In Hero Years... I'm Dead Delux Edition (47 page)

This project, in many ways, started with the title. The title, in turn, was born out of a personal experience. I was with my brother’s family on a visit to Flagstaff, Arizona. We were having dinner in a restaurant and I was telling my niece, Faith, how to figure ages in dog years. At the time, she was 70 years old in dog years.

She, very innocently, looked up at me and asked, “How old are you in dog years?”

I replied, “In dog years, I’m dead.” Glib and funny, the remark stuck with me and got shelved for later use.

In September 2006 I attended DragonCon. I recall entering the room with all of the podcasting programming. I’d been podcasting pretty much since the start, just like all the other podcasters in the room, but I was decidedly older than they were. I’d stepped to the side and just saw all these younger folks talking enthusiastically about this shared passion for podcasting. I got a sense—a feeling—of an older hero being in the same position. And the joke came back to me as “In
hero
years, I’m dead.”

That sense is not unusual. It’s a glimmer into a character that’s been percolating in the back of my mind. A psychiatrist would suggest I was viewing my own sense of mortality, and that I was feeling the contrast of being involved in something with younger folks, but being acutely aware that I was skewing the mean age to the high side. That’s a convenient explanation for that sort of thing, but I’ve learned it’s really something else. Because characters are the means through which writers and readers enter a story, getting a sense for a character is really my trying on mood and attitude. It’s akin to an actor getting “in character.” I recognize this as my subconscious mind’s way of telling me that story elements are coming together.

I couldn’t do anything with the story at that point because I was finishing up
The New World
for Bantam Books. In March of 2007 they decided they didn’t want to work with me anymore, so I scrambled around for work that would pay bills. I did a number of short jobs, including writing the script for a Lara Croft, Tomb Raider animated short to celebrate the property’s tenth anniversary. (Yes, my first produced script starred Minnie Driver… or her voice, anyway.)

A subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting was behind the short films. They brought me in to the San Diego Comicon in 2007. It wasn’t the first time I’d gone, but I’d not been recently and the show had become huge. When I wasn’t doing autographings at the Turner booth, or at the Bantam booth, I wandered around a lot. In my wanderings I came to a portion of the floor where comic artists manned table after table, selling old pages, issues of comics and offering to do sketches. While the lines for picking up swag from TV shows like
Heroes
were long, this artist ghetto was practically empty. What made it seem worse was the number of old-time artists upon whose work the entire industry was built. They had no customers and almost no one recognized them or their work.

That image stuck with me and inspired the Hall of Fame sequence. That sequence was really the first thing I locked in on for the book. It gave me a point to aim for.

A number of other background experiences and elements came into play. I’d been a Batman fan since I started reading comics. For a
Champions
roleplaying game I created the character Revenant. He was Batmanesque, with a dash of The Shadow tossed in. From The Shadow pulps I pulled the idea of his having a string of secret identities. I liked the idea of him being a human with a bag of tricks—hence the term Felix. Having a variety of secret identities meant he probably didn’t have Bruce Wayne money, which worked just fine.

I would have loved to have been able to do a Revenant comic, but all my attempts fizzled back in the 1980s. However, in the middle of that decade, Ken St. Andre ran a play-by-mail roleplaying game called
Crossover Earth
. The concept was simple. Players would run both a hero and a villain. Villains would draw up caper plans in two versions. The
overt
version would detail the caper. The
covert
version would include other stuff the villain hoped to get if the hero failed to stop the caper.

Ken would send the overt plan to a hero. The hero player would write up a short story explaining how the hero stopped the villain’s plan. If Ken liked the story, it became canon. If he didn’t like the story, he sent the story off to the villain and let the villain take a crack at writing up the incident. Ken would then pick the better of the two stories to become canon. Then, once a month, Ken would publish all the stories in a big fanzine and each player, after reading through the accounts, would be asked to rank the heroes and villains from 1-25.

Many players were using characters from commercial comics universes, like Captain America, Moon Knight and Batman. Bruce Harlick played and used his character Marksman from the
Champions
rules. I ran Revenant, but wasn’t terribly active in the first two cycles. I was over at Ken’s house as he was tabulating the votes from the second round and he commented that Captain American and Moon Knight were so far ahead of everyone in the points race, that no one could ever catch them.

I’ve never seen a gauntlet tossed down that I didn’t itch to pick up.

And so I did. Over the next seven months I ground out a bunch of Revenant stories. Bruce and I did some crossover work, linking a couple of tales. The Captain America player dropped out, so
 
Moon Knight was my big competition. He tried to organize heroes into a Justice League and invited Revenant. Revenant refused, making it very well known that he thought Moon Knight (as played) was a Fascist. (That was deliberately hyperbolic. The player is a nice guy, and was just having fun with the role.) And the Revenant stories took some peculiar twists and turns. At one point Revenant was rated on
both
the Hero and Villain scales.

In the very last rating period, Revenant overtook Moon Knight and won the first year’s worth of the game.

While that was fun, I was left with a whole pile of superhero fiction that I really couldn’t do anything with. The experience had been good for me, however, because it taught me to write fast. I also had a lot of fun with the stories, which was good. Just prior to the game starting I’d gotten a pretty brutal rejection of a story that I thought had sold to an anthology. It kind of set me back on my heels, and the Crossover Earth writing was an end-around disappointment.

In 1987 I sent the Revenant stories off to my then agent, Ricia Mainhardt. She didn’t know what to do with them. About a year later, in conjunction with John Varley, She sold Ace on an anthology called
Superheroes
. I got invited to write a Revenant story. I made a couple of false starts. I figured a Revenant story should be dark, nasty and tied up in this mythos of shifting identities. Which mean that all the stories I turned out were too idiosyncratic to stand on their own.

