Michael Carroll is an Irish author who (coincidentally enough) lives in Ireland, where he writes novels, columns, and comics among many other things. Having written a vast array of different genres and sub-genres, he has finally gotten around to one of not-so-secret loves: superheroes. He speaks about it in detail…
FM: So, Mike, what makes The New Heroes/Quantum Prophecy different from your average superhero story?
One thing that makes my books different is that the average superhero story is told in comics. I’m certainly not disparaging that fine medium - I have over ten thousand comics in my collection - but with a prose novel it’s possible to really delve deep into the story. Another advantage is reader identification: with a comic (or a movie or TV show), it’s easy to see exactly what the characters and settings look like. With prose, I can - and do - deliberately keep most of the descriptions either simple or ambiguous… Take Colin and Danny’s home town, for example: I’ve had letters and e-mails from fans all over the world who are convinced that I’ve set the books in their home towns.
But that’s just the presentation, and not really the story… I like to think that my stories differ from the average superhero epic because I can play around with the scale. The prologue to the first book is big: action, explosions, powerful good guys and bad guys, great big guns (and a really big tank). Then we cut to the first chapter, and it’s about a bunch of thirteen-year-old kids in school. They live in a world where the superhumans have been gone for ten years. It’s a smaller world, less colourful, less adventurous, much given to looking back to the past and wondering what happened… But gradually secrets are uncovered, strange stuff happens, and everything begins to grow…
You can, of course, do all of that in a comic or a TV show, but they’re episodic media. The readers (or viewers) will expect at least one big action sequence in each episode! Can you imagine a superhero comic where the superheroes appear in the first issue and then don’t really show up again for another eight or nine issues?
There are also disadvantages to presenting a superhero story in prose as opposed to a visual medium… There are cinematic tricks that comic artists and directors use, such as putting something in the background and only bringing it to the fore later on: that’s a difficult one to pull off in a novel!
Back when I wrote the first draft of the first book, I sent it to a friend who made a rather clever suggestion: He said, “When Colin arrives in America, it should be like when Dorothy lands in Oz and everything changes from black and white to colour.”
I thought, “Yes! That’s brilliant!… Er… How the hell am I supposed to do that?” This one bothered me for a while, until I came up with the solution… A quick rewrite later, followed by two more much slower rewrites, and I had it… So in the final book, it’s raining and overcast pretty much the whole time, until Colin lands in Florida and it’s sunny and warm. Not, perhaps, the most stunning of effects, but it certainly does change the atmosphere of the scenes, and it helps to highlight Colin’s sense of displacement.
FM: Do you always try to find something the reader can relate to when creating a character, or are there times when you prefer to keep the reader detached from someone?
I almost always try to give every character something with which the readers can identity. It may be a mannerism, a speech pattern, or a situation in which they find themselves: the classroom scene of the first chapter is a good example of the latter. The teacher hates his job but does it anyway. To illustrate this, I made him somewhat bitter, impatient and negative about everything, and the kids - by which I mean the readers, not just the kids in the book - are very quick to pick up on this.
As for keeping the readers detached: it’s rare that I’d need to do that. However, at times you don’t want to give away too much… In the first book it’s not immediately obvious who the real baddie is, and what he can do. I did this deliberately because his story doesn’t really kick off until the second book, and I didn’t want to overwhelm an already complex plot.
But you can’t just say, “Oh, and he was the real baddie all along.” You have to put in enough clues so that when you reveal the secret the readers have the desired reaction. That’s the key thing about plot-twists: you don’t want the readers to respond with, “Huh? Where the heck did that come from?” You want them to think, “Of course! I should have seen that one coming!”
Getting back to what I said earlier about keeping the descriptions simple: some writers will give full, detailed descriptions of their characters - often going to the trouble of having the chief protagonist look in a mirror very early in the book - but I do my best to avoid that. It’s way too transparent, really slows down the story, and makes it harder for the readers to put themselves in the place of the character.
In my books, it doesn’t get much more complex than this: Colin is short for his age, with dark hair. Danny is tall, slim, good-looking. That kind of thing. In fact, it’s not even necessary to say that Danny is good-looking: that can be done a lot more effectively by having all the girls interested in him.
