Your Cast: Brandon, Valynne, Dan, Howard

You had questions about heroes, villains, and main characters. We have answers! Here are the questions:

How do you make planned power increases not seem like an ass-pull¹?
What do you do when your villain is more interesting/engaging than your hero?
How do you know when a character is unnecessary and needs to be removed from the story, or killed off in the story?
What tricks do you use when you want the reader to mistakenly believe a character is a hero, rather than a villain?
Which is more fun for you: creating a villain, or creating a hero?
How many side characters can you reasonably juggle in a novel?
What are the drawbacks to making your villain a POV character?
If your villain doesn't show up until late in the story, how do you make their eventual appearance seem justified?
How do you get readers to like a character who is a jerk?

Liner Footnotes
¹ We hadn't seen "ass-pull," the a nouning² of the idiom "pull it out of your ass³" as a noun before.
² Bill Watterson gave us the verb form of the word "noun" indirectly in the final panel of this strip.
³ For those unfamiliar with the extraction-from-orifice idiom, it means "make it up on the spot," with a negative connotation, suggesting that the reader can TELL that this was invented in a hurry.