Rik Hoskin has worked on graphic novels and comics with best-selling authors and many top franchises including Star Wars and Doctor Who. The authors that Rik has collaborated with include Brandon Sanderson, Dean Koontz, Pierce Brown, and Patricia Briggs. Most recently, the graphic novel of Brandon Sanderson’s White Sand Volume 1 , which Rik collaborated on with Brandon Sanderson and Julius M. Gopez, won the Dragon Award for Best Graphic Novel at last year’s Dragon Con. Rik lives in the UK.
I spent a lot of time thinking about superheroes while writing my latest fantasy novel, Bystander 27, and especially how their world really works. It dawned on me that, even though they strive to reflect “the world outside your window” (as Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee would say), the truth is that superheroes don’t function well when placed in real world situations.
Superhero comics really took flight during the Second World War, a time when people needed to believe in brave men and women fighting the good fight. Captain America is the most obvious example of that hero, wearing the stars and stripes as he tracked down Nazi saboteurs, spy rings and famously punched out Hitler on his very first cover appearance. (Something the first Captain America movie managed to reference in a tongue-in-cheek moment during Cap’s stage shows.) But, at that point in its publication – 1941 – the war was ongoing, and the comics weren’t really the place to wrap up anything that the real world hadn’t already done.
The, who I like to think of as, “World War II Heroes” really came into their own again in the 1970s, when Marvel Comics, and then later DC, launched titles retroactively set during the war. These were notably in the form of the Invaders (Marvel), the All-Star Squadron and the short-lived, alternate history Freedom Fighters (both DC). These titles endeavoured to place their old heroes back in wartime stories, fighting Nazi saboteurs and spy rings and punching out Hitler all over again.
But there’s a strange tragedy to these things. By 1975, when the first of those titles appeared, the outcome of the war was fixed in history. So, much like their 1940s counterparts, these heroes were once again destined to never win a decisive victory that might alter or end the conflict. Instead, they were manoeuvred into fighting their usual type of foes, people in bright costumes with wacky powers, Axis sympathisers like Iron Cross, Tsunami and Lady Lotus.
I think that ultimately this reflects how these vibrant characters are unable to affect the world that we know. And that’s a dilemma I incorporated into Bystander 27. In it, we follow Jon Hayes, an ex-Navy SEAL and normal guy, who gets caught up in the fallout of a superhero clash that kills his wife. In his grief, he is driven to find out why these characters do what they do.
One of Jon’s earliest observations is this:
“The heroes lived their lives, full of color and excitement and lightning flashes of derring-do, while people like him cleaned up crap holes like Afghanistan, crap holes that could never really be cleaned up, that just festered with new forms of hatred …”
Because the costumed heroes expend their energies on fighting costumed antagonists and don’t ever get involved in real situations.
And that’s really how it has to be, because these things – comics, fantasy and science fiction in general – are at their most formidable when they work as metaphors. When the mutants of the X-Men are stand-ins for every oppressed group and outcast teenager. When the Daleks carry a message about the inhumanity of dictatorships without needing to be about just one. When Blade Runner’s androids highlight our own, very human sense of alienation.
Sometimes, it seems, the more real we make fiction, the less real it becomes. That’s the core dilemma in Bystander 27. I hope you’ll join me in exploring it.
