Ideas Like Bullets #1 -- Close to the vest and holstered

by Tommy Hancock

Ideas Like Bullets.  Catchy little phrase that I’ve used more than a few times to categorize how I think, how I create, how I write.  It’s handy in that it is rather descriptive.  Sometimes concepts come to my rather interestingly arranged mind and out on paper with the precision of a sniper, trained and prepared, perched in a nest of phrases of twists, looking down on the unsuspecting story unfolding below.  Other times, there’s very much a shotgun approach to how I do things.  Just load up with a first sentence here, a cool idea there, throw in a few characters for sake of impact, and just fire, see what’s left standing when the smoke clears.   Probably, though, more often than not, I carry around what I do as if it’s a pistol.  Close to the vest, holstered where I can get to it fast and quick, six shots or so ready to go at any given time.  Now, of course, those that know me know that along with those six bullets in the gun, I’m also carrying a figurative ammo belt of other ideas that would make a Wookie jealous.  But yeah, the concept of me coming loaded for bear idea wise as a writer and creator, that pretty much fits.

The imagery itself is telling as well, moreso concerning what I enjoy writing.  Most writers don’t envision the means by which they devise the things they write, they simply just write, pulling the past, present, and future of the worlds they build out of their brains and fertile and often fevered imaginations.   For those writers who actually do want to paint a picture of where their inspiration rises from and how they keep up with the Hydra that is creativity, usually it’s something colorful, yet simple.  Like a box, or a pirate’s chest full of storytelling booty.  Or maybe a treasured artifact they discover or even, according to an author I tripped across some years back, a mystical dragon that flies overhead, raining ideas down upon her thoughts like it was shedding scales.  Very magical stuff writers come up with usually, when they are prone to describe from whence their ideas come.  Which again, isn’t very often. 

But, not me.  The relationship of how I create to firearms is a fitting one, for reasons already stated, but also because I write Pulp.  I don’t just write Pulp, though. I read it, I watch it, I listen to it, I collect it, I enjoy it, and to some would say, based on career and life choices, I’ve actually lived Pulp at least a little bit.  Pulp is more than just the style that I choose to express myself with.  It is a very vital important part of who I am, and that’s both in the light and on the dark side of the street.

Now, this is the point in the narrative where defining what Pulp is usually becomes necessary, but I’m going to avoid doing that this time around.  Or, probably more accurately, if Pulp gets defined in this rambling, it will be in a longer form than usual and you’ll have to pick it out from between the lines.  Let’s leave it to say that I see Pulp as a style of writing I love to use in everything I write.  And that’s probably where the definition lies for what it is to me.  Not in the technicalities of it, not the trappings of Pulp, or who wrote it before me or what aspects of my own I bring to it.  But Pulp for me is probably best defined by why I write it.

The question of why someone writes anything is an interesting one.  It is a query that really almost always has deep, tangled roots into the true nature of the author, but the answers writers usually give are short and terse.  Some say, “For the money,” but most of them haven’t really been working professionally long or have already made their literary bones and are part of that upper tier making sufficient coin.  Others say, “Because I’m a writer.” And although technically that’s a reason, it’s not a ‘why’ reason, more of a ‘Go away, kid, you bother me’ reason.  And a few get a tad deeper, stating, “I can’t help myself. I try to stop, but I can’t.”  So, allusions to writing being a sickness, a disease there is no cure for – something that we’ll probably discuss all by itself at a later date – but still not ‘Why?’.

And as someone who’s been writing since being in Mrs. Phillips’ Third Grade classroom where I scribed the tales of murder mysteries and robot invasions of our school that I and my friends only had a recess to solve and/or stop, I get why the above responses are the usual.  Because, for a lot of people who create, who put themselves through the glorious heaven and torturous hell of being artistic, it is not only the fact that there is at least a modicum of talent flowing through our veins.  More times than not, our creativity, our desire to craft, to build, to weave, to draw, to write comes from something personal, something about us that, although potentially not unique solely to our situation, is in a way completely ours.

With this being the first of the new incarnation of my attempt at blogging, something I’ve honestly started, stopped, and restarted a few times, I thought it might be time to at least try to lay out why I write Pulp.  Not that anyone is requiring it of me or that me pulling back the tattered veil that shows my innermost whatevers will make you read this blog more or sell books for me or anything like that.  But, simply, why I write Pulp, the real motivation behind that choice, that drive, is something that I feel the need to share.  If you don’t feel the need to accept my sharing, though, I totally understand. You should probably stop reading now.

