Homer Glen Native Higgins Finds Superhero Status In Comic Book World

HOMER GLEN, IL — For someone who landed at a dream destination and then left it to forge his own path, Kyle Higgins will be the first to admit that the road to comic book stardom was one he never intended to travel down in the first place.

To say that the Homer Glen native and Lockport High School graduate has made a bit of a name for himself within the comic book world would be a gross understatement. But considering that Higgins had never set his sights on working for DC Comics and Marvel — two of the giants in the industry that have counted Higgins within their household names as a writer — it’s easy to see why he considers his journey here so unexpected.

But in Higgins’ world, the unexpected has never been a bad thing.

These days, Higgins is the creative genius behind the Radiant Black and Massive Verse comic book series. Being a comic book free agent is the place where Higgins is convinced he is meant to be decades after he started drawing his own strips while growing up in the southern shadows of Chicago’s metropolis.

Yet, to understand how he got to this place of contentment is to follow a storyline that has more plot twists than one of his comic book creations.

Higgins was always more of a fan of movies than the animated universe in which he now resides. A writer and filmmaker at heart, Higgins was always drawn to superhero tales that were told on the big screen that then carried over to comic books. At 7, Higgins saw the first Superman movie that director Richard Donner directed, which sparked his love for the medium, along with Tim Burton’s Batman films.

In college, Higgins directed and co-wrote a film called “The League” which centered around a labor union in 1960s Chicago, which followed an internship Higgins had with Donner that further provided a deeper dive into the world of do-gooders in superhero costumes.

While the film brought a lot of attention to Higgins, who transferred to film school at Chapman University in Orange County, Calif., it also put him on the radar of Marvel Comics. An interaction with Marvel’s editor-in-chief turned into a conversation that ultimately led Higgins to the place where he is today.

“You realize that all of those different, strange avenues of my creative life ….all of that stuff ends up being skills that can come together for all sorts of different storytelling opportunities,” Higgins told Patch this week.

Despite never planning to end up creating comic book plots and then creating compelling narratives for a living, the backdrop in which Higgins grew up around Lockport and the surrounding communities ended up playing a major role in the world in which his Radiant Black and The Massive Verse heroes reside.

And for that, Higgins returned to a very familiar place. He built scenes around local streets and businesses and in some ways, around people he knew and grew up with. And while every writer has their own tendencies when it comes to their brand of creativity, Higgins said having a sense of home has carried through all of his characters and books.

“The book is not about me, but there is a lot of me in the book,” Higgins said. “That also goes down to include hometown settings and at the end of the day, if you’re writing superhero comics, there is hopefully a little bit of wish fulfillment that you are trying to tap into.”

So when he set out to create a story about 30-year-old best friends and unrealized dreams, centering it around a place that had all of the hometown characteristics of the place Higgins grew up in only made sense. But before he struck out on his own, finding his place among comic book giants turned out to be a necessary step.

After working on books for Marvel and DC, where he wrote Nightwing, which just happened to be Higgins’ all-time favorite superhero. Higgins also wrote books for the Batman line before he was hired to carry the Power Rangers over to comic book form, which he did – writing the first 30 books of the series. Marvel then asked Higgins to step in and do an adaptation of Ultraman to pair with a Japanese comic book series — all of which made Higgins think he had reached his dream job.

As it turned out, though, he really hadn’t.

When he decided he launch out on his own, Higgins had a game plan from the start. If his company was going to take the big swings that he intended to take, the company and its creative products had to be able to grow and change in the way Higgins did himself over time. But that strategy also had to be sustainable, both narratively and emotionally.

Higgins’ goal is to always push the envelope in regard to what a superhero comic book should be in 2022.

He describes Radiant Black as “Power Rangers with adult problems” – but he set in in the familiar territory of where he grew up, giving him a foundation from which to build. While the storylines weren’t about him per se, there were “personal bits” of autobiographical information that made their way into the storylines that Higgins’ storied followed.

Things that scared Higgins or fascinated him tended to do the same in the fictional lives of his characters. When he builds out a character, Higgins likes to joke that he starts with an archetype and then adds in things that he doesn’t like about himself. He quickly adds that he’s only half-joking when it comes to that strategy.

With the Radiant Black and Massive Verse series, Higgins has only built on his comic book stardom but has done it his way. While working for Marvel and DC proved incredibly fulfilling, Higgins said to have complete creative control has added a different level of satisfaction to his comics career.

“Every decision you’re making is foundational,” Higgins said. “(With Marvel and DC), in some way, you are stepping into an established sandbox where the majority of the toys are already there …but ultimately, you can only tell stories for other people for so long.”

Higgins released his latest book, Radiant Black 18, last week, teaming up with Chicago sports talk radio host Laurence Holmes to introduce a new character and hero. The release took the series in a new and interesting direction in the way in which the story is told, unveiling four time periods of the main character's life on each page, which was again another creative twist that Higgins chose to unveil.

The twist is another big swing for the Radiant Black series and provides further evidence that doing his stories his own way is where Higgins is meant to be. And now, years into building into his own universe after writing his favorite coming book heroes for others early on, not only does Higgins know he made the right decision to go out on his own, but he knows that every step along the way helped get him to this place.

The time at DC and Marvel not only helped Higgins hone his storytelling skills but helped him to find his voice in a plot twist that he has truly made his own ever since. But the time it took Higgins to get here has proven pivotal to Higgins' own creative journey, making him realize that everything — planned or not — happens for a reason.

“The thing that surprises me the most at this stage of my career is how incredibly creatively fulfilled I am working across the mediums we are working in,” Higgins told Patch. “As a creator, it’s very challenging to find creative fulfillment and so to find it in this way having bet entirely on myself and our incredible collaborators has been pleasantly surprising for sure.”