How To Make A Petty Sinner Fascinating: On Sara Ryan & Carla Speed McNeil's "Bad Houses"

What might Sara Ryan & Carla Speed McNeil's Bad Houses have to teach the makers of a typical action/adventure potboiler? Despite a few thrown punches, a sprinkling of martial arts poses and a jeopardy-packed climax, Bad Houses is no way a heroic melodrama. What it does offer, amongst its considerable virtues, is a textbook-worthy example of how to introduce a character that is, on first impressions at least, wonderfully, captivatingly loathsome. As dozens of superhero movies will attest, it's far, far harder to create a compelling villain than it is a sympathetic, virtuous protagonists. But in the first appearance in Bad Houses of the seemingly irredeemable Fred Peck, Ryan and McNeil spell out several ways in which an apparently unpalatable and largely humourless antagonist can be made utterly fascinating. As the pages progress, Peck will be poignantly shown to be anything other than a one-dimensional moustache-twirler. But even given how the reader will leave him at the end of the book, his first appearance remains a tour de force in how to make an unpleasant character both repellent and compelling.

Fred Peck is most certainly no supervillain. But like many of the very best of supervillains, he combines a selfish disregard for a communities' best interests with an idiosyncratic and obsessional modus operandus. In Peck's case, the community is made up of antique bargain hunters and his M.O. is to aggressively claim ownership of money spinning items without any concern for rights or feelings. In the context of Bad Houses, Peck's single-minded pursuit of profit is both hilarious and infuriating. More fantastical genres often feature antagonists who remain stubbornly uninteresting despite being able to flatten whole cities. But Peck's everyday unpleasantnesses resonate in a way that the reader can directly relate to. Wherever we travel, from traffic lights to supermarket queues to cinema seats, the world is full of Fred Pecks. Many of them are very intimidating indeed. It's hard to feel moved by, say, the thousandth appearance of Doctor Doom as he again attempts to reconquer Latveria. But Fred Peck? We'll meet his like this afternoon and tomorrow morning.

Secondly, Ryan and McNeil make sure that Peck is introduced in a visually gripping manner. It is an inexplicable sin of modern-era fantastical comics, that a great many pages can pass without the appearance of anything much that's directly compelling to the eye. In Bad Houses, Peck's character is played out in action every bit as much as words. At first, he's shown being acerbic, unpleasant and unloved as he encounters his fellow minor-league treasure hunters. Our suspicions are raised, but he's still behaving within the bounds of acceptability. But then Peck is launched into a prodigious display of disgraceful acquisitiveness, as you can see above. In essence, set-up is followed by punchline. It was interesting enough that he operated out near the pale, but this exceeds, and thereby rewards, our skillfully-established expectations. The energy and cruelty that McNeil lends her portrayal of Peck's predatory activities, the helplessness she ascribes to his victims, the apparent insignificance of the goods that inspire such conceitedness: it all inspires the reader to empathise with the casualties of Peck's petty covetousness while wanting to know more about this mundane monster. (Those who instead finds themselves associating with Peck will probably not find the rest of Bad Houses, or indeed civil society as a whole, to their taste.)

Perhaps wittiest of all, Peck is lent a pricelessly idiosyncratic visual gimmick, namely, the stickers he's wrapped round his wrist with which he dubiously proclaims his ownership of whatever he wants. We first see them in the sequence above. As yet Ryan & McNeil have underplayed the worst of Peck's nature, and those stickers look deceptively like a ludicrously ostentatious armband or sports watch. But once revealed, those wrist-mounted stickers allow McNeil to show Peck wielding them as a weapon of sorts, as an eccentric and yet entirely effective method of aggression against a largely defenceless population. It is, if you like, the everyday equivalent of Captain Cold's freeze gun or the Stilt-Man's towering artificial legs. Without disturbing the story's essential verisimilitude, the sticker as shtick adds a compelling extra measure of both absurdity and aggressiveness to Bad Houses' first major set-piece.

 
There is a danger in adding what might end up being seen as sociopathic behaviour into any story that isn't directly about exactly that. The knowing, uncaring aggressor who utterly ignores common kindnesses can swiftly and irreversibly become the focus of the audience's attention. Even less helpfully, what might be intended as a disagreeable threat can end up being embraced as a welcome liberator from everyday hypocrisies. Bad Houses smartly keeps Peck's more extreme public transgressions off-page for most of the time, and never again allows him to play such a giddy, central role. That I wish we'd seen more of what is in narrative terms a secondary character in full and appalling flight surely proves that their judgement was right. In a graphic novel that's concerned with how tough it can be to leave the past behind, Peck's role is anything but an amusingly conscienceless scene-stealer. Instead, his role is to outline where the wrong choices can take us without being carelessly and harmfully transformed into a story-stealing, perverse ideal.

What might be taken from Ryan and McNeil's depiction of Fred Peck and put to use elsewhere in more fantastical fictions? That the menace which heralds from within a community, even if only from its periphery, is often far more involving and disturbing than the threat with few if any local roots? That expressing character and conflict in unique and compelling visuals beats the repetition of cliche or, perhaps even worse, the absence of action every time? That establishing jeopardy in the context of everyday experience counts for far more than any scale of universal threat? That the subtleties of a carefully constructed set-up can accentuate a scene's dramatic virtues in far more effective ways than any degree of hysterical and persistent excess? That terrible behaviour can be enthrallingly depicted without making such vices perversely admirable? As I know must be obvious, I think it's all of those things.

Bad Houses is very much not a tale of good and bad, heroes and villains. I hope I haven't suggested that it is. But Fred Peck had me beguiled from the very first appearance of his wrist-borne stickers, and I couldn't but wonder, why is this character, who initially appears utterly unpleasant, so compelling? Why is even his first appearance, in which he appears fated to be the narrative's heartless antagonist, so much more interesting than any number of ruthless, insensitive characters elsewhere?  But as for the greater part of Bad Houses, and that includes Peck's true character and his closing fate, I can only advise you to hunt Rayn and McNeil's book out. I haven't even scratched the surface here, I promise you.