I have always been fascinated with heroes.  From the time I was small and my dad would turn on the TV and there’d be whatever Western he was watching on Saturday afternoon on.  Or he’d let me stay up later than my mom wanted and watch Hawaii Five-O or The Rockford Files or any number of detective/mystery shows.  Heroes, either of the complete white hat or even the dingy gray variety, speak to me, have been a source of enjoyment, almost a muse all their own, since I can remember.

And it wasn’t simply the heroes, but it was the conflict. The battle between good and evil. The fact that as blurry as it may get, there really is a line, a rather wavy indistinct marking at times, but there is a moral distinction between what is right and what is wrong.  The fact that that determination, what exactly is good and what is bad is often up to the individual, was not a truth lost on me at an early age must be mentioned.  Earliest memories I have, mingled in with the pursuit of television heroes, followed very quickly by digging up every Sherlock Holmes movie and story I could find and building towers of DC Comics in every corner of my room, also involve lessons on just how fickle morality is for some people. Lessons that I wasn’t given a choice but to learn by teachers who didn’t ask me if I wanted to be their student.

I was a smart kid.  Would like to think I’m still a smart kid passing as a responsible adult. And please, that’s not me bragging.  I mean, I had good grades, but my opinion of my intelligence is based more on the desire to learn I had.  A natural curiosity, maybe, but a truly unstoppable need to gather as much information as possible.  I never remember not carrying a book with me from the age of four forward.  Although I’ve been told differently, I am almost one hundred percent certain that my first word was ‘Why?’  I take great personal pride in a nickname that has been given me multiple times over the years by different circles of friends and acquaintances – The Wizard of Useless Information. So, in that pursuit, I latched onto things that I wanted to know more about and went after them as if they were scraps of food and I hadn’t eaten ever.  And chief among those pursuits was the desire to know more about heroes and villains, to gorge myself on fictional adventures of characters that were over the top and larger than life.  To understand not only why they chose which side they walked, fought, or flew on, but also to see enough of the inner workings of those sorts of tales to be able to create them, to make them myself for others to read, for others who needed them.

And also, to maybe find out which side I hung my hat on as well.

Identity is a hard thing for anyone to figure out.  And I don’t mean just one kind of identity, but who you are as a whole and how all the different aspects of what make you you fit together, how they all define the person you are.  It seemed like it was even a harder chore for me, although that is probably just personally colored hindsight talking.  I had a very keen awareness of a lack of identity early on.  Even though I have these memories of my father sharing his love of TV heroes with me, it’s really the only early positive memory I have of him. Not that the others are necessarily negative, but they are distorted by arguments with my mother and with my grandfather as well as a general pessimistic view my father had of everything around him.  Nothing was his fault, everything was against him, and he never could get anywhere because he was a Hancock and Hancocks just didn’t get anywhere.

My memories of my mother, though better, are shaded by all this as well. She fought my father’s attitude as best she could, protected my sister and me from it as possible, but she also was his wife. And for her that meant, in her way, either supporting his views at times or, when she couldn’t and fighting back wasn’t an option for her, simply ignoring it and painting over it with shallow explanations.

I write all this just a few short months after my father died suddenly.  We had been working the last year or so to improve a relationship that really hasn’t existed since I was probably twelve, if not younger.  It must be noted that I’m 43 years old, so, yeah, a lot of stormy water under the bridge, and much fault for it, at least for me, begins with him, but I was working on that with him…and still am now without him.  Forgiveness doesn’t get easier when the people you need to forgive are gone, it just becomes quieter.

As I struggled to learn and at the same time see if I was to be my father’s son or if there was another way to go, other forces impacted my life.  People, not strangers, but people I trusted because I was told to, you always trusted family, decided there were other things I needed to know.  Things they showed me, they did to me, had me do to myself and them. But it was all right, they said, because they loved me.  One even said that they could tell just the kind of person I already was at age four and what they were showing me, sharing with me was exactly what the person I was needed to know.

I don’t have many complete memories before April 1980. Lots of ribbons and strips, but nothing really solid.  Not until the day I decided I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore.  Really weird association, I know, but that day in April, just a few weeks shy of turning eight, I no longer feared the monsters in the dark. And the monsters in the light were never going to scare me again, either.

