Dear New Writer,
As most superhero comics are based in the United States, and most of the companies are American, it is possible to have a writer who has never left the United States. This works when the setting is always New York City, but often a plot logically reaches beyond the borders of that USA. The most powerful and popular characters tend to have a global reach, and may have to interact with non-American characters in order to keep the scale of the plot intact for the reader. Writing a character from a country you’ve never set foot in may seem like a daunting exercise that demands a lot of research, but observation of not only the superhero genre but the mainstream American media as a whole proves that this is not the case.
In order to help these writers, the Mainstream Comics Industry has collected some short guidelines based on the great American superhero tradition.
5 Rules for Writing International Characters in Mainstream Superhero Comics
1) If the character is US-born and straight, script as normal. Consult the Thinly-Veiled Racial Stereotype Handbook and the The Wicked Witch, the Doting Mother and the Perfect Girlfriend: A Complete Guide to One-Dimensional Female Characters as appropriate. If the character is US-born and LGBT, seek advice from a conservative religious leader in your local community as to how obvious the character’s sexuality may be.
2) If the character is a guest-star based in a country other than the United States, skim the Wikipedia page of the country in question. If you are unfamiliar with the exact spelling of the country’s name, researching a better-known neighboring country will be just as good. Construct a nationalistic character with powers and costume based on the information in the basic Wikipedia article. Consult the Thinly-Veiled Racial Stereotype Handbook as appropriate.
3) If the character is based in the United States but born elsewhere, choose whatever powers and costume seems best for the story. You can portray ethnicity with some simple research. Obtain a vocabulary list for the predominant language (or what you suspect is the predominant language) of their native country. Choose three common words and two exclamatory phrases. In each scene with dialogue, make sure your international character uses at least two of the words or expressions on your list.
4) When interacting with American characters, your international character will almost always consider the government of his country to be absolutely correct in all ways. If this is a government that is in contention with the United States, your international character will discover that the Americans are actually in the right and he/she has been living a lie unless the character is meant to be a villain. If the international character does not consider the government of his country to be infallible, he/she abhors the oppressive nature of the government and idolizes the United States.
5) If your character is from a fictional country, locate it in a region that is crowded with hard-to-pronounce nations. Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East are favorites. Nobody ever notices a new one there. Pattern the history and culture after the stereotypes of the region, and cobble a funny-sounding name from the highest profile countries in the area. Make up your own words, phrases, and folkish sayings to give your character flavor.
The preceding rules are only guidelines. However, the Mainstream Comics Industry advises against researching another culture and creating a well-rounded original character based on actual facts, because this could result in your readers thinking of foreign nations as places with a rich history and culture populated by a variety of individual thinkers who are worthy of respect as human beings. This leads to the audience raising their standards and refusing to pay for books that don’t adhere to that standard. That makes more work for everyone, and may cost some very nice people their jobs. You will be very unpopular as a result, and have no chance of being invited to the good parties.
Good luck in your writing career!
–The Mainstream Comics Industry
March 8th, 2008 at 1:47 am
So true its painful.
March 8th, 2008 at 2:25 am
I see a lot of hate for the National Hero Based on National Symbols and/or Stereotypes. In response? Captain America. See also: every supporting charcter from when Cap wandered around on a motorcycle. See also also: Uncle Sam
March 8th, 2008 at 3:01 am
Lurker — See also: A bazillion American heroes who do not wear red, white, and blue or have patriotic names. See also also: Very few non-American heroes who aren’t National Heroes.
March 8th, 2008 at 5:18 am
Besides which, Captain America is a Golden Age character, when standards were different. The Lee/Kirby take was to play him up as a man out of time; he’s at his least interesting when he’s used as a straight patriotic hero.
March 8th, 2008 at 6:14 am
I’m just saying, when you only see 1 or 2 heroes per country, and they’re normally the OFFICIAL hero or whatever? Its not so shocking that they’re similar concepts to Cap. I mean, following Blockade Boy’s blog he’s been showing various non-American super-hero comics. And for the most part they seem about the same as American ones. Goofy costumes, origins and all…
Which I guess is part of the problem. If you suddenly show that EVERY country has a number of super-heroes/villains in similar size to the US you’ve suddenly got to explain where the hell all these people have been for every world threatening event for the last 60 odd years of continuity…
Though your thoughts on dialogue stereotypes are pretty dead-on…
March 8th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Lurker, that’s another point: an awful lot of supposedly “world-threatening events” only ever touch the US. Funny, that…
March 8th, 2008 at 9:38 am
So sad yet so true.
I don’t mind the costumes and names too much so long as the characters actually have personalities, are developed, explored, built upon etc etc but that doesn’t happen too much.
It would hurt if we had a few African writers who could write/create African characters or Chinese writers who could do the same of Cihnese characters etc etc etc. BTW is there an African writer at DC or Marvel?
There are some good new international characters like Busiek’s Sirocco(although very new), Rucka’s characters in Checkmate, Simone’s Atom.
March 8th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Katherine F.
“Lurker, that’s another point: an awful lot of supposedly “world-threatening events” only ever touch the US. Funny, that… ”
You would think someone might try invading Togo or Senegal or Chile to at least set up a beachhead.
March 8th, 2008 at 10:08 am
*fangirls you for the awesome post*
March 8th, 2008 at 11:07 am
kwaku: But doesn’t that run the risk of falling into the same ethnocentric trap? It’s not like Reginald Hudlin’s version of Storm was somehow more authentic or more interesting than Ed Brubaker’s (or early-period Chris Claremont, for that matter).
To put it another way, it’s true that the mainstream needs more diversity, both on the page and behind it… but I wouldn’t connect the two by saying that Chinese writers should create Chinese characters, etc. They should (be allowed to) create whatever they like, provided they have the talent to back it up.
