Home: Writing for Comic Books: Chapter One - The Basics: Emotional Investment

Chapter One
The Basics
(cont'd)

EMOTIONAL INVESTMENT

For a story to have any impact, it must instill a sense of emotional investment in the reader. The reader has to care about the characters and what is happening to them. To do that, you need to create characters that are recognizably human--be they aliens, super-heroes, or average schmoes. They must have human concerns (hopes, dreams, fears, etc.) for the reader to empathize or sympathize with, or at least understand.

People are the sum total of their experiences. For characters to seem well-rounded and consistent, the writer has to convey a sense of history for them. It's in this history and common experience that reader identification and thereby emotional investment will occur.

We'll cover this in more detail in the chapter on developing characters.

CHANGE

When you boil it down, every story is about change. Who has learned something? If something or someone hasn't changed or learned something by the end of the story, then what was the point of the audience reading your story?

In the traditional definition of fiction, it is held that your lead character--your protagonist--must change from the beginning of the story to the end. That is the protagonist's journey--the events he or she lives through in the course of the story--should have a transformational effect. If there is no change or growth, it is held, then why should the reader waste their time plowing through your golden prose?

In many ways, I do agree with this philosophy. I do think that the characters should learn something by the end of the story and that knowledge should be a catalyst for change, or that the events of the story result in a physical change for the character--whether it is a physical or situational change. However, this can be very difficult to apply to episodic fiction, especially when dealing with comic book publishers that have a stake in maintaining their status quo. The reality is that most publishers can't change their most popular characters significantly indefinitely. The traditional looks and identities of characters like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, and any other character with iconic value (any character that can be recognized regardless of the culture of the person viewing it) are too important to their owners in terms of licensing for bed sheets, action figures, underwear, and other ancillary merchandise. Any of these characters might undergo changes for brief periods of time in order to freshen the franchise and create reader interest, but usually there is a return to the status quo so that the value of the character's traditional image can be exploited.

To be honest, characters who have reached truly iconic value have done so by moving into media outside of comics. If the world at large doesn't read the comics in which the characters have been changed, then when faced with the new version, the average person won't understand and be resistant. (Think Green Lantern. Long time comics fans were horrified at the changes made to Hal Jordan, but to people outside of comics fandom, the response was more likely "Green who?") Companies must have an easily recognized image in order to merchandise it well. (The main exception here being action figures, where toy companies thrive on variations on a theme, but in this case, the essence of the character is usually maintained, even if their costume or props are altered.)

Mind you, the lack of significant change isn't a hard and fast rule--sometimes publishers will change second tier characters to make them more accessible and interesting to new readers. Jay Garrick to Barry Allen to Wally West as the Flash or Dick Grayson to Jason Todd to Tim Drake as Robin are two good examples of lasting changes secondary characters (okay, maybe not so much with Jason Todd anymore...). Even the upper echelon of publisher's characters may undergo some change. Any long-lived character has to adapt to the times in order to remain relevant, but the inherent essence of characters such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and other high-profile properties remain intact even if minor cosmetic changes are brought in periodically to make the property appealing to current tastes. These can be slight alterations to costumes (or the temporary appearance of a radically different look), new people wearing old costumes, new powers, etc.

So, if publishers have a stake in maintaining their franchises so that change to the leading characters is temporary or cosmetic at best, then how do you effectively create a sense of evolution or forward momentum in episodic fiction?

When it comes to significantly altering characters, the permanent changes are usually reserved for the supporting cast. The secondary characters are often fair game for major changes (like death), and sometimes supporting characters are introduced in order to have a character in the context of the story who can change permanently (blow 'em up real good and watch our hero grit his/her/its teeth in angst).

There is one other area where change can occur: changing the reader's perception of a character, philosophy, or events by forcing them to re-examine their perceptions via the events of the story. I consider this to be a perfectly valid way of approaching change. If the reader witnesses something at the beginning of a story and then, as events unfold, what reader believed to be true is proven false by the end of the story, then you have changed the reader's perception. This can actually be a very powerful way to approach change as it directly affects your audience and makes them active participants in the storytelling. Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon is a brilliant example of changing the audience's perception of events by examining events from the points of view from four very different characters. The audience is left to piece together what the truth is, each retelling of the story adding more facts and changing the viewer's perspective on what they had seen before. (If you haven't seen Rashomon, I strongly suggest you do so. Besides its historical significance and its impact in all areas of storytelling, it is also a movie that relies on images to tell its story. Remember what I said earlier about thinking visually and using pictures to convey your story...)