On Villainy

Once I started co-creating “real” comics—juvenile stuff I made as an adult as opposed to the juvenile stuff I made in grade school—I’ve always been drawn to the villains. Here’s a few!

Heroes are straightforward: they have a laudable goal and lines they won’t cross to get to it. The universe rewards them for trying and it’s all very linear and predictable.

But villains are more interesting and complex—few villains ever believe they’re in the wrong, so finding a way to make their skewed perspective make sense, if only to the villain themselves, is always a challenge.

Naturally, when I started devising the protagonist of my own comic, I made her a villain.

Veronica is mainly composed of a series of flaws; she’s impulsive, short-tempered, violent and flexibly moral. She murders. She lies. She’s promiscuous, and while I don’t regard that as a flaw necessarily, it’s tied into the fact that much of what she shows to the world is artifice, and she rejects romantic connections entirely. She cares about the well-being of exactly one person (not herself) and frankly would be gleeful if her entire home society were to be destroyed by the comic’s primary antagonist. She has the self-awareness to know that she’s doing wrong—and often actively chooses it.

That primary antagonist, for the record, wants to prevent an internecine magical war. And to avenge the callous, offhand death of her husband at the hands of the protagonist. 

You see where I’m going with this: the hero is what we would normally consider to be a Bad Person, and the villain is in many ways a Good Person. Veronica is even devil-themed in appearance and Azrael’s faction are all angel-themed, just to be really subtle and understated about the whole idea.

Of course, when your protagonist is a angry ball of bad ideas it can become difficult to move the plot forward—a problem I solved by outsourcing all the duty, intelligence and planning onto a second protagonist. More on her on a future post!

Because I’m not a monster I’d like to thank everyone who’s backed my Kickstarter so far! It’s running until November 15, so I’d really appreciate your sharing the campaign and inviting others to come aboard on my little story about a terrible person.