THE ARTIST KNOWN AS LUCAS

And so we take another look at a member of the cast of the Jungle Jon, Prince of the Wild Graphic Novel.  Thus far we have met the star of our story, his boyfriend-to-be, the tomcatting hunk, and the water-loving dreamboat.  Next, say hello to the artist in residence.  This, then, is Lucas.  He's from Hawaii and is moved to break out the old paints, pencils, papers, and canvases whenever he finds something beautiful.  On the mysterious Island where our story is set, he's the right guy in the right place.  The Jungle Jon Portfolio is available at this link.

SKINNY DIPPING WITH SPENCER

Another friendly arrival to the Island in the Jungle Jon, Prince of the Wild Graphic Novel is Spencer, who never met a body of water into which he didn't want to dive and swim.  When we first encounter him, that's exactly what he's doing--and that's exactly how he catches the ever-roving eye of Mark.  Are these two destined to be a couple--or will Mark's eye go roving someplace else?  You never know.  Go here to order The Jungle Jon Portfolio, and keep coming back for more previews of the characters and pages of the Graphic Novel.

HARK! IT'S MARK!

Continuing our look at the cast of the Jungle Jon, Prince of the Wild Graphic Novel, here is another of the inhabitants of the wondrous and sexy Island.  Mark, the first person that Jon meets after his encounter with the mysterious "Voice of the Island" (whom we'll get a look at in a future post), is a gym rat.  What time he doesn't spend in the gym, he spend with the guys whose attention he catches with the body that gets from being in the gym all the time.  Mark is a testament to the adage that "hard work pays off".  As you can see, hard work can also make you pretty "hard".  You can order The Jungle Jon Portfolio and get a preview of the Graphic Novel in progress here.

THE PRINCE'S CONSORT

And now, another look at a character from the Jungle Jon, Prince of the Wild Graphic Novel.  This is Tom, another lad who appears on the mysterious Island and will become a most important part of young Jon's life.  He's featured in The Jungle Jon Portfolio, which of course is available at this link.  Keep coming back for more previews of the Portfolio and the Graphic Novel in progress.

PRINCE OF THE WILD!

Here's a quick look inside The Jungle Jon Portfolio.  These are the master drawings of Jon himself that I'm using for reference in creating the pages.  As we go on, we'll see the masters of the other characters and a sneak preview of the first pages of the graphic novel itself, in pencil form.  The Portfolio is available as a PDF online right here.

AND NOW...THE JUNGLE JON PORTFOLIO!

A while ago I dropped a hint about what I've been up to since the holidays.  Over the many weeks since then, I've had to deal with not just the holidays but a whole host of other things that have badly slowed me down and completely thrown the wrench into my works.  But now, at long last, the new project is up and running, and you can finally see
--and buy--THE JUNGLE JON PORTFOLIO!

In deciding to switch to a new project for a while and give a rest to the other things I've been working on, I decided to go for what is surely the simplest (though of course not simplistic) of all my creations:  the illustration and graphic novel project from which I derived Wild Jon.  Jungle Jon, Prince of the Wild is the earlier creation that I adapted for the Wild Jon concept.  

The Jungle Jon Portfolio is an introduction and preview for the graphic novel.  Here's an excerpt from the introductory text of the Portfolio:


"Our story takes place on a mysterious but beautiful tropical island.  The Island is a place where there can be nothing but warmth, sunshine, happiness, contentment, and pleasure--for it also happens to be a living intelligence and that is what the Island wants.  That, and to be someone's home.  The Island seeks out someone to be its master, someone who needs a better home and a better life; someone good and kind and beautiful.  It finds a boy named Jon and brings him to live on it, to enjoy all that the island has to offer--to be its Prince.  For all Jon's spectacular youthful beauty, for all the love and kindness in his heart, life in the world outside the island has made Jon sad, lonely, and despondent, filled with heartbreak and the fear of living in a world that truly loves nothing but greed and wealth.  Communicating through a being called the Voice of the Island, which takes the form of a stunning, exotic young man, the Island thus invites Jon to cast off everything in his life--even his clothes--and live there, wanting for nothing, removed from all hurt and harm.  It makes him truly the Prince of the Wild.

This Portfolio serves as an introduction to the story of Jungle Jon, Prince of the Wild:  the initial designs of its cast of characters and a first look at the opening pages of the story in a "Director's Cut" form, prior to inking and coloring.  All are welcome on the Island, so keep visiting there and see all the sexy fun unfold with the story of Jungle Jon."

The Jungle Jon Portfolio contains material that is Not Safe for Work.  Download and enjoy it, but beware of where you open and look at it!

The Jungle Jon, Prince of the Wild Graphic Novel is now in production.  The final work will be released first as two individual issues, then as a collected Graphic Novel edition.  The Portfolio is now on sale at https://jafludd.selz.com/item/54cea15fb7987202a806250d?mode=edit

In future posts, we'll be seeing more of the Portfolio and new pages of the Graphic Novel as they're completed, so stick around.  You've got a passport to the Island!

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?

BEYOND THE SEA

Since our last post I’ve gotten a couple of interesting responses to our maritime marvel, Seastorm.  His costume--what there is of it and the way it’s cut--seems to have raised a couple of eyebrows among my mates over at Facebook.  Now it’s time to learn some more about how this awesome ocean-goer came to be.  Take a deep breath and let’s jump in...

