What if one person was two superheroes? ALTER EGO is a bombastic comic starring the smiling champion WHIZ-BANG, the prowling vigilante THE BLACK DOG, and the man behind both of their masks. This weekly newsletter is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Alter Ego, by Nate Cosby, Jacob Edgar, Kike J. Diaz & Rus Wooton. Go to this link to sign up for updates on when ALTER EGO will be available!
PART VII: Roger Langridge Has Nothing Against Superheroes, In Principle
Happy New Year, yo! Nate here, grinding my way through a teetering pile of unanswered emails and a seemingly never-ending to-do list.
This week, Jacob and I are coming up with a few new superheroes, to inhabit the Alter Ego world. Our only “rules” are that none of them can fly. (You’ll see why later.)
Last week, we showed you a page from Chapter One, all the way from script to color. This week, I thought it’d be fun to show stuff that’s still totally in-process. Here’s a sequence from Chapter Two, featuring The Black Dog. Without spoiling too much of the broader story, I’ll say that the influences here are pretty obvious…there’s Mazzuccheli/Miller’s Batman Year One, Cooke/Brubaker’s Catwoman, Grummett/McDaniel’s Nightwing, Anderson/Busiek’s Astro City.
Here’s my script…
Here’s Jacob’s first thumbnail…
I suggested these notes…
Panel 2 – Could zoom in a lil’ more to mainly be the hand/pearls/neck.
Panel 3 – Suggest flipping this horizontally, so they’re running left-to-right.
Panel 5-8 – These could NOT possibly be better. Wonderful panel choices/sizes/shots.
Panel 10 – Could this be mostly Dog’s head getting hit by the bat? Close and painful!
…and Jacob revised…
Jacob disagreed with my Panel 3 note, because leaving it as-is has a more “running away” feel than what I’d suggested. I wasn’t sure…my concern was that having the guys running from right-to-left would fight the reading order. I thought it’d be more “sequential” to have the characters moving in the direction that the readers’ eyes needed to go, from Panel 2 to 3 to 4.
But then Jacob turned in blue-line pencils…
…and he was totally right. It actually works great, because Panel 3 now stops your eye when you’re coming from Panel 2. Feels like they’re pointing the gun and bat at you, the reader. You’re stopped in your tracks, while they’re high-tailing it outta here.
It was a great reminder to me as a writer, editor and collaborator that it’s important to have opinions, and equally important to realize your opinions can be wrong, or at least not as good as someone else’s. Collaboration isn’t about any one person “winning” against another. The best idea wins.
And now, a lil’ convo with the great Roger Langridge…we talk a good bit about Thor The Mighty Avenger, and I continue my desperate quest to pick the brains of my favorite writers, and beg them to tell me how to write good superhero stories…
Awards. Roger Langridge has won…(just a second, let me check)…yep, Roger Langridge has won EVERY award. And rightly so. He’s the creator of Fred The Clown. His The Muppet Show comic somehow took everything great about a classic TV show, made it into a comic and somehow improved it in the process. I hired him to write Thor The Mighty Avenger, one of the best comics I was lucky enough to edit.
Roger writes and draws comics about his own life at an alarming pace. He rested his drawing hand for a minute, to talk to me…
NATE: Howdy, Roger. Do you like superheroes?
ROGER: I’ve got nothing against them in principle, let’s put it that way. Beyond that, it’s very much on a case-by-case basis as to whether I like a particular character or not, and (tunneling down even further) who’s writing and drawing the stories. (Or, increasingly these days, who’s making the shows and/or movies.) Even as a kid I was always interested in the cartoonists as much as I was in the characters. There was a qualitative difference between a Batman story drawn by Bob Kane and one drawn by Dick Sprang. (I grew up in an era of cheap reprints, before you wonder how old I am!)
The superheroes I like tend to be the ones that are the purest, least cluttered/complicated examples of the concept (e.g. Superman, original Captain Marvel) or the ones where the unique sensibilities of the creator/s are an intrinsic part of the character (Metamorpho, Plastic Man, most of Kirby and Ditko’s creations).
So I guess the answer is a qualified “yes”?
NATE: Knowing you, “qualified yes?” is the perfectly appropriate answer. I think your perspective makes its way into the superhero comics you’ve written. There is a warmth, and a specificity to what you make time for in the story. At the same time, there’s a delightful “let’s not take this TOO seriously, this should be fun” energy that vibrates throughout.
Your version of Thor (with Chris Samnee, Matt Wilson & Rus Wooton) is one of my favorite characters in all of comics. Who is Thor, to you?
ROGER: First, thank you for that - and for the opportunity you offered me, because I didn’t think I had a superhero comic in me, and you had the vision to prove me wrong.
I didn’t have a whole lot of preconceptions about Thor when you offered me the job. I’d read a chunk of the Kirby run as a kid, but that’s about all I knew of the character. So I picked up the black-and-white Essential Editions of that run and reacquainted myself with those stories as preparation. I came away from that with the idea that he’s a strong guy, not necessarily all that smart, but with a streak of honour that informs everything he does. I guess my takeaway was that he’s a guy who asks himself “What is the honourable course of action?” in every situation. (Perhaps the cod-Shakespearean dialogue helped to inform that impression; that’s a voice within every Shakespeare hero, even if (especially if) their actions seem to run contrary to those impulses.) The particular assignment you gave me, to write a version of Thor that would be accessible to people who weren’t familiar with him, inclined me to lean into a version of Thor that would be a pretty pure, uncomplicated character, without a lot of baggage. So that’s kind of where I was coming from when I was writing him.
NATE: Do you do much prep work, when it comes to character development and character dynamics? Do you need to define your characters, who they are and what they’d do, before you begin scripting? Or do you leave some of that unknown, and find it while scripting?