Intelligent and horribly insecure.  So much so that, at the age of eight, I considered not being here, not dealing with life anymore. Now, I didn’t put it in the solid terms such things are set in as we get older, but not existing, simply walking away and not being whoever the hell I couldn’t tell I was seemed awfully appealing.  There were things about me I couldn’t tell anyone, things that happened that I still haven’t shared with people you would think would have been the first I’d go to, even though I have taken appropriate steps to address the issues, sometimes kicking and screaming, but still I did.  But for so long, I simply wanted to go away, to not be.

And that is a struggle I carried from then in many ways until today.  One of the things I used to think, used to long for, used to regret was that circuses had stopped traveling from town to town by the time I was eight. Also, that the Merchant Marine and the French Foreign Legion, at least as I knew them, were things of the past.  See, in the stories I had discovered, all of these were passageways to other lives, to great adventures, to wild times and good friends, people who would die for you.  I wanted those opportunities, those avenues.  But they and chances like them only existed in Fiction. And most of them in Genre Fiction, particularly the type of stories that appeared in cheap yellowing pulp magazines or battered paperbacks.  Or in old movie serials and golden and silver age comic books.  Only in Fiction.  Pulpy fiction.

So, the first story I ever wrote I would call a Pulp story. And I haven’t stopped.

So, hero or villain?  Many of the good things in me as a person I actually can say I learned from fictional characters as much as I did the real, truly good role models I had around me. Of course, I’d like to believe I came out more Doc Savage than John Sunlight, more Lone Ranger than Butch Cavendish.  But I’ve had my mustache twirling moments, too.  No plots to dominate the world or anything, but I’ve acted out of selfishness, out of brokenness.  I’ve hurt people, sometimes with intent, most of the time not.  I’ve been a bad person at times, and have been pretty good in some of those instances at justifying, rationalizing it.  I have failed at being a good friend, a good husband, a good father, a good son, a good employee, a good everything. I’ve also succeeded several times, I think, at all of those things.

The truth of the matter is, the color of the hat changes with all of us.  We all have histories, both distant and current, that every day define who we are. The quest for identity is like Indiana’s hunt for fortune and glory.  It really doesn’t ever stop.  Hopefully we take the right roads more often than the wrong ones, but the fact is knowing who I am, pinning that person down with clear parameters and definition…is really a lot like defining what Pulp is.  And I’ve finally, after more years than it probably should have taken, become okay with that.

So, I write Pulp.  Because I like heroes and villains and the conflict they endure.  And because I can relate and vent a little writing those stories.  And who wouldn’t want to vent with giant robots, monster bat men, femme fatales, and cosmic catastrophes? Real stress relief, that.

Tune in next week, Kids and Adults alike! I promise the column won’t be so maudlin.  It may not make any more sense than this post did, and will probably be all over the map, but that, too, is just a reflection of who I am.

God Bless and Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid,
Tommy

Straight Talk About Origin Stories

The question from last week got me thinking about origin stories, and whether they still need a drawn-out telling. Batman had two pages in the old days and then it was off to the races. Most of the books from new pulp publishers that I've read tend to jump right in with little more than a brief set-up to establish character, and then they're off to the skies or into the jungles. Or in some cases, an origin requires a long comic book arc or is the purpose of the first novel in a series.

So, let's talk origin stories, folks.

Is the origin story still a necessity for today's pulp, comics, and action/adventure tales? Why or why not?

Nancy Hansen: It really depends on the story, and where you're going with it. A simple character or easily understandable world setting probably needs no more than a page of setup so that you know who this is, and where we are. Length of the story has a lot to do with it too, as well as whether this is going to be a standalone tale or something serialized. In something short or a standalone novel, you really don't want to waste too much time in that kind of setup, so the faster you can get any necessary info across, the better. And in anything like pulp, which thrives on fast action, you don't want to bog things down in details. If you're going to do an origin story, it better be exciting and full of thrills.

In fantasy and sci-fi there is often a lot of world building to do. In the mainstream writing, where readers tend to thrive on that sort of detailed thing, you have a lot more wiggle room for going off on long winded narratives. Not so in pulp where two pages or paragraphs into that, you lost your reader's attention. You have to do it in short spurts in between more active things going on. You'd be surprised how much detail you can get across even in the midst of a big action scene.

