Jokers Wild by George R. R. Martin
Is he gone?
Good. Now I can tell you about Kid Dinosaur and the Howler.
Over the course of Wild Cards, probably the single thing that upset our fans the most was the Astonomer’s hideous murder of Kid Dinosaur in Jokers Wild. For years thereafter, whenever we did a Wild Cards panel at a convention, one of the questions would inevitably be, “Why did you kill Kid Dinosaur? He was my favorite character.” The Howler was less prominent and far less popular, yet he had fans as well, some of whom wrote us in dismay when Roulette did the nasty with him.
The truth is, both characters had been marked for death from the day they were created. Remember, we plotted the Wild Cards book in triads. We knew, even before we started writing our stories for Volume One, that come Volume Three the Astronomer and the surviving Masons would be trying to hunt down and kill all the aces who had smashed them at the Cloisters at the end of Book Two. A number of our major on-going characters would be on that hit list, of course, and we wanted the readers to feel as though their lives were in desperate peril, the better to keep them on the edge of their seats.
But superheroes don’t die. Not in comic books, not really, not for good.
We needed to establish that Wild Cards was something different, that this danger was real, that we were playing for keeps here, that even our good guys could indeed die, and die horribly.
With that in mind, early on in the going I sent out a call for “red-shirt aces” (anyone who’s ever watched the original Star Trek will get the reference), secondary characters that we could introduce in Book One and include in the Cloisters raid in Book Two, thereby setting them up to be Astronomer fodder in Book Three.
A number of my writers obliged by creating throwaway aces. One such was Steve Leigh’s Howler. Another was Kid Dinosaur, introduced by Lew Shiner in the epilogue to Volume One. The poor Howler had, I seem to recall, exactly one line of dialogue in the first two volumes, before Roulette got him into her bed in Book Three, so to this day I don’t understand how our readers could get attached to him. Kid Dinosaur was pushier, though. The little snotnose managed to force his way into several juicy scenes in Aces High—including one wherein the Turtle warned him what was going to happen if he kept trying to play with the big boys.
Is it my fault that the kid wouldn’t listen?
—George R.R. Martin
September 16, 2001
George R. R. Martin, Jokers Wild
(Series: Wild Cards # 3)