#comic writing

🖤🤍 Careem "Khalil" Kanaan by our talented collaborator @jesncin for the @sonofalkhalilzine 💚❤️

hard to summarize 150+ pages of worldbuilding in one post, but here’s the core of my Superman reinterpretation:

this is not just “Superman but in Palestine.”

the project exists to re-center what Superman actually means by placing him somewhere where oppression is not abstract, neutrality is not an option and doing good has real consequences

if Superman is supposed to represent hope, protection, and moral clarity, then i wanted to ask:

what happens when those ideals exist inside systems built around occupation, surveillance, displacement, and narrative control?

“The Last Son of Krypton is also the son of the holiest of lands.”

Khalil is Palestinian–Kryptonian and raised in Al-Khalil, Palestine. He was raised by a Palestinian family after the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, grew up through the Second Intifada and the partition of Al-Khalil, and first became Superboy in response to the intensifying blockade on Gaza.

his relationship to Palestine isn’t symbolic. it’s lived.

the core contradiction of the story is that he has the power to save people in moments, but not the power to dismantle the systems hurting them overnight.

every intervention has consequences. every act of protection creates escalation. visibility itself becomes dangerous.

so the story stops being: “is Superman good?”

and becomes: how does someone stay good in a world that punishes people for protecting others?

a huge part of the project is also about belonging.

Khalil belongs through love, language, memory, and lived experience. His relationship to homeland is emotional, cultural, and lived.

Mama Mariam tells him: “Resistance, habibi. It’s fertile. Like the soil of your homeland.”

a lot of the emotional core of the project comes from the fact that Khalil was not raised by people who taught him power mattered more than humanity.

he was raised by people who taught him dignity, care, homeland, and responsibility.

the project is heavily focused on:

protection vs consequences

truth vs narrative control

survival vs dignity

resistance vs assimilation

hope as an active choice rather than passive optimism

another major character is Layla Loai, a Lebanese-American investigative journalist who moves to Al-Khalil as a correspondent.

where Khalil’s conflict is: “how do i protect people without making things worse?”

Layla’s conflict is: “what happens if the truth stays hidden?”

she believes silence protects systems more than people.

one of my favorite things about Layla is that she isn’t written as “the journalist love interest.” she’s someone whose worldview is built around the belief that if truth is buried, harm continues unchecked.

she lost her sense of permanence very young, grew up Arab in post-9/11 America, and became someone who refuses imposed narratives even when the truth isolates her from others.

where Khalil fears the consequences of visibility, Layla fears what happens when people look away.

a lot of her storyline deals with visibility vs safety, diaspora and belonging, as well as grief and disconnection

truth as responsibility rather than neutrality

one of the things i care about most in this project is that the people around Khalil are not props for his story. they embody different responses to systems of control, survival, fear, and resistance.

It ultimately depends on the type of comic you're writing - the genre, mood, etc. - and how you're planning on releasing it. If the visuals are a vehicle for storytelling within comics, then your GPS navigator is the pacing - it's up to you, the driver (i.e. writer), whether you want to take the scenic route or direct.

That said, here are some general 'rules' I like to follow when plotting out my own work!

DISCLAIMER: I am not a professionally trained writer, much of what I know has been picked up along the past 15 years of making comics, for better and for worse. Because of this, it's kinda hard for me to put exactly into words what 'works' for me, because so much of what I do relies purely on instinct and my own tastes. With all that in mind, do NOT take the following advice as a one-size-fits-all solution for your own writing - what works for me might not work for you!

~ Jason Todd, Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War

"But you, more than anyone on Earth, understand the importance of putting a good scare into people."

that’s a crazy fucking way to write! you want to tell a story and put your character through things but then they can’t have changed fundamentally by the end?? sometimes you get lucky and write That One Run where some key shift is allowed to happen that defines the character moving forward, but for the most part, you have to walk this fine line of maintaining audience interest in a static character. and that’s fucking fascinating.

that’s not really a requirement you see in movies or TV, and it’s like the opposite of how most books work. even fanfic doesn’t have that limitation, because there’s no expectations of a shared continuity from author to author or even between one person’s works. every time you start writing you can restart from the template of the comic or even from scratch, and by the time you end your fic you’ll likely have a person who looks very different from the comic canon. only the people answering directly to DC/Marvel/[other companies I don’t know about because I need to diversify my reading] have to preserve the archetypes, because they have to make sure they can still sell comics.

one of the easy, obvious examples is the way that Gotham never gets better no matter how hard Batman works, because if his methods got more successful or the villains left or reformed or died, you wouldn’t have the same conditions to perpetuate the Batman archetype. it’s also why we get a slew of origin story retellings, because those are the only places where you really can write permanent character growth, even if it’s sort of working backwards from the character everyone recognizes.

We’ve got:

⁃ Robin dies (again)

⁃ Joker and Batman’s final confrontation for real this time, we promise someone will die

⁃ Joker is back from the dead and worse than ever! Who could have seen this coming??

⁃ Batman is back from the dead

⁃ Thomas Wayne was secretly a horrible person

⁃ Thomas Wayne is still alive and a terrible person

⁃ Robin(s) die again

⁃ Some villain has enacted a full takeover of Gotham City! This will never be brought up again after it’s over

⁃ Batman is insane (again)

⁃ Batman fights the people with superpowers! (Again)

⁃ Batman is invincible because he’s so smart

⁃ Batman’s smartness backfired and now everyone hates him

⁃ Batman is going to get married for real this time

- Someone killed Batman’s fiancé (again)