Greetings from the Javits Center and the second day of New York Comic Con! Besides being a hotbed of debuts, premieres, and news, NYCC is also pretty great if you’re in need of creative inspiration. I found a lot at one panel, Justice Is Served.
This panel featured a panel of authors — Myke Cole (Control Point), Thomas E. Sniegoski (the Remy Chandler series), Jacqueline Carey (Dark Currents), Christopher Bennet (Only Superhuman), G.T. Almasi (Blades of Winter), Amber Benson (the Calliope-Reaper Jones series), and Kim Harrison (Into the Woods) — who have dealt with the most ultimate of moral and ethical dilemmas in their work, but with a supernatural/paranormal twist. It touched on subjects as heavy as individual versus institutionalized violence, the fluidity of justice, and how some actions we see in fiction should just never, ever happen in real life, regardless of having anything to do with superpowers. Cole’s unique perspective as an actual war veteran added something extra to the conversation; having seen serious action and been in the battleground of the Middle East, he said that some of the things he’s written himself would be pretty much catastrophic if anyone attempted it within the military (like one member of a unit going rogue). The other authors made similar points about vengeance and the responsibility of having superpowers in the first place. Benson even said that characters who wouldn’t initially accept being granted superpowers because of the responsibility were the most interesting to her.
But one of the more fun elements of a paranormal/supernatural crime story is how if you kill someone out of revenge, that guy might not be dead for very long. Justice isn’t the only thing that’s fluid!