Post #203 February 17, 2020

“Why Johnny Winger isn’t Tom Swift Jr...But Maybe Should Have Been”

For many years, I have been working with a continuing character I created for three different series, Tales of the Quantum Corps, Quantum Troopers and Quantum Troopers Return.

His name is Johnny Winger.  Although I have consciously patterned these series stories after the Tom Swift Jr. books, Tom Swift is not Johnny Winger…but maybe he should have been.

Serial characters are both fun and a challenge to write.  Over the course of the series, you want to see them grow and evolve, confront problems and overcome them.  You want your reader to identify with them and like an old flannel shirt, become comfortable with all their idiosyncracies and nuances.  Think James Bond, Captain Kirk and Spock, Jason Bourne, Harry Potter and so on.  Just the mention of a well-known series character can evoke all kind of memories and expectations.  Building a series character is like building a brand name.  Readers like that because they know what they’re getting when they buy a book.

Think about Tom Swift Jr and what comes to mind?  An eternal teen-ager.  A boy genius who never ages.  An inventor of some cool and some rather ridiculous inventions.  An adventurer who’s always up to his armpits in problems with devious foreign governments, wicked crooks, space beings, you name it.  Tom Swift Jr, as written in the series, is the quintessential, blond, crew-cut all-American boy.  Well raised, courteous, respects his elders, tries to do the right thing.  I could almost imagine him as an altar boy or acolyte at a medium-sized Methodist church.

Jeff Duntemann has written a background study of Tom Swift in his Tom Swift Jr:  An Appreciation: To wit:

Tom Swift was perpetually eighteen, an age far enough removed from where my nerd friends and I were to be beyond understanding, but close enough for us to think we might just get there someday. He didn't seem to go to school, and there was no indication as to how he learned all he knew. Hey, he was a genius. My friend Larry could play any song he heard on the piano, immediately, with both hands—and had never taken a single lesson. He was just born with it. So, apparently, was Tom Swift.

None of that bothered us at all. Similarly, it was no bother that Tom Swift as a character was almost completely devoid of distinguishing personality traits. He was brilliant, strong, patriotic, hard-working, and respected his parents—and beyond that was as featureless as a billiard ball. In one sense that was because Tom Swift was a sort of Halloween costume that we donned in our imaginations, and any specifics that clashed too strongly with our specifics might have made this identification difficult. (I had this problem with numerous other characters in later SF, which made me more a spectator than a participant in the action.) Grosset & Dunlap knew what they were selling, and it wasn't literature.

I did consciously have Tom Swift Jr. in mind (or at least his adventures) when I created Johnny Winger but there are some notable differences in their personas.

Winger has undergone personal tragedy in his young life, in the death of his Mom and the depression of his Dad.  We don’t know what Tom Swift did before the stories; Grossett and Dunlap writers never tell us.  Tom Swift Jr inherits his father’s business (Swift Enterprises) and apparently his genius and plucky approach to life.  Johnny Winger joins Quantum Corps to get away from his life and live a different way.

In my series, Johnny Winger is in military service, with all that implies.  Tom Swift is a civilian, though he has close relations with various government departments.  Johnny Winger is no genius inventor, but he does have latent and initially unrealized skills as an atomgrabber, which makes him a special commodity to his superiors at Quantum Corps.   It also gets him into trouble at times.  Plus, throughout the series, Johnny Winger sometimes imbues his nanobotic devices with personalities and qualities he can’t seem to find in his human relations. 

In my series, I have endeavored to have Winger grow in his responsibilities.  The reader can see Winger progress in the ranks from a Lieutenant right out of nog school all the way to a flag officer, a General and Commander-in-Chief of Quantum Corps  (CINCQUANT).  At the end, he even allows himself to be deconstructed  into a para-human swarm entity (aka, an angel) to better fight off the evil criminal cartel Red Hammer (later Red Harmony) and their otherworldly benefactors.  Tom Swift never did that.

Have I shown any other changes, growth or evolution in Johnny Winger?  Well, I tried.  He gets married, to another quantum trooper.  They have kids.  He loses his wife to a religious cult called the Church of Assimilation.   But like the creators of Tom Swift, I never let Winger’s need to grow get in the way of the story.  At least, he doesn’t remain eighteen years old forever.

One challenge of creating and using a continuing series character is having to write around the facts of what you have written before.  That can be both a challenge and an impediment.  You find yourself reading and re-reading earlier writing to keep up with what you’ve already said.  If nothing else, you want your series character to be consistent across the stories…readers will give up quickly on your stories if you’re not.  Ian Fleming always took pains to portray James Bond as essentially the same person from story to story…shaken but not stirred.  And we readers found some comfort in that. 

Johnny Winger is not Tom Swift because their backgrounds and their story environments are completely different.  But I did often have Tom in my mind as I drew up adventures and problems for Johnny to face.  What happened to Johnny Winger often happens to characters that authors create…he took on a life of his own and drove the stories in unexpected directions.

And that’s not a bad thing.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 24, 2020.

See you then.

Phil B.