Comics vs. Prose: The Novelization of a Comic Book Character
On January 21, 2025, my fourth novel, Bloodshot, based on the bestselling Valiant comics series, debuted. Though I’m known primarily as a comics writer—Marvel Zombies, Deadpool, Amazing Spider-Man, and more—I hadn’t directly mixed comics and prose in such a direct manner until now.
(Prose Fiction vs. Graphic Novels.)
In adapting a long running comics character for the prose medium, I learned some valuable tricks of the trade. It’s certainly been an interesting convergence of the two formerly separate paths my writer’s life has taken.
Growing up in a small town in Ohio, I was a huge fan of comic books, but as far as I knew they were produced in New York City, that might as well have been on Mars as far as I was concerned.
But prose was everywhere around me, and I was reasonably adept at it as a kid, writing short stories and starting (and not finishing—sound familiar?) a dozen novels before leaving for college. I went to Syracuse University to study filmmaking, since in my youthful arrogance I figured I didn’t need anyone to teach me how to write prose, and, again—comics seemed like an inaccessible industry to me.
To my shock, I discovered I couldn’t stand the tedium that went along with making movies—dressing sets, waiting for the sun to rise or set, lugging around heavy cameras and lights—and instead I fell in with the guys who were studying to become illustrators in SU’s comics club. I wrote short comics scripts for them and reveled in the magic of those images coming to life under their pens. After graduation, a few of us decided to move to Mars—er, New York City, and break into the industry.
Break in I eventually did, in a manner that would be better served with its own article, and I’ve written six New York Times bestsellers on the comics lists and counting, including one, Cowboys & Aliens, that would be made into a movie.
As my comics fame grew, publishers began approaching me to write prose, a skill I hadn’t exercised in any great amount since I was in school. As I began work on what would become my first published novel, Ten Dead Comedians, I fell in love with the written word all over again. Two more novels, The Con Artist and Never Sleep, followed.
Then, something interesting happened: The fantastic publisher of Never Sleep, Blackstone, acquired the novel rights to the stable of Valiant Comics, the third biggest universe of superhero characters behind venerable Marvel and DC. They wanted to know if I’d take on one of their titles. I leapt at the chance.
Bloodshot is one of Valiant’s most popular and exciting characters—you may recall the movie with Vin Diesel from a few years ago. A super soldier injected with microscopic nanomachines that heal him from any injury and let him communicate with any machine, like most superheroes, Bloodshot has gone through a number of incarnations since he was created by Kevin VanHook, Don Perlin, and Bob Layton in 1992.
Even though this was a prose novel, the first thing I did on taking the assignment was what I always do when taking on a new comics character: I read pretty much every story about him I could, trying to wring from that gestalt the essence of the character, what made him unique and interesting to me, and (hopefully) the reader.
I knew going in that Valiant and Blackstone wanted a completely fresh take on the character, something separate from any pre-existing comic (or movie!) that would attract legacy fans and brand-new readers alike. So I had the freedom to create my own Platonic ideal of Bloodshot, that perfect distillation of the concept.
The most interesting aspect of Bloodshot, to me, was the idea that as a side effect of the nanomachines coursing through his veins, his handlers in the shadowy pseudo-government agency that created him, Project: Rising Spirit, could erase his memory with each mission. Just as his body heals instantaneously from wounds, his conscience heals instantly from any regrettable actions he might have been ordered to do on any mission, because his bosses just use a giant chalkboard eraser on his brain and get rid of any memories that might cause trauma. That meant a soldier with no PTSD, but also, less attractively, a soldier with no real sense of who he was.
As a writer I have long been fascinated by memory, and its primary role in making up our sense of self—who we are, after all, is the sum of where we’ve been and where we want to go. Here I knew I had my hook. What would happen to Bloodshot if his short-term memory was wiped but his handlers weren’t around to help him fill in the long-term blanks afterward? What if he wakes up with no memory of who he is, or what he’s supposed to do?
That led to another conclusion—I should write this book not just in the first-person, from Bloodshot’s point of view, but in the first-person present tense. That put the reader in the mind of someone who had no past, tense or otherwise, but only had the present—he lives in the eternal now.
The other aspects of the plot fell in quite quickly after that, with the idea that Bloodshot is found amnesiac in the woods by a young woman, Kalea, and her younger brother. At first they think they’re helping him, but pretty soon they are on the lam from Project: Rising Spirit themselves, who not only want to get their assassin asset Bloodshot back—they also want to get their hands on Kalea too, who has mysterious powers of her own, and are linked to an underground network of superpowered young people that sees Bloodshot as the ultimate bogeyman. Bloodshot then becomes their protector.
Along the way, Bloodshot will have to solve the mystery of his own identity—and he may not like every answer. As the tagline for our book says (which, full confession, I ripped off the 2012 comics revival of the character): He can trust no one, not even himself.
What makes prose different from any other storytelling medium is its ability to bring us into the mind of a character, to show all events strained through their consciousness. I found that the biggest challenge for me returning to prose after years of pretty much exclusively writing comics scripts was to continually remind myself that I had to be that consciousness. I had to fill in every visual detail myself; I couldn’t leave something unsaid for an artist to fill in later. The shade of orange in the autumn leaves; the expression of that woman crossing the street wearing sunglasses—all of those things were my responsibility to flesh out. Nobody else was going to do it for me.
In comics, the writer conducts the orchestra. In prose, the writer is a one-person band.
Of course, all good prose writing is visually evocative writing. This is doubly true when adapting comics to prose. In my years in comics scripting, I tried to be as sparse as possible in my descriptions, both to make it clear to the artist what I wanted, and also to give them as much leeway as possible in bringing those images to life. That led naturally to a staccato, rat-a-tat prose that lends itself to the heart pounding action scenes and chase sequences that I know Bloodshot fans will be expecting when they pick the novel up. (The first-person present tense gives an incredible sense of urgency to every scene!)
That’s been the best part of this experience: learning how to use the best aspects of each medium to create the best adaptation of a comics character that I can. It’s certainly done nothing but increase my love for crafting both comics and prose, and I hope thriller readers and comics fans alike dig right into Bloodshot when it drops in January.
Check out Fred Van Lente’s Bloodshot here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
