Even Heroes Need A Friend: Introducing Paige Wan

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Issue One, Page Twenty-One

This week’s post continues my From The Archives series, where I revisit one of my earlier pages and provide some insight on its creation. I’m going in chronological order, so that those of you who have just discovered the comic can get caught up!

Hi there!

This page was the introduction of Paige Wan, who I created as a foil for Steamroller Man. I realized pretty soon after I started writing this comic that I couldn’t just have Steamroller Man walking around talking to himself all the time, or not talking at all. As hard as comedy is to do in a comic, I felt it would be even harder to do it without dialogue. He needed someone to talk to.

I initially came up with the punny name Paige Turner, but to my recollection, that name was being used in another comic. So I changed her last name to Wan, making her Asian, and still a decent pun. Paige is some kind of Scientist working on some kind of Experiment that Sugar Daddy needs to steal. If that sounds very generic, it’s supposed to. I wanted to keep the details very opaque at this point in the story, both to avoid spoilers, but mainly because I didn’t want to go down a rabbit hole of scientific research trying to fact-check stuff for my silly superhero comic. The more detail I put into this early stage of the story, the more it would tie my hands as I went forward. I felt it best to keep the details ambiguous until I the moment I really needed to spell things out for the reader. Perhaps unwisely, I’ve kept those details out of the story for three issues now, but all will be revealed in the upcoming issue four.

There’s an old superhero-comic-writing tenet that characters should refer to each other by name at least once every issue, which ties into another maxim, that Every Issue Is Someone’s First Issue. I first heard this attributed to Jim Shooter, Marvel’s 1980s-era Editor-in-Chief, but he started his writing career as a 14-year-old at DC Comics (really!) and most likely received this method from one of the old-school DC editors. This practice has fallen out of favor a bit in modern comics, with the justification that it results in unnatural-sounding dialogue and “readers can just Google it if they really want to know”. This attitude baffles me. As a reader, I don’t want to interrupt my reading experience to do a Google search! As a writer, the last thing I want to do is bump the reader out of the flow of the story.

In this case, there’d be nothing to Google anyway - this was the first appearance of the character and I needed to establish certain facts about her: her name, her job, and the fact that she was working on something vaguely scientific that was important to Sugar Daddy. The challenge was to deliver this information without making it seem unnatural. Hopefully I managed to do that.

I’ve got some art process stuff for my paid subscribers behind the paywall!

Thanks for reading, and Keep Rolling!

Matt