Roger Stegman: A lot of whether an origin story is necessary depends on the character, situation, and the audience. If the situation is really strange,  you had better explain it. If the situation could be misinterpreted,  you had better explain it. If the situation is obvious at the moment, you might go without an origin explanation until a bit later.

One must remember that readers today are much different than readers back in the 50s or earlier. I remember reading one of the Doc Savage books and the first 60 pages was introducing the characters before the story  began. I remember hearing about authors of the late 1800s explaining the history of the country for a hundred pages before the story even started.

Today's readers expect to be captured at the first word and dragged along. Description, back story, details fitted into the action. Modern readers have less patience with their books.

Ed Erdelac: I think absolutely it is. If you've got a great, well-thought out character, a character that resonates with readers, he's got to have a great origin. The Lone Ranger, Batman, The Shadow, Superman, Spider-Man, they've all got great origin stories.

Lance Stahlberg: It depends on how important the origin itself is to the rest of the story that you really want to tell. In pulps especially, err on the side of "not very".

For most crime fighters,those stories are typically more about the crime and the criminals than they are about the hero. In most cases, what motivated them makes for better filler material than it does an introduction.

In adventure tales, its even less needed. Heroes like Indiana Jones are pretty self explanatory. You don't need to do more than establish who and what they are in one paragraph or two panels. In fact, I may not need or even want to know too much about a character's background. I just want to see what he's gonna do next.

Lee Houston Jr.: Maybe not immediately, but definitely over time, yes. Your hero/heroine's actions and reactions during their debut adventure will do more to cement any relationship the character might develop with the readers. While there is no one correct way to present it, you do want to reveal the character's origin eventually so that the reader understands not only how, but more importantly why, the hero/heroine does what they do. The two schools of thought on this are "as it happens" and "the big reveal", which your other questions cover in more detail.

James R. Tuck: I believe origin stories can be complete in and of themselves. You can tell the full, detailed story of how your character came to be who they are. It is a classic move. Star Wars is basically the origin story of Luke Skywalker. It works because it is a complete arc.

Bill Craig: I think origin stories are necessary because readers want to know where a character comes from, what has turned them into the person they are.  As I was recently going over the manuscript for one of my Jack Riley adventures, Pirates' Blood to reformat it since the rights reverted to me, I noticed that during the course of the story, that I was telling through flashbacks some specifics of Riley's time spent working for the CIA, something not normally talked about in the books which focus on his time as a Chicago Police Detective.  It both gave him extra dimension and also made him more human as it revealed exactly why he left the CIA to become a cop, something that had been hinted at in the past but never been fully revealed.

How you can make an origin story more than just a recap of the back story a reader needs?

Nancy Hansen: Depends on how detailed you need to make it. If you have to get in over a couple pages worth of info, you need that origin story first. I'm not fond of long flashbacks, they get confusing and kill story continuity. If it won't fly in a paragraph or three, you need to rethink this tale. If you can find a way to get that info across without slowing the action and bogging down the story, go for it.

Just don't do the, "As you know Captain...," routine that Spock always did on classic Star Trek (which I loved BTW).

"Why yes... I do know that Spock..., so why... are you telling me... again?"

"Well Captain, our viewers do not know this, so it is is just my awkward Vulcan way of telling them."

I've got a trilogy going right now that started with FORTUNE'S PAWN and is designed to introduce an ongoing character that isn't even born yet. I started trying to write the character as is, but the background tale was just too good to gloss over. The trick has been to make that seminal story just as fascinating as the future ones will be, so that my readers are already steeped in that world and know what to expect. Yet at the same time, you have make sure each story or book can stand on its own, so that if readers pick up Book 3 or the magazine running the 5th installment of a series, they aren't going to be totally lost. So with something ongoing like that, there is going to be some repetitive description. Over time you learn how to fold that into what is going on now, not stop the story to write a character dossier or re-explain the setting. Recaps can be done by several means. I tend to favor heated war room discussions, nightmares, quick screen shots of the surroundings, and ugly reminders in the here and now of what happened in the past.

Lance Stahlberg: Just tacking on a recap of a character's origin like it's a footnote is usually boring and tends to come across disjointed, at least to modern audiences. Even background exposition should still flow with the rest of the story.

Sometimes the origin itself is kind of integral to the plot. John Carter, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon. Okay those need a little more setup up front. Trying to start a tale in an alien environment and revealing how a modern day Earth man fits into that through flashbacks would end up being pretty convoluted to follow.