ROGER: I do try to have a clear idea of who everybody is and how they relate to one another, although that can shift a bit as I go on. The more I write a character, the clearer they become in my head; even if you think I have every aspect of them down on paper before I start, once I start running them through a story I tend to find out more about them. I suppose that’s because I’m putting them into situations and seeing how they react within the parameters I’ve established, and sometimes the only way to push them through those situations is to dig a bit deeper, because the surface characteristics I’ve established won’t do the job. And I’m bouncing them off other characters, too, which I guess is where you really get to know them. So I suppose, going back to your question, it’s a little from Column A, a little from Column B.
(And I should also add that I think laying the groundwork to begin with makes it a lot easier when your notes don’t cover a particular character situation. At least you have a vague idea of what is likely to ring true.)
NATE: What’s your usual reaction to when the script isn’t going to plan? If you’ve plotted something out, and then the characters aren’t dealing with it in a way that feels right, or the structure of the story is starting to sway and tip…Are you angry that the map you drew isn’t accurate? Do you find joy in the possibilities of finding a new way forward?
ROGER: It’s rarely an occasion for joy, if only because there’s usually a deadline and I’ve just created a lot of extra work for myself. I don’t get angry; anxious, if anything. I’m falling, and I have to find something to grab on to before I hit the ground.
I do sometimes get a sense of satisfaction in hindsight, though. The Ant-Man issue of Thor: The Mighty Avenger, “The Shoulders of Giants,” wasn’t working at all on the first draft, but once I added the framing sequence and cut out some of the dead ends in the middle it became one of my favourite issues of that series. I know I fixed it, but I’m not sure I could tell you how! One version didn’t work and one version did, and I could definitely tell the difference between the two, but I couldn’t entirely explain how I got there. It’s a nerve-wracking experience while I’m in the middle of it.
NATE: Is there a tangibly different approach in your writing process, if you’re writing for yourself versus writing for others? If it’s something you’re drawing, will the panel descriptions be more sketchy because you know you’ll figure it out visually later?
ROGER: It depends what it is, and whether an editor will be looking at it at every stage or just when it’s finished. If an editor needs to look over a script before I start drawing, I’ll normally write a full script, with detailed descriptions, as if I were writing for another artist, because I need to ensure they understand what I’m going for; so the scripts for, say, Snarked! don’t look very different from the ones I did for Marvel. But if I’m going to be self-publishing a thing, or someone has asked for a short piece for an anthology, I’ll tend to sketch the story out in thumbnail form and that will be my script. Either way, I like to have a written outline first. I’m not sure why that is; I think I just may be more of a verbal thinker than a visual one. And I suppose it’s easier to move things around and change things with a written outline, so there’s slightly less labour involved.
Generally, I do like to plan things. I’m not desperately keen on leaving things to be worked out later, although sometimes you have to do that just to get the project moving – you might never start otherwise. And sometimes, if your plans change as part of the process, you have to be flexible enough and nimble enough to improvise your way towards getting things back on track. I guess I know there’ll be enough of that already without building more of it into the plan as well.
NATE: Alter Ego is the first superhero comic I’ve written. What advice can you give me personally, and in general for the readers?
ROGER: I have only written a handful of superhero stories, so I’d ask you to keep that in mind. That said: I think most superheroes lean towards being one of two basic types.
The first type are reader identification characters: the ones where you empathise with the hero, and where events are constantly on the brink of completely overwhelming them (Spider-Man and The Rocketeer, in their purest forms, fall into this category); their vulnerability and sense of being out of their depth make them identifiable characters, and the reader finds it easy to experience the story through them.
Then there are the ones who inspire awe and who we mostly see at a slight remove, as others see them – Superman and Captain America are examples of this kind of character. They’re symbols more than people, to some degree. (Depending on the point of view you choose, you can apply this approach to a wide range of characters – Kurt Busiek made great capital out of this with Marvels.) If you’re writing a superhero of this kind, your main character is really someone else; someone through whose eyes we’re seeing the hero.
I wanted my take on Thor to be a bit more like this, but as soon as other heroes entered the picture that became difficult (for me – as someone who wasn’t 100% in command of his brief, you understand), because I felt this perspective required the hero to be something unique and unusual. (Or, at least, I didn’t see a way to make it work otherwise – perhaps someone with more experience or talent could have pulled it off.) In the end I made him sort of an amalgam of the two kinds of approaches, which I suppose most of them are, really – 90% of superheroes exist at some point between those two extremes. But I’d argue that most of them, or at least most of the ones with staying power, tend to be closer to one or the other pole. The ones that try to be all things to all people rarely appeal to anybody very much.
The other thing I’d say is, as a reader, the most entertaining superhero comics are ones where the writer is obviously pouring a ton of their own obsessions and enthusiasms into what is, essentially, a superhero-shaped bucket. One of the appealing things about the genre is that it’s flexible enough to carry a really wide range of approaches, and it can lean towards other genres without breaking. That might be because it’s a genre that encourages a suspension of disbelief from the outset, I don’t know. But I do know that you can stretch it to some pretty extraordinary limits – you can do comedy superheroes, fantasy superheroes, noir superheroes, kitchen sink superheroes, super-cartoony, super-realistic, ligne claire, ink-spattered grunge – dozens, maybe hundreds of different approaches – and they’re all still superheroes. It’s a genre that is very forgiving. So, as a reader, I’m always on the lookout for stories or characters or creators that take advantage of that, and especially ones that reflect the personality and obsessions of the people behind the stories.
But, you know, I’ve written, like, four superhero books ever. So, pinch of salt and all that.