No2 Inc. Origin Story

No special abilities.

No special costumes.

Being a sidekick is just a job.

This story is about how we at No.2 Inc are creating a story, actually a series of stories, about an agency that outsources sidekick services to superheroes. With a premise involving superheroes, you might think this story was born from a love of comic books, but strangely it wasn’t. I mean, we didn’t start off by saying, “Let’s writing about the adventures of a super human.” But more on that later. For now, think of this project as one we didn’t expect to love, but eventually stole our hearts.

I’m using the collective we a lot. There are two of us involved. Me, Nate, and my writing partner Annalisa. And No.2 Inc isn’t the name of an actual company. It’s a fictional company, an employment agency. The premise is this: all super heroes have secret identifies. In fact, they prefer to remain as incognito as possible. But when you’re out doing super hero things in super hero ways, it can take a lot of work to keep all that under wraps. That’s where No.2 Inc comes in. They offer specialized services at keeping titanic people hidden. Think of them as sidekicks for hire.

As I mentioned, telling another super hero story didn’t initially interest us much. It had been done a lot already for decades. But what we kept wondering about were the practicalities of being a super hero. Who patches and launders the outfits? Who upgrades the computer systems? The hero hasn’t time for everything. What we were really interested in was the behind the scenes of hero-dom. In some cases, it was the real story of what happened when titans clashed, and who cleaned it all up. And that… that was interesting. But how did this story really begin?

I had been tweeting with a local comic con organizer. A small con was launching in my home city in a few months. We were wondering how we might work together. Without thinking much about it, I suggested that I could “hack” their convention with a story, whatever that meant. Even I had no real idea. But she was interested and I pitched the idea of a kind of scavenger hunt. Participants being sent on missions in service to a resident super hero. It was pretty vague on details.

To make a long story shorter, I didn’t end up doing anything for my local con, but did get a chance to work for another con in Wilmington, Massachusetts, called the North East Comic Con, or NECC for short. By that time the story had evolved. I had created the idea of a sidekick agency and even had a lead heroine named Kate Taylor. She was at the convention undercover, trying to reclaim her client’s laptop that had been stolen from her. But because she couldn’t come out of hiding without tipping off her adversaries, she enlisted the help of con attendees to collect the needed reconnoissance. Attendees were still sent on missions. It involved a lot of picture taking and delivering information back to Kate.

The reasons that made this idea so attractive were the same reasons that ultimately doomed it: it was an original story. I liked it for that reason. It was a new perspective on a well known archetype. But for fans of characters like Spider Man, Catwoman, or the Hulk — fans who came to a comic convention to get their fill of their favorite characters — introducing them not only to a brand new character, but an new way of getting involved in her story, that was a rather difficult sell. How difficult, that I would find out later.

Even from the beginning, I knew that No.2 Inc wasn’t any one individual’s story. It was the story of a whole company. In order to tell that story right, many different perspectives had to be taken into account. That meant creating many different characters, different intersecting plots, and a whole lot of writing. That was too much work for just one person, so I started looking around for help.

One of my first problems was, I hadn’t a clue how to write a directed scavenger hunt. I knew the hunt had to take place over two days. There would be a lot of interactive prompts. Given that real people would be doing this, a large element of improv would be needed. At the very least, some sort of loose script would be required. Most of my writing friends were short story writers and novelists. They were used to controlling everything in their stories. This form, well I couldn’t say how much control the writer would have. This had to work live, like a game, or a theater piece.

I knew one woman who might be interested. Well, I didn’t really know her. We followed each other on Twitter. Her resume included writing comic sketches for television, which was in the ballpark of what I needed to write. I sent her a tweet asking if she wanted to meet for coffee.

Her name was Annalisa. We met at a tea house a few days later. It’s funny meeting someone for the first time. Even if you converse easily online, meeting them in person is never what you expect. The first fifteen minutes was a settling down, getting to know you, kind of chat. Then I rolled out the pitch. An agency that outsourced sidekicks. A story told at a comic con. A writing project that I still had trouble defining. This was the point when I expected her to politely excuse herself and never come back. But she asked me to “keep going.”

I kept going. The main character, Kate Taylor, was tasked with recovering a laptop her employer had left behind, a laptop that had all kinds of valuable information on it. In the course of recovering it, it was stolen from her. She tracked it down to a convention where, she assumed, a hand off would be arranged. Kate would have to steal it back again, but the bad guys had already seen her. If she showed her face, they might take the laptop and run, and she might not find them again. However, this is a comic con. People are already in costume. And, she can enlist the help of everyone with a smart phone to take pictures of the location of the laptop and the people surrounding it. In short, she’s using the con attendees to run reconnoissance for her. As I described it, I could already see multiple plot holes that needed to be filled. God this was a weird idea. “Keep going,” she said.

So I pitched her the entire plan, as far as I had developed it. It involved actors, improvisation, social media, a flexible script that told the story over the two days of the convention, and an ebook version of the story. The ebook, I explained, was for anyone who wondered what all these picture taking missions were about. It would be near impossible to provide narrative context in the moment. We could, though, give the ebook download to anyone who wanted to know more. At some point during my longwinded presentation, Annalisa decided to join in.

After the NECC, I was left with more questions than answers. Questions like: why wasn’t there a decent internet connection available? I had asked specifically about that. Did I misunderstand something? Did I screw that up? Also, why weren’t people more attracted to the idea? Convention attendees were the right kind of people. They liked to imagine. They liked to roleplay. The reaction I received at the con to our project was largely favorable. So why didn’t it work? I needed answers. That meant finding more con attendees and talking to them.

