Imagine a world of Superheroes: The godlike figures; the daring exploits; the incredible battles; the frightening mayhem; the thrilling victories.
Now imagine a world suddenly without its heroes.
Earth's heroes have just been killed on an outer space mission. And as the deadly force that destroyed them now rushes towards Earth, brave souls come forward to try to take the place of the heroes... to keep the world safe...
That blurb was literally the first thing I conceived when writing Midgard's Militia, my homage to the rollicking world of pulp stories and superheroes.
Midgard's Militia was my second novel. At that time, I was fresh off George R.R. Martin's Wildcards series of novels, and lamenting on how the series had come to an end before the stories had fully run their course (something fairly common to long serials). Wildcards, too, was a superhero story written in the venerable pulp style, though modernized in scope and style to satisfy modern audiences. Which, in most cases, meant sex. Plenty of it, some of it explicit. Not the kind of stuff that kids were supposed to be getting from pulp novels, or their descendants, the comic book.
Now, I had no intention of writing a pulp just for sex, and as it turns out, the sexual references in Militia are more in the old vein (ie, couple hugs, couple kisses, some buttons are undone, cut to anywhere else!). My intention was just as the blurb stated: What does the world do when it has to take over for its missing superheroes? There was a story that was rarely, if ever, explored, and I had some great ideas for the concept.
Take the central character Lee Prime, who is modeled not-too-loosely on the pulp hero Doc Savage. Doc Savage was the seminal pulp hero before comic books brought us Superman. It occurred to me that a normal man scientifically bred to fight crime would become markedly diminished in the world's eye alongside beings who could shift planets and move at the speed of light. And beyond that, even more normal people would essentially stand aside and let the superheroes do the dirty work. Many of them would come to rely on the heroes totally, and others would come to resent them when they failed at their impossible tasks. To a man like Doc Savage, trained to rely on himself and his talents, such a world would be anathema to him. And if he felt diminished or underappreciated with superheroes around, he would certainly be the first to step forward when they were gone.
That was the start. Then came the other natural question: What about all those supervillians? How do normal people deal with them? And when normal people are so physically outmatched, will they fight the fair fight with villians... or just unceremoniously kill them? I wanted to explore that world, too, to see what normal people would attempt, and stoop to, to protect themselves.
One of the most enjoyable parts of preparing the story involved conceptualizing the superheroes. I didn't use characters from existing comics, but I wanted the reader to be able to infer their superhero type from what sparce information was available, even if it was just their name. This would help to sell the idea of the heroes, which would in turn help drive home the catastrophe of losing them. Without them, there's not only less power to the story, there's little point to it.
And finally, the coup de grace: I came up with an explanation for superheroes! Okay, it's clearly a pulpy sci-fi explanation, but it works, and it becomes a major part of the story's development. What is it? Dude... read the story!
So I developed a concept, fleshed out some characters, outlined some of the things I wanted to see... and the story almost wrote itself. And boy, was it fun to write! It was like reading a good pulp novel or comic book—I couldn't stop until it was done!
Once done, I passed the story on to a friend of mine who had read plenty of sci-fi and comics, and he got the concept in one. And loved the story! Why I didn't try to publish it then is sometimes beyond me (other times not), he was so enthusiastic about it. He even gave me a few tips that helped me polish it a bit.
With this release, I'm considering the polishing essentially done, and presenting my homage to the pulps. It's not a superhero story: On the contrary, it's a story about normal people who rise to the challenge of defending themselves against a dangerous, powerful world. A world that needs superheroes desperately. A world that we sometimes wish we could live in.
Copyright © Steve Jordan. All rights reserved.
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