DRAGON WITH A MANE

While we're looking forward to more of The Adventures of Lucky Vega, I have a number of other things for your entertainment.  Remember a while back when I did a quick pencil sketch of Draco Rex, King of Dragons, with longer hair?  I decided to take that idea back to the old sketchbook recently, and do it up more comprehensively and put color to it.  (And take the mousse out of the hair!)  What do you think about this?

BAD BOY, BAD BOY, WHAT'CHA GONNA DO...?

So, as we learned last time, Dr. Esteban Vega led an expedition into the rain forests of the Amazon in search of rare, possibly endangered, biological treasures that might be a boon to humanity and an aid in his initiative to make humans more ready for life in outer space.  With him were his then-teenage son, Lucky; and Lucky’s fitness and self-defense instructor, Paloma Reyes.  Accompanying them was one of Esteban’s associates in the space project, Jack Samson.  The world’s greatest health, exercise, and fitness mogul, Samson owned a national chain of gyms and had his own best-selling line of exercise and workout gear and fitness supplements, and was the publisher of Samson Magazine, the men’s exercise bible.  Jack had come into Esteban’s project as a consultant on the aspect of helping space travelers retain muscle mass and bone density in space.  And tagging along with Samson was his own son, Todd, a handsome and buffed young lad learning his father’s business.

The expedition’s guide brought them into an area where few white men or outsiders had ever visited, deep in the forest.  Here, the group’s botanist found a species of plant that she had never encountered.  Before she could study the unidentified flora in detail, the group was set upon by a group of youths who could have stepped right out of a Brazilian edition of Samson.  The youths, led by one named Cabroro, accused the Vega party of trespassing on the lands of the Xiil Tribe and attacked with the intent of capturing them.  In the ensuing melee, Lucky used battle moves taught him by Paloma to knock down Cabroro and get the upper hand over him--until more natives arrived and interrupted the whole tableau.  These were members of yet another tribe, the Paramati, who disputed the Xiil’s claim over this part of the outlying territory in the part of the rain forest that both tribes shared.  Which side was in the right?  Cabroro didn’t care; the outsider called “Lucky” had personally humiliated him in his attempt to defend the borders of the Xiil, and as Prince of the Tribe he would have satisfaction.  

The Xiil withdrew for the time being, with Cabroro’s threat hanging over Lucky.  The Vega party went with the Paramati to the heart of their territory and began to learn the incredible secrets of the advanced societies living hidden in the rain forest.  The Paramati and the Xiil both possessed a command of science that would have done Esteban himself proud, and they owed it all to the amazing properties of the Rumutu plant and how it affected the two rival tribes in mind and body, a heritage passed down over centuries on both sides.  The Paramati and the Xiil knew all about the outside world and had in fact been observing the nations of North America and Europe for years, but they had maintained their isolationism to protect the secret of the Rumutu from possibly dangerous foreign hands.  But now Zavio, leader of the Paramati, judged that it was too dangerous to keep Dr. Vega and his son in the dark:  for the aggressive and headstrong Cabroro would soon seek his revenge on Lucky for daring to strike him down in battle, and the Vegas must know what they were facing.

Sure enough, Cabroro and his father Guldaan, leader of the Xiil, came barging into the Paramati Royal Court, demanding a duel of honor between Cabroro and Lucky--a battle that Lucky would surely never survive.  The Vega party would not be permitted to leave the rain forest until the duel was ended, and if they tried to escape or the Paramati aided them in such an effort, it would end the truce between the two rival tribes.  His back to the wall, young Lucky had no choice but to accept Cabroro’s challenge.  However, Princess Ixia of the Paramati fancied the young American and decided secretly to help him.  She arranged a clandestine meeting in which she served Lucky a Rumutu tea that would fortify him enough to stand a chance against the Xiil Prince.  Lucky spent that night in the Princess’s bed, a fitting “first time” for the brilliant and exceptional boy.

The duel proceeded.  As Esteban and company watched, powerless to do anything else, Esteban gave orders to Paloma:  “No matter what happens, we are not going to let this strutting fool kill my son.  If it becomes necessary, you will save Lucky by any means you must, we will get him out of here, and we will let the Paramati and the Xill fight it out between them.”  Paloma understood and accepted her employer’s orders.  As fate would have it, the Rumutu-enhanced Lucky faced Cabroro in a furiously fought battle with both tribes watching--and in the end, Lucky fell at Cabroro’s feet!  But in a twist, before Paloma could step in, Cabroro himself, battered to the limit of his endurance, fell along with his opponent!  Cabroro had triumphed--but he had not won cleanly and decisively as he vowed!  His Princely honor now stained, Cabroro now had no choice but to accept banishment from his own tribe until such time as he redeemed himself in the eyes of his shamed father!

The Vega party left the land of the Paramati and Xiil, but the fallout of this encounter would go on for years to come.  Esteban took a sample of Lucky’s blood and preserved it before the Rumutu derivatives in his blood could break down; these extracts would be a vital component of the hormone-enzyme cocktail in the Samson-Vega Patch, which would eventually be what transformed Olympic champion Travis Roykirk into the World Champion.  And the fallen Prince Cabroro, with his loyal entourage of young male Xiil courtiers, left the tribe and traveled into the outside world, where he would gather wealth and resources for himself, and plot and scheme and wait and bide his time, until the moment came for him to strike back at Lucky Vega and take his ultimate revenge.  So it is that one night, Cabroro is ready.  He and his followers stand on a hillside overlooking Los Angeles at sunset, and as the sky darkens and the city lights up before them, the vengeful Prince vows, “Before we have departed this city, the accursed Lorenzo Vega shall have learned at last that Cabroro, Prince of the Xiil, is his master!”

Pride and power make a dangerous combination--and never more so than in the person of an angry young Prince.

