Welcome to DC Comics. I’m the sub-editor who on-boards new writers. I’ll tell you what you need to know, but first, remember our guiding principle: justify every single thing about our children’s characters from the 1930s, and make them fucking badass.
What do I mean by badass? Picture a bottomless pit of rage transformed into a human jackhammer kicking the snot out of a cuckoo clock while a woman shaped like Jessica Rabbit cowers nearby, dressed in ninety-nine percent torn-off fetish gear.
And what do I mean by justify? Take every detail of a character’s many-decades-old mythology and defend them as normal and believable today, except anything hinting these were figures of children’s entertainment. Paint those elements every shade of badass.
Let me take you through the big characters.
Batman (Must Be Bad-Ass)
A handsome, famous billionaire who styles himself after a flying rat and swings around buildings in tights and a cape, fighting costumed criminals, unarmed. To assist in his crusade, he brings along a brightly dressed little boy. Law enforcement’s fine with all of this. Decades of comics, cartoons, and a TV show presented him as happy and jovial. Ignore those. Give him a permanent scowl. If you’re male, badass means having an emotional spectrum moving from rage to noble regret with nothing in between.
Superman (Has To Be Bad-Ass)
He’s an alien who looks exactly like us from a planet where they speak English. He flies around in pajamas and a red diaper designed to make his junk look huge. He can mate with a human woman and disguises himself with a pair of glasses. His rogue’s gallery includes a backward version of himself from a square planet. He’s pure-hearted and good (read: bland as dry oatmeal), so make him angsty and tormented, like in the recent movies. Or have someone mind-control him because even though he’s as super as it gets, he’s stupidly susceptible to hypnosis. Have him destroy a bunch of buildings and people, so when he snaps out of it: barge-loads of torment and angst.
Wonder Woman (Uh, Yeah, Bad-Ass)
She’s from Greek mythology, and real, as is the whole pantheon of Greek gods, heroes, and magical beasts. They exist in the contemporary world and everyone accepts this. The guy who created her was into S & M, so you’ve got all the license you need to write her into situations where she gets tantalizingly tied up. No matter what’s happening, showcase her ginormous rack. Do that for every female character in every comic, super or not. We can’t outright show their naked tits, but we can sure as hell tease the possibility that we will. Having huge boobs is the acceptable female equivalent of badass.
Green Lantern (Green And Bad-Ass)
Part of an intergalactic police force where each space cop gets their powers from a ring they charge by reciting a special poem as they hold it up to a lantern. Yes, a lantern, like you’d find in an old shed, except super. Green Lantern wears a tiny little domino mask which somehow obscures his identity but not his vision. A bunch of our heroes wear these. Never have any other characters see through these, even though every single person would. Green Lantern’s vulnerable to anything yellow. Don’t abuse this by having his enemies pelt him with bananas. He’s often involved in space battles, so slaughter as many purple people as you like. And all female aliens have humongous bazongas.
Even The B Listers MUST Be Bad-Ass
The Flash runs really fast, spouts science facts, and time-travels by running on a souped-up treadmill. His nemesis is a psionic gorilla who lives in Gorilla City. Martian Manhunter’s another Superman, except from Mars and green, Zatanna casts spells by saying things backward, Aquaman controls fish, Captain Marvel’s a little kid who turns super by saying a special acronym, Green Arrow fires a trick arrow with a boxing glove on it, enabling him to punch someone thirty feet away…
Just go along with this, okay? Somehow we wound up in the branch of the multiverse where Disney bought Marvel and Warner Brothers bought us, so Marvel gets to be family-friendly and we have to be darker than a black hole. We’re doomed to keep feeding our audience stories that are as serious and joyless as arsenic.
So get ready to bend yourself into so many pretzel twists to make this happen that it’d make Plastic Man faint. Then we’ll get you writing Plastic Man. And when you do, make him fucking badass.