Of course you don’t do this by saying, “Girls like him” in the narrative - that’s cheating and the readers will rightly pull you up on it! You do it by showing that girls like him: there’s a scene in which Colin, Danny and their friend Brian are hanging around, chatting, when a bunch of girls go by. The girls fall silent as they pass, and cast quick glances at Danny. One of them says hello, but Danny can’t remember her name. Brian, however, can remember her name, and is disgusted with Danny’s laid-back attitude.
In this instance, it’s not Danny with whom I want the readers to identify: it’s Colin and Brian. We all had a friend like Danny when we were teenagers: someone who mysteriously didn’t blush or break into a sweat when girls talked to him!
Everyone’s heard of the writer’s maxim “Show, don’t tell.” I like that one, but the one that I have on a post-it stuck to my monitor is a lot more useful: I believe it was originally designed for teaching, but it works just as well for writing: “Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. Involve me and I will understand.”
Speaking of characterisation: A couple of reviewers have complained about my books’ lack of a clear definition between the good guys and the bad guys. Several other reviewers have noticed the same thing and have applauded it. Perhaps the first bunch of reviewers like everything to be in black and white because they believe that younger readers aren’t able to cope with shades of grey. Those reviewers are very wrong! Younger readers are incredibly astute, much more so than most adults. They have incredibly well-developed instincts of right and wrong, which is why ambiguous characters are that much more attractive to them.
I was always vaguely aware of this, but what really clarified it for me was a review of The Phantom Menace that went something like this: “Darth Maul has got a red and black face, wears a black hooded cloak, he’s got horns, yellow and red eyes and stained yellow teeth. Yet he somehow managed to leave his ‘I’m Evil’ t-shirt at home.”
Y’see, there are no bad guys. Well, there are, but they don’t see themselves like that… Take Magneto, for example. No disrespect intended to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (love those guys!), but in the early days, Magneto was - to be blunt - a rather dull character. He was the leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and it was his intention to take over the world. Nothing there to make him stand out from pretty much every other supervillain.
Magneto only became interesting when the powers that be in Marvel decided that he was more misguided than evil. A bad guy becomes fascinating (and a lot more scary) when you find yourself thinking, “I know he’s a baddie, but he kinda has a point there…”
In other words, every character is the hero of his own story (insert “heroine” and “her” as appropriate!).
FM:Can you recall where your love of superheroes came from?
I can! Some time in the early 1970s my dad went to London. In those days travelling from Dublin to London was a big thing. Ireland was in the middle of a very long recession, and we were by no means a wealthy family. Anyway, while he was over there Dad bought me a copy of The Mighty World of Marvel, a black-and-white comic that reprinted some of the early Marvel stories. I’d never seen anything like it! The Incredible Hulk, The Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four… I was completely blown away.
Shortly after that, the UK Marvel comics started being imported to Ireland, so I was able to get a reasonably regular fix. Around that time I was also lucky enough to see one of the original Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons on a friend’s television set (we didn’t own a TV at the time - I told you we weren’t wealthy, didn’t I?), and one of my friends owned a little Batman figure with a parachute.
I was hooked on superheroes, and especially loved Spider-Man, but what really impressed me was the Marvel UK reprint of The Avengers. My first issue was #16 - “The Old Order Changeth” - the one in which Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch joined the team. I actually still have that comic. Well, most of it: the cover is long gone and I coloured in the splash page…
FM: Were there any stories that you think inspired Quantum Prophecy/New Heroes (in retrospect, or as a conscious decision)?
I can’t think of any specific stories off-hand… But I certainly wouldn’t have used anything directly from someone else’s work! That said, I’ve subsequently discovered little things here and there that might have been subconsciously lifted from comics. The name of my character Solomon Cord, for example… Originally his name was Darrien Kane, but given that the book already had a “Danny” I decided to change it (where possible, I try to have the main characters’ names start with different letters - unless a name is just too good to change!). I came up with Solomon Kane, but that seemed familiar, and didn’t feel quite right for the character. So I reused the name Cord from a five-page comic-strip I’d recently written. It was only after the book was published that I realised there was an Andrew Chord in Marvel’s New Warriors series. (I’m a huge New Warriors fan and I think it’s a crime what Marvel did to them last year!)
With a work as complex as the New Heroes series, there’s bound to be a few similarities with other works, be they comics or novels or movies. But I like to think that I’ve got a strong and fertile enough imagination to be able to create my own material without plundering other people’s creations!