If the origin story needs to be told in full for the reader to understand what's happening, you ideally still want to get it out of the way quickly so you can dive into the fun stuff. The more you spend on background, the less you are moving the action forward.

Ed Erdelac: It's not easy. I'm dealing with that very issue in something I'm writing right now. Marvel Comics always had those nifty little recap paragraphs Stan Lee (I presume) wrote before the splash page (i.e. - Peter Parker was just a nebbish youth until... etc). Not great for prose books I guess. I would say past the origin issue/story, it only needs to come up as it suits the plot. Does a character know the hero from his past, maybe before his 'origin?' That would necessitate the hero rehashing his roots, but I think again, to avoid it being a simple rehash, it should move the plot along somehow. Think about The Shadow or Itto Ogami - they're origins aren't revealed till further along in their respective stories - but the characters are intriguing enough for the reader to want to follow along.

Roger Stegman: I will have to surmise here a little, but like any flashback in most stories. What was remembered in the flashback effects what the person does in the now. Remember that it was criminals who killed a number students in elementary school, the hero then makes these criminals pay. Remember that the mistakes during training resulted in teachers delivering pain, the hero ignores a serious bruise on t he chest. Remember the first time one cracked concrete blocks in a wall, The hero smashes a fist through the body armor of a thug. Make the memories of the origin effect how the hero reacts in the now, even if it is to decide to put another hour on patrol rather than heading home.

Scott Rogers: I always believed if you could tell the origin in two comic book pages you were doing it right. Grant Morrison made me a believer in the one-page, eight-word origin story in All-Star Superman.

Lee Houston Jr.: By telling it as it happens instead of just revealing the details as a flashback. That way the reader is literally with the character from "day one" instead of learning everything after the fact. The reader can share the trials and errors of the hero/heroine discovering their powers, how to use them properly, along with everything surrounding the first adventure and whatever reason(s) the character decides to continue on afterwards. While "the big reveal" (telling the origin story after the fact) was the traditional method of telling origin stories until sometime in the 1980s regardless of the medium, the "as it happens" method has gained serious popularity over the last couple of decades. My forthcoming superhero novel Alpha takes this approach.

James Tuck: In a lot of modern genre, I think it works a lot better to begin after the origin. That is what I chose to do. The Deacon Chalk series begins five years after Deacon's origin as a monster hunter. Why did I wait five years? I mean he did have some adventure in there, he killed a shitload of monsters in those five years. I chose to wait because the beginning of book one, BLOOD AND BULLETS, is where Deacon is first able to begin to change as a character.

Bill Craig: If done correctly, giving little details hinting of the past life before the reader knew the character, it enhances the story and makes the character more human and more easily identifiable with for the reader.  They begin to care and that makes them want to pick up earlier books and go "Ah ha, now I understand why that pissed off so and so. Kinda  like in Die Hard 2: Die Harder when John McClain is crawling through the ventilation system at the airport going again?  Seriously?  Why Me?  Anybody who did not see the first one is going to go rent or buy the first movie just to see what he was talking about.

What dangers do you face if you choose to ignore an origin story and jump in in medias res, with a character already operating with a status quo? What are the advantages of choosing that method? Well of course it's a gamble. What if the character doesn't catch on with the reader?

Lance Stahlberg: Well if the events by which your hero got their motivation and abilities is complicated, you risk confusing the reader and detaching them from your character. Without any explanation at all, then they are just a cardboard cutout going through events that ultimately mean nothing to them.

Ideally, I like stories that launch en medias res and feed needed details through flashbacks or revelations, if for no other reason than pacing. Hit the ground running and let the reader get to know what makes your hero tick over the course of the story.

The formula of LOST was fantastic in that regard. Every flashback related to events in the story's "present" in a way that made an insanely intricate plot chock full of origin stories mesh and kept the audience engaged.

Nancy Hansen: Whether you chose to write it or not, I think a complex character or world setup demands that you know in your head at least what has happened, and why, as well as how that lead up to the present situation. A really skillful writer can handle a character with a mysterious past—whether that is simply a well-kept secret or for some reason it has been forgotten—and then reveal little bits of it throughout the ongoing tales. The biggest danger in that is forgetting what you wrote previously and suddenly having a character do or say something that makes no sense at all. And there's the dreaded misremembered info that makes it past all the editing stages. It's tough enough to keep it all straight in your head with one series, I have something like eight of them going right now, and the simplest stuff tends to get away from me. You'd be surprised how fast someone is going to point out that Gwen's eyes are blue and not green, or that Gwydion's mother died in story #2 so she can't be calling him from the hometown in #8. I have to do a lot of back checking to make sure I've been consistent throughout. Over time I try and make a cheat sheet for that stuff, so that I can look back quickly and see what happened when and what so-in-so looks like, or where I introduced some character or idea.

