Writing Established Characters

At conventions I meet a lot of aspiring creators and a lot of them have the common goals of working for DC and Marvel. A big reason for that is they want to work on established characters. There’s an appeal to working on characters that are already known, famous, that you may have an emotional connection to. For a writer, I see it as a challenge to try and do something unique with a character that’s been written by plenty of writers before you.

Now since I don’t work for a major publisher, how do I write an established character? Well there are established characters that actually anyone is allowed to work on. These are characters that are a part of Public Domain. Public Domain basically means that a work or a character inside a work has had their copyright expired (and this is mostly commonly due to enough time has lapse since creation of the character). Now this means you can work on the character and you can even reference the original material, but you can’t use or reference any works that use these characters in works that are still in copyright. An example would be is that you can use the character Dorian Gray, but you can’t use anything about the character that was used in the movie League of Extraordinary Gentlemen because that is a recent work and still under copyright.

So I looked through the various characters in Public Domain but I focused on comic characters. If you wanted to, you can expand to all sorts of literary characters from Dracula to Aladdin. But I’ve been doing vampire and horror comics, so I wanted to do a superhero story so I stuck with Public Domain superhero characters. There was a company called Nedor that did a bunch of superhero comics in the 40’s and 50’s and I looked through their characters for one I could work with.

Now I didn’t want to do a retro superhero story or one that required a lot of old school comic book logic. I wanted something you could use modern thinking to make the concept of a superhero work (well with some creative license). So I looked at the character and saw Miss Masque. What first appealed to me about Miss Masque is I have a thing about women with strong personalities, but the article isn’t about my preference in women. The other thing about Miss Masque was her origin was vague enough you could take liberties with it and not stray to far from the essence of the character. And what was the core of the character? Well as far as I could gather from what I read of her old stories was that she was some sort of bored socialite that took to fighting crime as a way to find excitement in her life. Kind of like crime fighting was a hobby.

And so I thought that Miss Masque could be reworked to fit in a modern context. Miss Masque could be a character that is addicted to adrenaline. So she would keep taking risks to get her fix. Simple stuff at first like rock climbing but then like a drug addict, she would need to do more and more to get that same high, to get her fix. She could escalate to things like say having an extra-martial affair to finally becoming a vigilante. Now the thought on why she would think of vigilantism is because it’s a very risky activity and it can be justified morally for the character.

Another thing about the character Miss Masque is she has been kept somewhat current and in the public view. For years, AC Comics has reused old public domain characters and even reprinted their original material. When Alan Moore started doing his America’s Best Comics line (which happened to be the name of an old Nedor comic) he used a lot of Public Doman characters, and one of them was Miss Masque. Currently Alex Ross is working with Dynamite Comics to revive a lot of the old Nedor characters in their comic Project Superhero. Miss Masque was even given her own miniseries titled Masquerade.

So yes that means, I’m competing with comic greats Alan Moore and Alex Ross. That wasn’t my plan, but I figure if you’re going to compete, you might as well as aim high and do your best. Currently my version of Miss Masque is being drawn and inked as we speak. I hope to have it out in the first quarter of 2010. Wish me luck.