And it’s not like I just bashed out the plots without checking… I did a lot of checking! That was how I discovered the single most important thing about creating superheroes: All the good names have been taken. You wouldn’t believe how many names I went through before I came up with Paragon… And then just before the first book came out, Marvel invented a character with that name. Arrgh!
However, I did manage to dodge a bullet when it came to Dioxin: he was called Toxin from the very beginning right up to the day before the book went to print, when I discovered the Marvel character of the same name.
Incidentally: the similarity between “New Heroes” and “New Warriors” is just a coincidence: I wanted to call the series “Heroes”, but my publishers didn’t think it was catchy enough for a title. Shows what they know! (Actually, my original series title was “Superhuman”, but they rejected that one very early in the process.) So my editor suggested “New Heroes”. I referred him to the New Warriors comic, but somehow New Heroes stuck, and I eventually worked it into the text.
FM: Is it hard to create such a detailed plot in prose over comic books or other media, which you’ve at least dabbled in?
Well, my comic strips have mostly been for the small-press market, so they’re usually not more than five pages. You can’t cram a whole lot into five pages!
I do plot very densely, though… I begin with a few paragraphs - rudimentary notes to myself - about what I want to happen, and then I go over it and over it, expanding, discarding, rewriting, until I end up with what amounts to a very detailed blueprint of the book. It’s a long process… For the third New Heroes book, my final outline was about 45,000 words. Which is quite a lot when you consider that the book itself is only 65,000 words.
When I’m writing the comic strips, I work pretty much the same way at the beginning, but soon start breaking the plot down into pages. For a five-page strip, I know that the first page is almost certainly going to be on the left-hand side, which means that the reader won’t get to see the end of the strip before he or she turns to the final page… This might not seem important, but it is! If, say, the story ends with a twist, you don’t want the reader to spoil the surprise by glancing at the last panel before they’ve read the rest of the tale.
Once I know what’s going on each page, I start writing it. For 2000 AD, there’s an average of six panels per page. I just keep adding panels until I get to the end of page one, then move on to page two, and so on. That’s the easy part, because I don’t care at that stage how many panels there are… Then comes the hard bit: condensing each page to the right number of panels. That usually means throwing away a lot of stuff, or combining panels. And where possible I do it with the minimum of narrative captions. It’s all too easy to have a caption reading, “After they escaped and got into their jet and returned to their headquarters…” I hate that!
There are other things about writing comics that I need to keep in mind… First, don’t overwhelm the artist with lengthy descriptions. Artists know how to populate the panels! Second, if more than one character is speaking in a panel, the character who speaks first should ideally be on the left, otherwise the speech bubbles’ tails will cross each other, and that just looks bad. Third - and this is one I nearly always forget - the characters should be named in the dialogue or captions. Otherwise the readers won’t know who they are. Fourth, there’s a limited amount of space on each page, so keep the dialogue crisp and succinct, and don’t add lots of sound effects - in fact, it’s rare that you’ll need any: with a good artist and decent writing, the readers will mentally add their own sound effects.
FM: Did you consider writing this series in other media, or was it always going to be a novel?
When I came up with the basic idea, I did consider writing it as a comic, but I chose to do novels for two reasons: first, I’m much more familiar and comfortable with that medium. Second - and this is the important one - superhero comics have already been done, but there haven’t been many original superhero novels.
A good story should work in any medium, but there are ways of telling a story that are more suited to one medium or another. The Quantum Prophecy (or The Awakening, to use the American title) is a very personal story for the three protagonists. We see what’s happening through their eyes, and we experience their thoughts and reactions. That’s much more difficult to do in a visual medium. If the same story was told in a comic it would have to be peppered with thought balloons, and thought balloons are one of the things I like least about comics: “Good lord! The evil bank robbers are about to detonate the bomb and destroy the building, with all those innocent people trapped inside! I’ve only got a split-second to get inside and somehow prevent the bomb from detonating! But — how?!” and so on. I re-read an old Batman comic recently in which Robin has something like half a page of internal dialogue while some guy is shooting at him. He’s either a very fast thinker or those are extremely slow bullets.
