Blackguards_ Tales of Assassins, Mercenaries, and Rogues - J. M. Martin Page 0,1

less than shining good when you got up close enough to smell them. They gained shining status like a patina of time.

Think Arthur, the once and future king. He has warts all over him when you get up close. He had a son with his sister, not commonly accepted heroic behavior…though maybe it started out being fun. Later he had a war with that son. And his golden circle of Camelot guys were mostly not such squeaky clean actors, either. Old Art couldn't keep his wife from cheating with some of them. The Knights of the Round were pretty much all anti-heroic in some way.

Flaws. Some of them huge. I began reflecting on characters who touched me when I was younger, Fafhrd and Mouser, Elric and Hawkmoon, Conan the Barbarian (R. E. Howard's Conan), and so many others. They all had something in common: they were flawed. Even damaged. Definitely somewhat less than ideal human beings. They all had, to say the least, shadows at the edges of their dubious characters. In our oh so politically correct and sensitivity-burdened 21st Century North America every last one of them would be locked up and the keys chucked into the Crack of Doom, with one key ring to bind them. They committed murders, thievery, shoplifting, pickpocketry, smuggling, counterfeiting, tax evasion, even pederasty. And yet they were what we all wanted to be when we grew up. They were interesting. Their bad behavior and ability to get away with it, most of the time, made them interesting.

Of course, it helped that their antagonists were more wicked and distasteful than they were. Usually.

Still more thinking (brain cramps threatened) led me to conclude that it is all about character. Interesting people doing interesting things, though an excellent character can carry a feeble plot by making you care about him. And people battling the darkness within them while coping with the enemy without are more interesting than those who line up bad guys and cut them down only because they own the mickle-sharp scythe of moral superiority.

Thus do I find most Batman iterations more interesting than the various versions of Superman. Batman is a homicidal psychopath savagely struggling to keep his mania under control. He goes into battle as much to save himself as he does to save the world.

(Aside, I do feel that if Batman had let the evil run free at certain critical moments, Joker and other serial escapees from Arkham would not have placed nearly so much stress on him, and Gotham could have saved billions in reconstruction costs.)

We do become fascinated by evil, even infatuated with evil. Why do women chase after and even marry life-serving killer convicts? And are we not unfathomably infatuated with evils already overcome? There are about six genuine Nazis remaining alive in the whole wide world yet still we dote on conspiracy stories which allow us to splash a swastika across a book cover.

But maybe we do that knowing that it is only a story now. We can get a little thrill without having to truly dread a horror already put down. We can have fun, knowing that a particular evil can no longer strike back. Boogerman stories for grownups.

The triumph over evil achieved, we can even make that evil the hero in its own song, as Norman Spinrad did in THE IRON DREAM, where Adolf Hitler immigrates to America and becomes a famous science fiction writer.

The small evils in us all, and our endless contests with and sometimes surrenders to them, are what define us as people. The quirks of the characters we conjure in the minds of our readers (always, really, more part of who they secretly are than part of us who give them their shadows) help make them worth accompanying on their adventures. The anti-hero would be that character with a little extra, special quirkage that makes you think, "Oh, that rogue Mouser. I wish I could be like him. What's he gonna do next?"

Glen Cook

October, 2014

INTRODUCTION

J.M. Martin

In sixth grade I read The Hobbit as a class assignment. I was 11 years old and a whole world had opened up to me. Thinking about Bilbo Baggins, he was an interesting fellow, sure, but he really captured my imagination as soon as the grey wizard labeled him a thief. Soon after that he acquired the One Ring, outfoxed Gollum, and became a truly canny little twit. It wasn’t just the ring, but also the magical, orc-sensing blade called Sting that transformed Bilbo from a