Brad Meltzer Explains What Comics Contributed to The Lightning Rod

Brad Meltzer, the author and comic book writer whose nonfiction kids books are reaching out to include histories of Batman and Superman in the coming months, has released his latest thriller, The Lightning Rod, which blends his fascination with conspiracies with his ability to build compelling fictional worlds. In the new book, The Escape Artist's Nola and Zig find themselves drawn into a mystery that begins when a valet borrows a fancy car. Telling its GPS to "go home," the valet thinks he's going to rob the driver's home -- but when he gets there, there's a man with a gun waiting for him. It's a trap.

The book feels like it shares some DNA with The Book of Lies, Meltzer's novel that brought fictional characters and conspiracies into contact with real-life historical figures like Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. Bringing big ideas into a small enough scale that it's believable and relatable is Meltzer's preferred way of making these mysteries feel genuinely dangerous.

"When I look back at my own writing, I felt like there's a real pressure to always want to go bigger," Meltzer told ComicBook. "After 25 years of doing this, the one thing I've realized is that smaller is bigger. The more human and smaller you can make the motivation for your characters, the far bigger it will feel. So I've actually gotten away from...I don't do world-changing conspiracy plots. I have no interest in that, because that's just not how they ever run. What happens is, someone needs money, or someone is cheating on their wife, and someone is caught, and therefore they will do something desperate and stupid. I believe that far more. The same way I don't believe in blowing up buildings because it's going to get adrenaline pumping. What's far more scary to me is walking into a bathroom and hearing something, a small noise on the opposite side of a closed shower curtain."

He explained it in the context of Identity Crisis, his best-selling comic book miniseries. He said that while there were big, continuity-intensive things in that story, the scenes that people still talk to him about are the ones that feature small, emotionally-charged character interactions.

"Why? Because those were the ones that were human," Meltzer explained. "That those are the ones that were like us....It has to feel real. So the idea of making the global conspiracy...I have no interest in that. When we went up on the satellite and saw the Secret Society of Super-Villains, they were there playing poker. They were there making money. They were there trying to figure out how to make quick cash so they don't get caught. Again, much smaller problems, but to me, far more realistic. That's what I want to read."

Zig and Nola themselves, he explained, draw a lot of inspiration from the comics he loves reading.

"The books that I'm doing now with The Lightning Rod are about Zig and Nola, these two characters that I learned from comics," Meltzer said. "One of the many things I learned from comics is that, the reason that Superman and Batman and Spider-Man persist, is not just because they're cool, but it's because those characters have depth. No matter how many times you come back to them, you can always scratch a little more and find something new....The first time I started writing a recurring character, I thought, 'Oh, I'm going to just write this character to be fun. I'll bring them back again.' But the character didn't have the depth I needed. It wasn't until I did Zig and Nola that I really had these deep needs and wants in these characters, that people were like, 'I want to see them again,' and they have the depth to support another story."

The Lightning Rod is in stores now.