Comic characters - especially villains - are experts at talking to themselves, too… They do this while they’re standing on the peak of a mountain, overseeing their minions (whom they call either “puny humans” or “insufferable dolts”) who are assembling weapon capable of destroying the world. “At last! My atomo-destructivator is almost complete! With the sheer power of this mighty weapon, none will dare to stand against me!” It’s info-dumping at its worst! I mean, who is he talking to? Well, I’ll tell you: he’s talking to the team of good-guys who appear out of nowhere on the next panel and somehow managed to get close enough to hear the bad guy telling them what they need to know, but not quite close enough to try and stop him.
Actually, forget thought-balloons and expository captions: Info-dumping is definitely the biggest crime in comics. Any writer who opens a sentence with “As you know…” should have his artistic licence revoked.
FM: Let’s talk about your other work… Some of your most well-known novels would be the “Jaye Carroll” books. Did you have to do a lot of research to get into the mind of a woman, or are characters just characters regardless of gender?
I kind of fell into the Jaye Carroll books by accident. After my third Young Adult book was published I pitched about a dozen ideas to the publisher, but all were rejected, except for what was to have been a mainstream adult novel. They liked the basic idea and suggested that I write it as “chick-lit”.
The first draft was a disaster. It was painful to write and really wasn’t going anywhere. I was struggling because the lead character is female, and I was telling it from her point of view, so I was trying to write in a “female” sort of way. It was only when I realised that I should concentrate on her character, not her gender, that it began to flow. I scrapped everything I’d done and started over. After that it rocketed along. So the conclusion I reached was that people are people first, and their gender second.
There were some difficulties: the sex scenes were awkward to write at first (not that there’s any actual sex in the books: it’s all implied), and I needed to learn a little about clothes and fashion. My wife was very useful in that regard: “She’s going out on a date with a guy from work. What would she wear?” But for the most part, once I had the stories right the books were relatively easy to write.
I was contracted for three novels, but before the first one was even published I was offered a second contract for a further four books, and they multiplied the advance per book by ten. The first “Jaye” book was a great success, published here in Ireland and in the UK (which has a market about twenty times the size of Ireland’s). Unfortunately, shortly after the first one was published a distributor in the UK went bankrupt, owing my publisher a fortune. It really hit them hard, and they had to reign in their plans. They could no longer afford to publish in the UK, which subsequently meant that they were contracted to pay me a lot more money than the books would ever earn.
I wrote all seven of the contracted books, but in the end we decided to quit after the fourth was published and call it a day. Of the three unpublished Jaye books, I’m currently cannibalising the good bits of the fifth for a very different kind of book. As for the remaining two… Well, the sixth isn’t bad. I might do something with it one day. The seventh, though, is my favourite of the lot. It’s a direct sequel to the first, and it was a lot of fun to write. I’m still disappointed that no one ever got a chance to read it!
One thing that was cool about the whole process was that most of the readers didn’t guess that I wasn’t a woman. In fact, I was anonymously browsing a chick-lit website a few years back and I came across an argument between two users, one of whom absolutely insisted that there was no way the Jaye Carroll books were written by a man. Yay! Success!
However, men and women do have different ways of writing. I once discovered an article that proposed a method of analysing word usage to determine whether a piece of text was written by a man or a woman. And it works, too: I wrote my own program to analyse text using the parameters laid out in the article, and it showed very clearly that the Jaye books were written by a man. I tested it on a lot of other books by different writers, and the program got it right every time. This was around the time I was developing the sixth Jaye book… After I wrote the first draft I ran the program to see what it said, and then went back over the book and removed all the “male” words…Next time, the program believed that the writer was female! Since the book was never published that didn’t achieve much, but it’s a fascinating way to pass the time!
FM: Any plans to return to the less extraordinary genres?
No specific plans at the moment… I love writing science fiction and fantasy (I don’t mean the “magic sword” / “mysterious and powerful ancient artefact” kind of fantasy; I mean the superhero stuff). I’m currently working on a couple of new SF series, again for the young adult market, and I intend to return to the New Heroes at some point (the first three books tell only part of the overall story). I’ve also got vague plans for a Western I’d like to do some day. Imagine that - a book completely devoid of aliens, robots, monsters and superhumans! Not a single flying car in sight!
As I mentioned earlier, there are still two completed Jaye Carroll books that haven’t been published. The rights to all the books have reverted to me, so in theory I could sell them as a package to a romance publisher. And one day I might get around to doing just that. It would be nice to see them all in print.