A number of years before that I’d purchased a white paper on product development. What it suggested was simple. If you want a new product, take any existing product and turn it inside-out, upside-down or swap black for white. I know, kinda New-Agey mumbo-jumbo there. What it means is that you should challenge all preconceptions, so that’s what I did.

Revenant stories are dark, so I wrote a funny story.

Revenant works alone. In this tale, not only was there a Justice League type group, but Revenant gets a six year old boy as a side kick.

Revenant stories are serious. This story was serious, too, but had some parody elements. I used a number of stereotypical heroes. This story, in fact, was the first appearance of Colonel Constitution, complete with secret identity.

The story,
Peer Review
, was a lot of fun to write, and is still one of my most favorite stories.

Another aspect of the Revenant mythos was the idea that he might pass the mantle on to others. I also established one of his secret identities as that of an occultist named Damon Crowley. When Game Designers Workshop asked me to write
Dark Conspiracy
novels for them, and I needed someone who would be aware of other dimensions and magical stuff, I brought Damon over into that universe. He’s never referred to as Revenant in those books, but all the other names he goes by point right to that identity.

And, in those books, he works with a man called Coyote. I’ve always liked the idea of a hero named Coyote because coyotes are survivors. I once heard that coyotes are the only animals with a bounty on them who have
expanded
their range. I don’t know if that’s true, but I like the idea. On my morning walks to Starbucks I see coyotes often enough. Thank goodness they’re as terrified of me as I am of them. I usually spot them when they’re slipping away through the shadows.

Coyote as a survivor fit perfectly into the nature of this novel’s hero. If nothing else, he’s a survivor. He’s also a trickster, or uses a bag of tricks, so that ties back into certain Native American legends. This latter point wasn’t a consideration during the writing, but sounds good for any academic analysis of the work. What really
was
a consideration was alliteration. Kid Coyote sounds great, and I loved the idea of someone adopting Coyote’s abandoned identity. All I had to do was justify it in the story, and it would work. That justification became another point to write toward.

The whole system of the world, with Superfriends and fantasy leagues and leaked plans and the like came together pretty easily. The idea of a villain leaking plans grew out of Crossover Earth. The idea of ratings points comes from television and folks playing fantasy leagues and folks watching endless YouTube videos. Using non-lethal weapons and staging great fights come straight from Professional Wrestling—which really presents simple morality plays in a very entertaining way. All I needed to do was to figure out a few aspects to make it a viable business model—albeit one built on a shaky foundation—and the world worked.

Being a lifelong comics fan, there’d always been questions I wanted to address in a serious manner. For example, I always found Batman to be a greater hero than Superman because nothing could hurt Superman. Or there was always the question of Batman’s sanity, or the lack thereof. Little practical things like the vulnerability of secret identities begged for exploration. In this novel I could tag all of that, and more.

There were two greater issues that this story made available for exploration. One is the nature of the consensual reality in which we live. By and large we live by mutual consent. Sure, there are laws that proscribe some behaviors, but being a jerk isn’t against the law. It’s also not pleasant, and most folks prefer acceptance to hatred, so they act within social norms. Still, we all realize that the old saw “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” is valid—and there are times when
greasing
a squeaky wheel seems like a great option.

This consensual reality and its collapse in the face of extremism is one of the things that bothers me about both Libertarianism and Pacifism. If someone is stronger, is a bully, is well-armed and not afraid of killing someone for offenses imagined or real, society implodes. The thing is that we all know this. It’s the reason that terrorism is so daunting. Terrorists are agents of chaos. They’re willing to operate outside the rules, which means society has no way to fight them effectively. It’s like so many stories of the Wild West, where it takes a gunfighter to save society from other gunfighters, but once he’s done his job, he becomes the new threat.

The other issue I got to play with is one that shows up a lot in my work. I am fascinated by heroes and what makes them heroes. Why do people do things where they put their own lives at risk to save others? I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject and haven’t yet found a one-size-fits-all answer. That’s actually good, since it allows for all sorts of stories to be written around heroism. One aspect of things is that someone who is a hero to one person, might not be a hero to another—including himself. And he can easily be a villain to many others. All those factors provide a lot of energy for a story.

Unlike most of my novels, I started writing on this one
without
a complete outline. My process for this book started with to an early-morning walk to Starbucks. I’d think about what I wanted to write and sketch things out for the next two or three chapters. I’d pull notes from the previous chapters and project them forward. I never really had a sense of who the true villain was until halfway through the writing process, and wasn’t able to make all the connections backward and forward until the second draft.

The operating situation for this book can be summed up as
progressive complication
. My main character had three areas of conflict in his life: re-entry into the world, dealing with friends and family, and sorting out the mystery of why he’d been away for so long. Just as he made headway on one problem, I’d hit him with something from one of the other areas. As a result, he never really got a chance to reach some sort of equilibrium. He life was constantly in chaos and picking up speed as the lines merged and tangled.

The first three chapters really bear this out. In the first, he’s setting himself up to work on the mystery of his exile. As he defines the problem, the weirdness of the world kicks in. Just as he gets a handle on how he relates to villains in this new world, he discovers he has a daughter who can kick his ass, and doesn’t seem to like him much. And then he’s back to world weirdness and feeling out of place in a world he was stolen from two decades earlier.

As with any novel, there are things that pop in which surprise the writer. In this book, it was the character Puma. As I noted above, the situation at Comicon led me to create the Hall of Fame sequence. I really wanted to contrast how the actors were more popular than the real heroes, which is a bit of social commentary. Puma became a means toward that end, and his sacrifice went back to the true nature of heroism.