Ed Erdelac: Ideally, as I mentioned, the character should be able to hold the reader's attention from the get-go. If you've crafted the character well, then the advantage of jumping right into the story is obvious; lack of info-dump. Raiders of The Lost Ark is a good example of this. But Indiana Jones is an iconic character. By his very mode of dress, by the first thing we see him do, we already know who this guy is and what he's about. His origin is just icing on the cake. Conversely, from the first time we see The Shadow talking Harry Vincent out of jumping off a bridge, we want to know what this guy is about. It drives us to read more about him.

Robby Hilliard: Today, so much is acceptable in urban fantasy that it seems to be nothing for Jane to walk into a bar and chat it up with her friendly neighborhood vampire while her favorite demon bartender serves up drinks and all Jane has to add to it is that her spells seem to be a bit weak lately. No real build up, it's all just there.

That said, I think that if you can pull off starting in media res and still communicate the origin story, go for it. At the same time, fans of pulp and comics may be more tolerant or perhaps even want the origin story to be played out! But if you do, I think it needs to be creative to really capture the reader's interest. Otherwise they're really just anxious to get past the origin part.

Roger Stegman: The advantage is that the reader is in the action immediately, they are going for the ride with the first words.

The problem is that the reader may have no clue as to what is going on or why. Why is this strange person is beating up a whole bunch of people and laying waste to a neighborhood? Where's the police? Without a back story, it might simply be senseless violence. But if they can quickly learn that the super hero has been hunting down these criminals since he was a child, then it becomes a bit more understandable. With any writing, it is a balance. fit in enough detail to help make sense of the action.

John Morgan Neal: My Aym Geronimo is the queen of in media res. And she has never had an 'origin story. Though bits of her history and how she came to be who she is have been sprinkled in.

Lee Houston Jr.: While (as I said in question 1) a character's actions and reactions will do more to establish any potential relationship with the readers, an origin story should be told within a set amount of time of a character's debut, especially if you are making the mystery surrounding that character part of the origin tale. The best example of this I can think of is The Shadow. With his start as a spooky voiced announcer for Street and Smith's Detective Story Hour BEFORE moving on to the pulps, readers already knew who he was to a point, but not his background.

Walter B. Gibson, aka Maxwell Grant, took advantage of this unique situation and built the character's background over the course of several stories to reveal the details every fan knows today.

James Tuck: Often times a hero is created and then they have a long period where they are adjusting to their new life. This can create great storytelling, a la Batman: Year One, or it can be kind of boring. I mean, can you imagine Elongated Man: Year One?

I choose to do the origin story as brief flashbacks as they inform the character in the present day. I keep it short and sweet (and truthfully, looking back I didn't keep it as brief as I could have. It was my first book, sue me.) and it serves as a hook into the character. The hope is that by the time I am ready to go and write the full, detailed origin story the readers will be champing at the bit for it.

Bill Craig: Jumping into the character and ignoring where they came from is just a bad idea.  It can leave a reader feeling cheated because here comes Superagent Bob Badass jumping in to save the day, killing all the bad guys and saving the world which is all well and good, but what do we really know about him?  It creates a mystery around him which demands some sort of origin story about how he was a former Navy SEAL recruited into the clandestine services and where he got the skills he used to wipe out the bad guys and figure out how to disarm the bomb that was going to destroy all the leaders of the free world beneath the United Nations building on a day when the president that he didn't even vote for is scheduled to give a speech.  Like in Lethal Weapon 2 we find out that the accident that killed Martin Riggs' wife was actually an attempt on Riggs' life by a drug running gang.  That rounds out his character much more than the first movie did because it gives us a glimpse into his past.  It also fuels his rage when he goes after the drug runners to avenge his wife and that of the new woman in his life that they also murdered.  You just cannot get around giving some sort of origin story, even if it is dribbled out a little at a time.

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To follow the works of these fine creators who took part in this roundtable, simply look for their links on the list of Heavy Hitters on the right side of this page.