FM: Did writing those books affect how you wrote subsequent books, like New Heroes/Quantum Prophecy?
Definitely! Prior to the romance novels I never really had any deadlines: the books were pretty much complete before I sent them out. It was quite a shock to suddenly have to write a 100,000-word novel by a specific date. I produced the first three romance novels while I was working full-time, and I was able to do it because I learned some very valuable lessons, which I will now impart:
1. Know the story and the characters before you begin the first draft. That’ll save a lot of time in the long run (because it’s much easier to change an outline than it is to change a complete draft).
2. The book won’t write itself. You kind of need to be there for the words to appear.
3. Publishers very rarely publish unfinished books, and they never publish books that are sitting in the author’s drawer because he or she is afraid to send them out.
Media recommendations!
FM: What was the last great book you read?
The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel: The Alchemyst by Michael Scott. It’s absolutely great! Okay, I’m biased because Michael is one of my closest friends, but that doesn’t diminish the book’s excellence.
I’m currently reading Make Love… The Bruce Campbell Way, by Bruce Campbell. I loved his first book If Chins Could Kill and this one is shaping up to be just as good, if not better.
FM: Last great movie you saw?
“Great” is such a strong word…! There’s a lot of movies I like, but very few that have blown me away. But if you’re pushing me for an answer, I’ll say The Descent. It’s been over a year since I saw it and it’s still creeping me out.
FM: Last great comic book?
The past couple of years have been great for comics, so it’s hard to choose… Can I pick two?
FM: Of course not!
Well, I will anyway: Planet Hulk was hands-down one of the most enjoyable Marvel comics I’ve read in years. The Hulk as a gladiator in an alien arena? Now, that’s so hokey it really shouldn’t work… But it does, and it works brilliantly.
I’m also going to pick 2000AD, which I read every week. The most recent Judge Dredd epic, “Origins”, is a masterpiece. Thirty years after they created the character, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra finally tell us how the judges came to take power in America.
FM: And last great song you listened to?
That’s a tough one to answer… I’ve converted my entire music collection (CDs, LPs and singles) to MP3 files, and they’re all on the PC. The last time I counted that was over 11,500 songs to which I have instant access. So it’s hard to pick a “last great song” because I could just call up my favourites right now and listen to them. Hold on a second while I do that very thing…
I’m back. I’ve just listened to an incredible song called “On the Beach” by Alphaville, my all-time favourite band. If you haven’t heard it, then track down a copy of Alphaville’s four-CD compilation album CrazyShow. I promise you that it’ll vastly enrich your life!
FM: Any upcoming work you’d like to plug?
Yep! The third New Heroes book - Absolute Power - will be published in the UK and Ireland in July, and a couple of months after that in South Africa, Canada and Australia. That one won’t be published in the US until mid 2009 (the second book will hit the US shelves in mid 2008). So if you’re in the US and you’ve just bought Quantum Prophecy: The Awakening, you could order Sakkara and Absolute Power right now and be the first in your neighbourhood to own all three. I promise you that it’ll vastly enrich my life!
FM: Any final thoughts?
Some people look down on romantic fiction, or science fiction, or fantasy, or young adult books, or comics… Such people adopt the attitude that these marginalised genres and media are the Morlock equivalent of “proper writing.” Well, to the creators and readers of comics, SF, romances and the rest, I want to say this:
Be not ashamed. If you like something, don’t hide it. Those who scoff at our preferences are pompous, pretentious idiots who are doomed to eternally wallow in turgid “worthy” prose. Trust me: they’re only fooling themselves. They’re not having a good time. We are. We’re having fun.
They want to laugh at us? Let them! It’s the only laugh they’re going to get.
Some years back at a science fiction convention, a member of the audience asked the panel - of which I was a member - about the perceived lack of depth in “kids’ books”. Once the other panelists had their say about why they believed such books occasionally do have great depth, it was my turn to respond… I remember this because it was one of those rare moments when I was able to put into words exactly how I felt:
“Depth is not something that the writer puts into a book. Depth is something that the reader takes out of it.”
- Danielle Lavigne is a teenaged writer who resides in Dublin, Ireland. She is passionate about writing, art, style, and nearly all forms of media, particularly comic books. She hopes to one day make a decent living writing comics so as to avoid the long-prophecised "actual work".