Superhero comic ideas: 14 stories told from the people around the cape

Every superhero story has a crowd at the edge of the panel: the people on the pavement, looking up. Their windows get broken, their cars get thrown, their Tuesday gets ruined, and then the hero flies off and the story goes with them. Stay with the crowd instead and you get a comic nobody else is making. It's easier to write, too, because ordinary people want ordinary things.

Here are fourteen premises told from the side door. Take one as it is, or use the three questions further down on an idea of your own.

Why the side door works

A cape is a big idea, and a hard one to keep fresh. The person who has to live next to one is small and specific, and comes with problems built in. They also pass the test every series needs: a small place, a want, and a thing that comes back every issue. Here, the thing that comes back is the hero. (The three-part test is in the post on first comic ideas.)

The ones who clean up after them

• A night-shift laundromat owner is the only person in the city who can get scorch marks out of a cape, and she knows which of her regulars it belongs to.
• A tow-truck driver in a city of retired superheroes hauls away a different wreck every issue, and every wreck comes with the story of how it crashed. (It's one of the examples on the webcomic page.)
• A two-person glazing firm has replaced the bank's front window eleven times this year, and they've noticed the fights only ever happen on a Thursday.
• An insurance assessor has to put a price on every rooftop battle, and the hero keeps turning up at her desk to argue the estimate.

The ones who live next door

• A superhero's biggest fan becomes her landlord, and knows far too much.
• A grandmother sews every costume her grandson saves the city in, and has opinions about the colour.
• The man in the flat below a hero hears every landing through his ceiling at three in the morning, and has started leaving notes.

The ones who used to be in it

• A retired superhero runs a quiet hardware store until her old nemesis opens a rival shop across the street.
• A villain's henchman quits and starts a support group for other henchmen.
• A sidekick whose hero has vanished has to finish the case alone, in a borrowed cape that doesn't fit.

The ones nobody films

• The city's least impressive superhero has one power: she always knows where the nearest lost thing is.
• A night nurse runs the hospital ward where both sides end up after a fight, and she has one rule: nobody fights on her ward.
• The café across the road from the villain's lair has the same customer every morning, and the barista is starting to like him.
• A parent on the school run works out that the quiet dad at the gate, the one who's always late, is the one on the news every night.

Three questions for an idea of your own

1. Who sees the hero at their least heroic? The person who does the washing, collects the rent or fixes the window sees what the crowd never does.
2. What does the cape cost them? A window, a night's sleep, a rent payment that was late because the tenant was busy saving a bus. That cost is your plot.
3. What comes back every issue? The bag of capes on a Tuesday, the estimate, the note under the door. That's the reason there's an issue 2.

Two things to skip

• Borrowing a famous hero. A comic about a hero someone else owns is a comic you can't share, and the studio won't draw one. A caped hero you invented is fine. Give them a name, a suit and a bad habit, and they're yours.
• Leading with the power. The power is the hook; the person is the story. If you can't say what they want on a day when nobody needs saving, the comic isn't ready yet.

Pick a superhero look

The genre has its own looks on the wall, and ordinary people look right at home in them. Here are the same two friends at a bus stop in the rain, drawn once in Golden Age Four-Colour and once in Modern Superhero:

Silver-Age Halftone adds the dots of old newsprint, and Nineties Extreme the loud colour and huge poses. Whichever you pick, every panel of every issue keeps it. Each of the cast is drawn from their own model sheet, so the laundromat owner looks like herself in issue 1 and in issue 20.

Start with one

Five of these premises are on the superhero ideas page, each with a "Start with this idea" button that takes it into a new comic as your own. For more side doors, try workplace comedy or found family. Or type your own idea into the box: one sentence is enough.

Start with one of these: 35 credits when you sign up, no card, and your first issue on a standard look is covered. The cape is yours; the panels are drawn and narrated by Panel & Ink.