Most of the big cons happen later in the calendar year. Many are in late summer. A few in the Spring. Here it was January, and I was impatient, not wanting to lose momentum. There was one fan con that was recommended to me called Arisa happening down in Boston. This one happened in the middle of January, Boston was close, and they still had available tables. I signed up. I shared an artists table with another man who sketched cartoon mice. I had printed up a banner and some fliers advertising No.2 Inc, and had the ebook we had written. My idea was to talk to everyone I could about the campaign without actually running it.

Arisia was a different kind of conference than NECC. While NECC was heavy on the artists and the pop-culture collectors, Arisia has a heavy scifi fantasy tone and many dozens of panels on topics on everything from podcasting to sword fighting. Attendees frequently dressed up as a favorite character (also called cosplay). The hotel lounge was overrun with knights in full armor, aliens, wizards, comic book heroes, and Japanese animae.

Down where I was, deep in the vendor tables, people floated in a kind of social parade of genre characters. Tables with LED lights or crystals got a lot of attention. So did tables selling stuffed creatures, costumes, and toys. Tables selling books, comics, and games had less visitors.

I talked with everyone I could and observed when I wasn’t chatting. Some regular patterns started to emerge. The first was, people attend cons because they have very real expectations of what that con experience is supposed to be. If that con experience is upset because there was not enough of one thing, or too much of another thing — whatever those things were — that got people upset. Anything new will largely get ignored unless its expected, or over-hyped. Over hyping something also has its disadvantages, especially if that something is not inline with con-goers expectations.

In other words, comic conventions may seem like they’re a melting pot of fans and pop culture, and anything goes, but they’re actually quite formulaic. People attend them for the celebrities who may be there, occasionally for the panel discussions, usually for the opportunity to dress up as a favorite character and to view others’ costumes, to meet up with their friends, and of course to buy stuff. Stuff could be comics, t-shirts, costumes, artwork, jewelry, toys, bags, patches, or props. The stuff that people bought either centered around what comics or stories they were interested in, or it could be something they felt made a statement, usually about themselves.

Introducing something new into to that expectation of a con experience takes a lot of energy to get any traction at all. If done badly, it could backfire.

I realized that telling the story of No.2 Inc already took a lot of energy. The question was, was telling this story by creating some brand new experience at a con the best way to spend that energy?

Annalisa and I struggled with this question, because, like many we talked with at NECC and Arisia and others, it really seemed like a cool idea. But there were a lot of potential pitfalls in creating a new kind of entertainment for a con. The story had to be familiar. It had be anticipated. What happened at NECC could be summed up simply as, “It wasn’t familiar or anticipated and therefore overlooked and ignored.”

There’s an industry term for the kind of experience we were creating. It’s called an ARG, or alternative reality game. It’s an immersive experience designed to put a person into the middle of a story. It’s not a passive experience like reading a book. Ideally, your actions, or lack of action, can directly influence the outcome of the story. They also tend to play out inside one’s own everyday reality. You don’t go somewhere to play the game. You don’t ever leave the game. They game is always happening. Imagine leaving an office meeting, suddenly being passed a football, and then sacked by a linebacker, right in the middle of the hallway. That’s kind of the experience an ARG creates. Except it usually starts with a text message or an email, not a linebacker.

The problem with ARGs is that they’re frequently used as marketing tools to promote Hollywood films or big budget electronic games. They’re so frequently used this way, ARG is almost synonymous with marketing. As soon as a person gets the idea that the experience they’re having might be an ARG, they back away quickly. After all, no one likes being a tool. We had no interest in making anyone feel that way.

As we continued to develop the character of Kate, we both felt we had experiences just like hers. That is to say, at some point in our lives we both had signed up for some weird temp job because of the money, just as she had signed up for No2 Inc. It wasn’t a good fit. It wasn’t a long term job. It was run according to some bizarre code we didn’t understand. But unlike us instead of filing paperwork in the basement of an office complex, Kate was asked to do some truly bizarre work. The stranger it became, the more it teased and tested her. Some moments, we wouldn’t wish her job on anyone, but at other times, working at No.2 Inc sounded kinda cool. It never felt like she was saving the world herself, but maybe in some indirect way, she was.

Back at the tea house, we both had the same reaction when the NECC event didn’t work: we didn’t want to let it go. We might not be able to tell it as an interactive story at a convention that may, or more likely may not, be open to such a thing. But we could find other ways to tell it. We had a part of it in ebook form. It could also be told in part as a video, a radio drama, a graphic novel. In fact, there were so many ways we could tell all the different parts of this story, it was easy to lose focus on the meeting. We’d pour tea. It would get cold.

Faced with whether the con was the right approach for a story like this, we did what any enterprising person would do: we asked people what they wanted. Google Forms made it easy enough to knock together a basic survey around what people we knew might be interested in. Overwhelmingly people really liked the idea of our agency that outsourced sidekicks. Mostly they were interested in print stories, followed by videos, then maybe podcasts. In short, they wanted it in formats they already knew how to easily take in, and avoided those newer, experimental formats. So we had a new direction. We launched a new website http://no2inc.co and started moving forward again.

By the way, if you want to learn more about our first comic con adventure at NECC, we have that story here.

There’s still a lot more to No.2 Inc to tell, a lot more, and we will continue telling it. Because while we were interested in our fictional superhero world, we’re also interested in the subculture of superhero fandom and what roles those figures play in our society. Only, we’ll be exploring more conventional story formats. But we’ll also be exploring new ways to tell stories, in smaller, more controlled experiments. Those things that don’t blow up the lab might be allowed out of the secret hideaway into society at large. Stay tuned.

You can find more about No.2 Inc at the website, http://no2inc.co