THE TURN OF THE STONE

The Adventures of Lucky Vega is still on its way back to full production.  In the meantime I still have a couple of other things to show you.  As we've seen in prior posts, sometimes I reconsider the look of a character.  Until the characters are "official," i.e. appearing in an actual story, they remain "open" for fine-tuning and tinkering.  Here, then, is the update on a Lucky Vega supporting character and future Environaut, Lionel Marshall, who upon acquiring his super-powers will become the stupendous Stone!  

 

As originally conceived, urbane and erudite gay Lionel, a college boxing champion, was purely African-American.  In response to the evolution of my own family--an awesome melting pot of blacks, Italians, Jews, and most recently Asians that reflects the present evolution of America itself--I decided to reconfigure him a bit.  Lionel's official identity is African-American on his mother's side, Irish-American on his father's side.  But he's smart and brave and strong to the core.  I wanted to have one more pass at giving him the perfect look, and this time I think I've really got it.

Coming up next:  One more thing I wanted to see and show you, related to a recent post.  Then we'll be on hiatus for a while with the production of a new set of Lucky strips.  Keep watching, everyone!

SKETCHED IN STONE

With a Webcomic version of The Adventures of Lucky Vega now in thumbnailing, I decided it was time to have a set of final master drawings of the lead characters of The Environauts, both as they will appear when they acquire their super-powers and become Earth's most awesome adventurers, and as they'll appear in the prequel.  For this and the next three posts we'll see the official model sheets for the Nauts.  These model sheets are in the process of coloring right now, but I'm giving them a preview here.

The powers of the Environauts reflect the spheres of the natural environment through which life has evolved (or will evolve as man advances), from Ocean to Land to Sky to Space.

Biracial Illinois native Lionel Marshall, the stupendous STONE, is the "Land" character, both the super-strength member and the gay member in the group.  Lionel's African-American mother is a physician; his Irish-American father is a University Dean.  Lionel started out as just black; I've evolved him in this way as a response to the growth and change in my own family and to what's happening in American society in general.  America is turning varied shades of "brown" before our eyes, a fascinating process to watch.  Lionel is a prep-school graduate and a college boxing champion whose romantic life hooks him up with at least two other major characters:  hardbody martial-arts expert Travis Roykirk, who becomes the super-hero World Champion; and super-powerful time traveler Prince Declan Draco, a.k.a. Draco Rex.  

Belying cultural expectations and assumptions about large, physically intimidating black men, Lionel, an English major in college, is the most urbane, erudite, articulate, and cultured of the Environauts, and is the appointed spokesman and media representative of the team.  But as noted above, the voice of the Nauts is also the muscle of the Nauts.  In his super-powered role as the Stone, Lionel can become a body of indestructible, super-strong living marble.  Imagine a certain Russian mutant in another comics universe, but in marble instead of steel.  Strong enough to lift 85 to 90 tons, invulnerable enough to resist heavy artillery, and skilled in hand-to-hand combat, the Stone is one of the most formidable members of the Quantum cast. 

LAUNCH OF THE SATELLITE

Illustration--a craft of which comic book art is a subset--is a profession in which you are encouraged and paid to steal.  We call it "swiping," to be nice about it, or "using reference," but it's stealing, it's allowed, and we're taught to do it.  We steal images for our use to make our work look more convincing.


However, there are some things you can't steal or swipe, even for reference, because there are very good laws against appropriating people's registered trademarks.  In that case we employ another trick:  Reworking something so that it is not a recognizable trademark, but if you're savvy enough you can still figure out where it came from.  I always envied the logo of the defunct Saturn automobile company.  I always thought that design should be the symbol or emblem of a super-hero, not a car.  But I couldn't just lift the logo from Saturn as it was designed:

To use it for my own character-design purposes, I had to transform it a bit.  And that's how I came up with the costume of this Quantum hero--The Satellite!

The Satellite is not a character that I created just to steal (or adapt) someone else's ingenious graphic.  For a long time I have searched for just the right character with whom to do an African-American version of my most prevailing hero archetype:  the Prince.  Quantum Comics will be full of Princes.  They're as common to my work as Princesses are to Disney movies.  The Prince may be defined as the most exceptional of men (even by the standards of Quantum Comics heroes), the man you most want as a champion, a rescuer, a leader, and a lover.  Lucky Vega, who will become Lucky Star, leader of the Environauts, is the most prominent of the Princes.  Wild Jon is another.  It was important to me to bring on a Prince who's black.  I put a great deal of time and thought into coming up with exactly the right character with which to do this.  I wanted him to be a character who would reflect all of my hopes for blacks in America to see all the beauty and greatness in themselves, to see themselves as not just rappers and basketball players and gangsters.  I took extra care in creating the Satellite--and his civilian identity, Max Thoroughgood.


My concept for Max is that he is a life-loving playboy from the richest African-American family in the country.  The secret of his family's wealth is that long ago they discovered a massive meteorite laden with extraterrestrial gold ore, and have used the sale of portions of the alien gold to build their fortune.  However, some of them have also resorted to less than scrupulous means to maintain and grow their empire, rather like an African-American version of the Ewings of Dallas, and when young Max finds some of the skeletons in the family closet, he's ashamed.  Not so ashamed that he completely gives up his hedonistic ways and his prolific pursuit of women (yes, he's one of the straight ones), but ashamed enough to want to find ways to redeem his family honor and turn his fortune to something good.  To that end he uses his genius with material science and engineering to create a super-suit and become a hero!  And he has an even loftier ambition:  to use some future upgrade of his suit to become the first man to orbit the Earth without a spaceship!


The Satellite's suit contains a technology that works in much the same way as the powers of another hero, the Quantum.  It is lined with an array of transducers that can store and process energy from any source and use it for a variety of effects, including flight, and has musculoskeletal enhancers to give Max superhuman strength when he's wearing it.  The suit is made of a diamond fibre and boron carbide combination with self-sealing resins that also makes Max invulnerable like a suit of super-armor.  Max's genius makes the Satellite one of the major players and heavy hitters in the Quantum Comics universe.  The Satellite:  a hero sure to put you in orbit!