Processing #1: Where Do I Put The Sidekick?

When I started this blog at the beginning of the summer, I envisioned it as a place to share writing and parenting experiences. I started out posting a lot of photo-heavy reports from some of the places I was taking the Kiddo over the summer, but somewhere in that I got too busy to keep up. As the summer came to an end and some writing and comic publishing deadlines started to loom (not to mention the school year starting up again), I began to think about new approaches to the blog.

This is the (long awaited! ha!) result of that thought process. I'd like to blog about the writing process, for comics, for serial fiction, for zines, for short stories, and eventually for novels as I follow the twisting path my writing seems to be leading me on. This is about process, and it's about me reflecting on what I've learned and what I'm continuing to learn, so I'll be calling it "Processing". Hopefully this will be the first installment of many.

I'm not going to spend time on my background. I'm Rick. I write comic books. I write other things. Today's column is about Perils of Picorna, a fantasy manga comic that I co-write and self publish. Further information about myself, my comics, and my other work can be found online easily enough. My website, dandelionstudios.com is a good starting point, and I'm on several of the popular social networking sites and always happy to meet new friends in those places.

Processing: Where Do I Put The Sidekick?

We're in the brainstorming phase of the third issue of Perils of Picorna, and I have found myself falling into a pattern that I don't like.

I keep trying to find excuses to remove Petrus from the story.



Petrus is the protagonist's main companion. He's her sidekick, to use the traditional comic term, although he's also a potential romantic interest. And in a lot of the scenes that we are planning, he's just not all that convenient to have around.

We play around with clichés at lot in Perils of Picorna. It's patterned after the cliffhanger serials. We absolutely delight in clichés. We've got Picorna hanging off a cliff (well, a tall statue, actually) to end the first issue. The cliché that ends the second issue is even more wonderfully outrageous.

But as much as we love clichés, we delight even more in tweaking or breaking them.

Here's a cliché:

The hero is in the final battle with the villain. The hero's love interest (the damsel in distress; we'll just call her Damsel for the rest of this example) needs to be present, because of course, as the cliché requires, she needs to be "saved". But of course, we can't have her, you know, do anything USEFUL in the impending battle because it makes the hero look weak if he needs Damsel's help to win.

So we get an array of tactics to conveniently remove Damsel from the scene so that we can get on with the brawling/dueling/slaying/jello-wrestling. At times, writers will simply have Damsel stand around uselessly, looking vaguely concerned. If they can't get away with that, then maybe she could be conveniently tied up, locked in a cage, or frozen in carbonite (What the heck is carbonite, anyway? Oh, never mind. I looked it up. It's the hypothetical di-deprotonated anion of dihydroxymethylidene.).

Of course, more modern sensibilities will demand that Damsel actually show some degree of competence. This is typically accomplished by having her offer a measure of token assistance before being taken out of the fight, typically with a single blow that manages to render her unconscious without unduly messing up her hair or makeup. Classic example of the above can be seen in the climactic fight scene of the (admittedly obscure) film The Karate Kid II.

With Perils of Picorna, we're trying our hardest to break those gender clichés. So we've got a heroine who fights her own battles. She gets into horrible imperilment and gets herself out of it. She saves Petrus when he gets into horrible imperilment. She…

Yeah.

Therein lies the danger. We didn't break the cliché. We just gender-reversed it. Which is cool in one sense because it's still not done often enough. Clichés need to get gender-reversed. It should happen a lot.

But the trick of the writing comes in finding more creative solutions, and that's what we're going to try to do. Petrus gets knocked out on the next-to-last page of the Issue #1 so that Picorna can have her (literal) cliffhanger. That allows her to do a fun escape scene followed by a solo fight scene to begin the second issue. It's a good sequence that accomplishes a lot.

And now we need to be careful not to do it again. The book is called Perils of Picorna. It’s Picorna's story. As much fun as Petrus is (and he's really a great character), he's still a supporting character. So that means that Picorna is going to get more of the action (and in our cliffhanger fantasy genre, that means she gets more fistfights, swordfights, high-speed chases, falls, tumbles, vehicular collisions, and narrow escapes).

But if we start falling into a repeating pattern of simply removing Petrus from the action every time we hit some big scene, the story will get predictable and the writing will look lazy.

So right now, Amy and I are brainstorming some creative ways to mix up the action. We're not doing anything new with most of this. As I said, we have fun writing clichés.

But what is really fun, and really challenging, is looking for the little tweaks and variations that will break the cliché situation out of the familiar patterns and leave the readers smiling at that little twist that they didn't see coming.

That's what we're aiming for.