THE VILLAIN FORMERLY KNOWN AS PRINCE

I hope you’re in the mood for some more evil, because I’ve got another purveyor of perfidy to bring a little menace into your life.  And if you thought Graeme Grimstead was something, here’s a heavy you’re sure to find hot!

In delving into the backstory of Lucky Vega and his friends before they became the Environauts--stories to be chronicled in the Environauts prequel, The Adventures of Lucky Vega--I looked for what Lucky, his father Esteban, and Lucky’s friends were up to before the four boys acquired their powers.  The idea is that before they became “super” they were still heroes.  And as I sought the adversaries of their pre-super-powered past, I came across someone as sexy as he was dangerous!

You’ll recall from previous posts that my most frequently occurring character theme is a type of character that I call “the Prince”--the man with exceptional, extraordinary qualities beyond his Quantum-worthy looks that truly put him over the top.  I defined the Prince as “the man you most want as a champion, a rescuer, a leader, and a lover.”  Until I discovered this character we’re meeting here, all of my Princes were good guys.  It didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have an evil Prince--and then along came Cabroro, Prince of the Xiil!

This kid is every bit as bad as his looks are good:  proud, arrogant, entitled, aggressive, vindictive--and dangerously intelligent.  Prince Cabroro belongs to one of a pair of rival, secret civilizations that live deep in the Amazon rain forests of South America.  They are advanced, possessed of technologies to rival Esteban Vega and Graeme Grimstead themselves.  And they are isolationists, living outside of the civilizations of the rest of the world, but routinely spying on us to ensure we pose them no threat.  

How did these cryptic cultures get that way?  Well, science is aware that there are natural resources in the Amazon rain forest that have gone yet undiscovered and untapped by the nations of the “civilized” world--things with miraculous properties that could cure otherwise fatal or crippling diseases and transform the quality of human life, if only they were not destroyed by the short-sightedness of the world’s governments and corporations.  One such is the wondrous Rumutu plant.  The roots of the Rumutu can enhance the human body, improving a person’s ability to accrue lean muscle, increasing the endurance and resistance to pain, boosting the immune system, healing diseases and disorders, even preventing birth defects and harmful mutations.  The flowers of the Rumutu affect the brain, the nervous system, and the intelligence.  Extracts from Rumutu flowers sharpen the cognitive functions, the memory, and the reflexes, and enhance the health of the brain itself.  Users of Rumutu can become borderline-superhuman.  

The Rumutu plant is one of the best-kept secrets in the world, a secret known only to two hidden Amazon tribes, the benevolent Paramati and the aggressive Xiil (pronounced “zeal”)--until one day when an expedition from America, led by the scientific visionary Esteban Vega, comes to the Amazon seeking biological secrets that might help man in his conquest of space (and which could have saved Esteban’s late wife Rosita, Lucky’s mother, who died of cancer).  Esteban, his son Lucky, and their companions stumble upon the two tribes and their secret, which sets off a dangerous rivalry between young Lucky and the proud, arrogant Prince of the Xiil tribe!  It’s a rivalry that leads to the fall and expulsion of a Prince--and the Prince’s deadly vow of revenge.  We’ll learn more about that in the next post of Quantum Comics Blog.

JON AND TOM

When we look for love--or even friendship--we tend to look for the one with whom we have the most in common.  Which makes perfect sense; compatibility is a highly desirable thing.  But such are the curious twists of human nature that sometimes what pleases and charms us most in others is the thing that we are not, as witness the most unlikely lovers who make the most perfect sense:  Jon Wilde, nicknamed Wild Jon, and Tom Tierney.

Consider the tale of Tom.  His father, attorney Kevin Tierney, wanted a son with whom to share all the typical Dad-son things in life.  He finally got one after two daughters--but Kevin was surprised one day when he walked in at an inopportune moment on Tom and his high-school boyfriend.  Bewildered, Kevin got into his car to think and drive and ran afoul of someone who had chosen to drink and drive, which left a world of things unsaid between Tom and his father.  Bereft of his Dad and fearing that Kevin was ashamed of him, Tom embarked on a life of denying himself love, dumping every boyfriend and sabotaging every relationship out of a need to be unhappy and punish himself for what happened to Kevin.  He even went so far as to move from California to New York and enroll at the same Manhattan law school his father attended, as if to keep Kevin’s ghost with him forever.  And it’s while he’s a student in New York that Tom meets Jon.

Jon couldn’t be more different from Tom.  Jon’s father is a wealthy Englishman; his mother was the Princess of a tribe of shape-changers from an alternate Earth called Greenworld.  The son of a captain of industry and a noble werewolf, young Prince Jon is a hybrid belonging to neither of his parents’ species and is effectively the child of nature itself.  Possessing superhuman strength, senses, and reflexes, animal-like powers, and a communion with the natural world, Jon is a creature of  instinct:  intuitive, uninhibited, innocent--as “wild” as his name implies.  He recognizes Tom as his destined mate by Tom’s scent!  Tom is Jon’s 180-degree opposite.  While handsome and athletic (as the boyfriend of a gay comic book hero should be), Tom is thoughtful, circumspect, analytical, intellectual--everything that is “civilized”.  The two should not get along and should even repel each other, and yet they prove to be the perfect fit, each possessing the qualities that the other lacks.  It is under the influence of the wild and primal but sweet and innocent Jon that Tom’s carefully guarded heart finally melts and he accepts his need to love and be loved.  In the bargain Tom gets the responsibility for helping Jon’s father protect him and all his secrets from the world.  In effect, the civilized Tom takes up the cause of conserving the part of nature that is most precious to him:  the wild and innocent boy he loves.

Jon and Tom together are an old song lyric expressed as two boys in love:  “Wild thing, you make my heart sing...”

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!