Disaster looms. The world is in ruins. Humanity is waiting for impending doom as the forces of evil draw closer for every minute.
Fortunately, since your webcomic is full of clichés, there is one true hero who can save the day. He’s the chosen one! He’s the hero! He started as a natural born talent at everything, and since then he’s had years of training. He can defeat anybody! His power is over 9000! He’s saved the world multiple times before the comic began, and at the same time he’s not a jerk; he’s a lovable chap who the reader immediately get a connection with. He’s Buffy, Bruce Wayne and Son Goku all rolled into one!
And then he dies.
In the first chapter. The one hero who can save the day dies in one of the first fights in the story.
And I’m not talking about the cute “dies and becomes a spirit who can help his friends from beyond the grave” dead. I mean dead. As in, being sliced open by the villain and have all his blood pouring out dead.
Now the crew has to get themselves together and find another way to survive this whole thing. Several of them will probably die throughout the story, too, considering how tough this villain is.
I think this would be a pretty cool story. I’ve always wanted to read a story where the one person it’s obvious will be the hero of the story dies in the very first chapter.
91 down, 9 to go.
Again, I’ll have to add a similar concept to the discussion, namely the upcoming “Megamind” movie. Although the movies title character is the villain, he manages to kill the caped super hero, creating a big fuzz!
The story in this movie is of course based around the supervillain going bored, and creating a new nemesis – it is a comedy, after all – so the similarities end there.
A less kid-oriented feel to this theme would be great. I can imagine the Hope Lost feel of the characters seeing their Greatest Hero smashed under a rock.
It was a sci-fi opera show, but Ronald Moore’s pilot for “Virtuality” (they only made 1 episode), involved the captain of the ship and obvious Main Guy, dying at the very end. It’s probably more of a trope than you’d think.
That sounds quite a bit like “Mystery Men”… but it could obviously be done with even way more parody than they did, as well as, if you would want to, way more seriously than they did. In any event, it is just an opening chapters-sort of twist, so the story would likely be its own, original thing afterwards regardless. I would definitely like to read it, if you want to write it.
Oh, and Jon is right about Virtuality. They did that there, too. Have not seen Megamind, though.
Yeah, I’m not surprised to hear that this has been done before. I checked TVTropes to see if I could find anything that sounded like this, but the closest thing I found was the concept of high-billing an actor with a tiny role in a movie because that actor is the most famous actor in the movie.
Thanks for the tips on places where this has already been done, I’ll try remembering to check them out.
You might enjoy Mystery Men, as it is a festive attempt at superhero parodying without parodying any one franchise in particular. If nothing else, it has great performances by Geoffrey Rush, Hank Azaria, William H. Macy and really funny dialogue. Assuming you can bear Ben Stiller.