not just be décor for the panels on the page.

When we launched the project, we soon came face to face with the issue of dialogue: how to prevent the conversations between characters from all sounding alike. We decided to consult books on writing. They covered the issue of dialogue but in a disappointing way, advising writers to develop the characters’ inner voice. Gee, thanks, we couldn’t have thought of that on our own! This led us to set the question aside. We agreed that strong characters, with well-defined identities would act (words and gestures) more consistently. But how do you go about creating these strong characters? Our solution was to talk it over with friends and to find answers to some basic questions: Why is the character acting this way? Is it because of recent events or much earlier events? How did the earlier occurrences influence those that followed? And quickly, a sketch of the character begins to appear, and he or she takes shape.

Creating a character that will evolve in various environments is definitely a challenge for a writer. His or her reactions have to respect his own nature, which, inconveniently, can potentially make him predictable and therefore less interesting to the reader. At the same time, however, time is an important component in our stories. This means that characters can learn from their past experiences and, consequently, adapt and evolve. Naturally, this is much easier said than done when one is sitting in front of a blank computer screen.

Since our stories aren’t published chronologically, we thought of putting in place the timeline system to position the different comics in time.

In October 2010, Jeffery Kleahn (jeffreyklaehn.blogspot.com) interviewed Steve Englehart, who said: “If you’re trying to write thrillers like I do, you need a coherent plot, at least as a framework. But then you have to let the characters be who they are.” We feel that such respect for the character is essential. Otherwise, characters become mere mouthpieces for the authors, at the expense of psychological unity.

In October 2010, Jeffery Kleahn (jeffreyklaehn.blogspot.com) interviewed Steve Englehart, who said: “I was writing Captain America and America was transfixed by Watergate, and I couldn’t see how Captain America could NOT react to that – so I started commenting on real-world events. I found that even though I was writing fantasy, the more firmly it grounded in reality, the better it was.” In our opinion, this connection with reality allows readers to have something in common with the fictional character.

In this story, the murder of Shumen Datta served three purposes. First it showed the subtleness of the Black Orchestra’s mission: they don’t define themselves as uncompromisingly good guys. Second, it demonstrated that Benson is a good soldier who obeys without much discussion, and third, that Fabien is very naïve about his own role.

We asked for changes to one of the frames. First we didn’t want the adversary behind Kirsten to have a gun (why would he wait to be only a few feet away from her before shooting?). Second, in an initial version, the weapon seemed too long and so the villain wouldn’t have any reason to be so close to Kirsten.

On Comicvine, on August 22, 2011, Corey Schroeder explained that “when we hear inside the head of someone like Superman or even Lex Luthor, it humanizes them, makes them more relatable, and ultimately more understandable.” We personally feel that the last part of that statement is a mistake. The desire to explain a character’s behaviour tends to reduce them rather than make them more complex. We prefer to let readers develop their own interpretations based on their own reference points, rather than imposing the author’s views. Comic books aren’t novels. The artwork should offer plenty of interpretive clues.