So hey, you might've heard I like writing stories about superheroes. Been doing it for four years, which is a distressingly long time to work on a single story, and since I'm only about halfway through my Metro City characters, it means I'll be working on them for a depressingly long time to come. But what really makes me depressed is that I'm actually considering doing it some more.
A decade or more ago, I'd worked on my own comic book script, never planning on seeing it produced, mostly because it was so stupidly colossal. There were forty main characters, and each of the 12+ issues I wrote usually ran for at least a hundred pages. I don't remember why I stopped working on it -- perhaps I just got tired of all the typing I was doing on it. But I did stop working on it, stuck the notebooks in a box, saved my files to my hard drive, and forgot about it.
And then during the last couple of months, I found the old notebooks, started re-reading them, and remembered how much fun I had writing some of the characters. Which isn't to say that all the characters were very good at all, because when I looked back at them, a lot of them were just not all that interesting. Still, there were plenty of them I liked, and I started toying with the idea of working on a new series starring a vastly trimmed-down cast of only my favorite characters.
It was really fairly easy to reduce the size of the cast. So many of them were, once you got down to it, just a few cool powers with a little characterization to keep them from all blending together. I cut them without very much regret. There were others I excised with a bit more hesitation. I got rid of the granola girl who was also a skilled auto mechanic -- partly to keep me from having to write a lot about car repair. I got rid of the mostly personality-free spellcaster, but regretted losing her familiar, a talking iguana with a funny apathetic/sarcastic personality. I tossed the blind guy with the superhuman sense of smell because I knew I'd have too much trouble writing anything from his point-of-view. I discarded the college-age psi whose constantly shifting attitudes about crimefighting and her own powers were, entirely by accident, a perfect example of a young person wrestling with moral and ethical codes; in her case, I couldn't imagine how I'd convey all of that within her own storyarc. I got rid of the feral rage-monster, the super-agile acrobat, the scientific genius, the immensely powerful brick, because I'd already used variations of those characters in Metro City.
And unfortunately, after I'd finished the cut-down list of favorites, there were still way too many of them. There were 15 of them, which is almost as many as the entire Metro City cast. And all of them were female. Now I'm a colossal fan of female superheroes, but honestly, trying to write a bunch of stories starring only superheroines stretches the credibility allowed even to dorks who write superhero fiction, you know? So I figured I'd raid my stash of old City of Heroes characters and my list of possible Metro City supporting characters to see if I could even those numbers out. I ended up adding just six male characters... and an additional four female characters. (insert aggrieved sigh) So 25 characters, with the overwhelming majority of them female. It'll probably end up taking a solid decade before I finish Metro City, and I'm considering starting a new one with even more characters? In a modern American city with an even larger population of metahumans, with an absurdly imbalanced female-to-male ratio? Even for a guy writing about people with impossible powers and impossible costumes, that goes beyond my ability to suspend disbelief.
And in fact, there's a diversity problem in general. I really don't like comics that are full of nothing but white people, with maybe one or two token minorities. And once I had trimmed out the weak characters, I'd cut a lot more minority heroes than I'd planned. I made a couple of race lifts, but that's actually harder to do than you'd expect, especially with a character that's already firmly established in your mind. It's not just a matter of changing someone's skin color -- racial identity makes a big difference in the makeup of our personalities, and changing a character's race can end up altering the personality drastically.
So what are my options? I really do enjoy getting to write about superheroes, and doing it here with my own characters means I don't have to jump through the hoops of writing-for-hire for established comic publishers. Besides, I really don't think the established publishers like Marvel and DC are much of an option -- they're extremely hard to break into, their business models are declining fast, and they don't generally care about good stories anymore. On the other paw, do I really want to spend the rest of my life writing about spandex jockeys? It's not like superhero prose fiction sells very well, right? Not that I've got plans to break into literary fiction, but still, that's a heck of a shallow niche.
And beyond these pointless philosophical conundrums, there are the practical matters of getting the stories down on paper. I think the Metro City stories have a good formula -- interconnected stories sharing a cast of characters but with a different narrator for each new storyarc. I like getting a bunch of characters together and letting them interact -- it's an easy way to replicate comic continuity and to synthesize the interactions that work well in team-based comics. And again, getting all these people into a single setting might push the boundaries of disbelief too far. Modest superteams of 5-7 people (the Avengers movie or most Justice League comics) work pretty well -- much, much larger teams (most Legion of Super-Heroes comics or the 2000-era Justice Society) are simply too unwieldy.
I could split all of them up into two or more teams, but then we run into the gender problem again -- still a lot of female characters with very few males. (The exact opposite of most mainstream comics, actually, but the skewed ratio still bugs me.) Could I shoehorn one or two into the Metro City stories? Maybe, but I've already added too many new characters to that story since I started it. You just can't keep doing that. It starts looking silly after a while.
How to work it out so it all makes good sense and is still fun to write? Heck, I don't know. But I really do want to write about my reluctant cyborg, my abrasive but hyper-competent flamethrower, my twin crimefighters, my four wildly different unpowered vigilantes, my reforming supervillain. I'll have to figure something out somehow...