March 8th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I agree completely. When I say African or Chinese writers should write/create African and Chinese characters I don’t mean to say that is all they should so. There is no guarantee that an African writer will write African characters any better or worse than American writers.
However I think African/Asian/South American writers are more likely to write authentic African/Asian/South American characters than your average American writer. And I think African/Asian/South American creators are more likely to create those characters in the first place. This isn’t to knock American writers. Any good, hard working writer can write good characters regardless of race, nationality or gender. But there are things someone cannot “get” unless they experience it for themselves.
March 8th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Most writers have a difficult time writing locales other than New York or Los Angeles, let alone the rest of the world. Why are so many superheroes based in those two cities. The United States is not the world and the United States is not New York and Los Angeles (or their fictional substitutes). Comic book writers should learn to see beyond their point of reference and that should start with looking beyond New York, and to a lesser extent, Los Angeles.
March 8th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Myron: It may just be a reflection of the dominant local readership – after all, most 2000AD stories take place in or nearby England…
March 8th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
(When they’re not in space, that is.)
March 8th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Sympathies from a SHIELD and Alpha Flight fan…
March 8th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
1) If the character is US-born and straight, script as normal. Consult the “Thinly-Veiled Racial Stereotype Handbook and the The Wicked Witch, the Doting Mother and the Perfect Girlfriend: A Complete Guide to One-Dimensional Female Characters as appropriate. If the character is US-born and LGBT, seek advice from a conservative religious leader in your local community as to how obvious the character’s sexuality may be.”
In all fairness, popular TV shows ranging from America’s Top Model to Ugly Betty feature obviously gay men. And Hollywood could hardly be called a bastion of religious conservatism.
The truth is that some gay people really do broadcast their sexuality for all the world to see while others don’t. That’s true of any group of people.
March 8th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
“4) When interacting with American characters, your international character will almost always consider the government of his country to be absolutely correct in all ways. If this is a government that is in contention with the United States, your international character will discover that the Americans are actually in the right and he/she has been living a lie unless the character is meant to be a villain. If the international character does not consider the government of his country to be infallible, he/she abhors the oppressive nature of the government and idolizes the United States.”
Two things.
First, Black Panther is a clear example of a comic in which the title foreign superhero doesn’t blindly agree with all the U.S. government’s decisions.
Second, there are plenty of countries with oppressive governments like Iran, China, Sudan and North Korea. So, it wouldn’t shock me if some superheroes from these countries would find American democracy more appealing, warts and all.
March 8th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Katherine F. said:
“Lurker, that’s another point: an awful lot of supposedly “world-threatening events” only ever touch the US. Funny, that…”
To be fair, the worldwide Martian invasion in the novel War of Worlds focused on Great Britain, H.G. Wells’ birthplace. And Japanese alien invasion films are usually set in their country of origin.
So, I’m not surprised that comics by Americans would have the U.S. be the focus of a global alien invasion.
March 8th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
“Obtain a vocabulary list for the predominant language (or what you suspect is the predominant language) of their native country.” This made me think back to the good ol’ days of X-Force, when Sunspot, who is supposedly Brazilian based on his back story, would never fail to speak random phrases of Spanish at least once an issue.
March 8th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
What’s all this, then? Madre de Dios!
March 8th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
@19—Don’t Brazilians speak Portuguese? Or was that your point?
Re: Lisa’s #3—see Roy Thomas’s writing of the Invaders.
March 8th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
RE: Alan-yeah, I was referring to the fact that they used the wrong language because, apparently to Marvel, any country south of the Border speaks Spanish. Oddly, I think they apologized about it in a letters page when some readers pointed out the error, but then continued to have Sunspot make exclamations in Spanish.
March 9th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
I love fictional countries.
March 10th, 2008 at 11:37 am
What I love about some of the little slip-ups that betray the calibre of the research by writers and editors. For instance in an early edition of the OHOTMU they gave the Russian “original version” of the Crimson Dynamo as “Krasnii Dinamit”, which actually means “red dynamite” – they must have slipped into the wrong line of the English-Russian dictionary they leafed through. It does become a bit sad when chosen names become counter-productive, such as when Marvel wanted a hero to represent democratic West Germany in their “Contest of Champions” mini. What did they hit upon? Blitzkrieg, a word taken from Nazi propaganda. Rather like naming a supposedly positive American character something like Know-Nothing, Manifest Destiny or even the Klansman.
And let’s not forget the method of choosing civilian names for foreigners – either combine first and a last name of two persons from the country in question or its neighborhood (e.g. Kurt (Waldheim) + (Richard) Wagner, Peter (the Great) + (Grigorii) Rasputin) or confidently use made-up stuff – AFAIK Illyana is a completely made up name, apparently intended to be a female version of Ilya, and according to what I looked up, “ororo” is not “beauty” in Swahili and apparently does not exist as a word of its own in that language, there being only the adjective root “-ororo” meaning “smooth, soft”, to which different prefixes are added according to the class of the word it is applied to, thus “soft” applied to a person becomes “mororo”).
Another thing about foreign countries: Writers, who needs wikipedia or other works of reference when you have movies from Hollywood’s golden age? If superstitious villagers with torches and pitchforks were good enough for 19th century Transylvania in the Columbia Dracula and Frankenstein movies, by golly they’re good enough for a scene set in present-day West Germany (Nightcrawler’s first appearance in 1975, still very much part of his origin).
(Little-known fact: Frankenstein in the original novel is actually Swiss).
March 11th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Dead on–even with exceptions I can think of–on how foreign supers react to the US government.
But I agree with some of the other posts that having aliens attack America is just a convention, the same way the old Avengers TV show invariably had Sinister Foreign Powers targeting England.