I think I’ve mentioned in prior posts that I sometimes look outside of comic books for ideas; for example, to film, books, magazines, music--and television.  It is to cable TV that I owe the starting point for the origin of Seastorm.  A while ago, I think it was on Animal Planet, there was a fictionalized “documentary” about the natural history of mermaids.  It was called Mermaids:  The Body Found, and it expounds on something called “the Aquatic Ape Theory”.  This theory--unsubstantiated, to be sure, but incredibly fascinating to think about--contends that at some point in Earth’s natural history a group of pre-human apes that lived near the sea began to gravitate back to the oceans and, over the eons, were naturally selected for a completely aquatic life!  This, then, is the actual origin of what we call mermaids.  According to the fictional account on the show, what humans have seen and mythologized as people who were fish from the waist down was actually a race of beings who were more like dolphins from the waist down.  (And don’t tell me you don’t know dolphins aren’t fish.  Come on, you’re smarter than that.)  The way this theory was presented and illustrated in the show got the engines in the ship of my mind charged up to full power.  Watching this show I couldn’t help but think, I have GOT to find some use for THIS!  And as it occurred to me that I hadn’t yet perfected my own oceanic hero, I naturally looked in the direction of this concept.

What it comes down to is something a bit like the first act of the movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey, except with prehistoric “aquatic apes” instead of land-dwelling primates.  And in place of the mind-stretching Monolith, Earth’s oceans all those millions of years ago became the home of something called a Farwanderer.  

The Farwanderers are among the most mysterious beings in the universe.  They are either completely noncorporeal, or they are noncorporeal life in artificial, semi-organic host forms.  Whatever they are, they are ancient beyond imagining.  They teleport themselves across interstellar space seeking out planets containing only pre-sentient life.  Once they find such a planet, they set about raising the consciousness and directing the evolution of the highest existing life form.  The Farwanderer that came to Earth chose to work on the aquatic apes.

Once in Earth’s oceans, the Farwanderer itself took the form of an immense, whale-like cybernetic organism, kind of a cross between a Grey Whale and the submarine Nautilus.  And as the aquatic apes evolved, losing their legs and developing a lower anatomy resembling that of a dolphin while becoming more human-like from the waist up, they lived under the guidance of the Farwanderer, which gradually enhanced their intelligence.  They created a civilization for themselves in the sea--but not one like what you see in Sub-Mariner and Aquaman stories.  It bothers me to see undersea civilizations in comic books where you can stand up and walk around or use furniture and utensils on the ocean floor as if you were still on land, and drapes and fabrics hang as if they were in air instead of water, and so forth.  I have an understanding with myself that if I have beings who live underwater it’s going to be more natural and logical than that, and it’s not going to work that way.  But I’m getting off track here.  The point is that these beings, whom we’ll call Cetusians for want of a better name, have a civilization in the ocean that is older than any civilization on land and even more advanced than our own.  

The Cetusians are without aggression beyond self-defense and have no interest in dominating nature or the planet.  They have only intelligence and curiosity.  With the help of the Farwanderer, they have learned to project their minds out of the ocean to explore both the far reaches of land and the depths of outer space.  The Farwanderer has shown them planets and parts of the universe that humans have not yet imagined.  And at times the Farwanderer has allowed some of them to take human form and move discreetly, secretly, among our kind to learn about us in person.  There have been humans throughout history who have unknowingly met and been acquainted with Cetusian explorers.  

And this is all very well and good, as you can surmise--until something happens.  What happens is the story to which so much of the Quantum Comics Universe links up:  the origin of the Environauts.  The invasion of the Ardemian Rief Clan threatens both the surface and the oceans of Earth until Lucky Vega, a.k.a. Lucky Star, and his friends repel the aliens.  But in the wake of the danger, the Farwanderer is disturbed.  Advanced as they are, the peaceful and pacifistic Cetusians would have been subjugated by the Rief if they had been discovered.  What if another such threat should arise and this time not even the Environauts could see it off?  Something, the Farwanderer reasons, must be done.  The Cetusians need a protector, but the Farwanderer is not willing to try to change the Cetusians’ nature to produce one.  It wants its proteges in Earth’s oceans to remain as they are.  Fortunately, the Farwanderer has other options.

In its travels, the Farwanderer has had occasion to study--discreetly--those humans who have ventured into the sea.  And sometimes it has come upon scenes of disaster where the sea has claimed human lives.  In its curiosity the Farwanderer has seen fit to collect samples of the DNA of humans who have perished this way, and store them away for study.  So it is that when it decides to create a champion for the Cetusians, the Farwanderer reaches into its store of human genomes and re-creates a human who lost his life in the depths.  It alters the subject and endows him with mighty powers--and creates a being who will be known as Seastorm!

The reconstruction is not perfect.  The Farwanderer’s creation has the now superhumanly empowered body of a human who died at sea, but the memories are badly corrupted and almost gone.  What Seastorm knows is that he is the creation of the Farwanderer and that he is the friend and protector of the Cetusians, the defender of Earth’s oceans, and the wielder of the powers of the sea and the tempest.  (Our last post includes the full rundown of his powers.)  When he tries to remember anything more about himself, he recovers only vague memories of a life on land, and of a name:  Jonas.  As you can tell from the way Seastorm is outfitted, the Farwanderer is not impressed with human taboos about the body.  Jonas shares Wild Jon’s aversion to excess clothing.

Nevertheless, everyone who encounters Seastorm--including the Environauts themselves, with whom he soon crosses paths--is duly impressed with him!  Whatever he’s wearing (or not wearing), this is a guy to be reckoned with.  Defy him at your peril!

Who was Jonas?  Where did he come from?  What was he doing at sea and how did he perish?  Is there anything of his life remaining on land?  Is there anyone alive who would even remember him?  Indeed, how long ago did he even live, and to what part of human history did he belong?  The answer is...I honestly don’t know yet; this is brand new material that will take a while to work itself out.  But I wanted to get it at least to the state I’ve described above because the idea has really taken hold and I wanted it officially worked out in some manner.  What I’ve determined so far is that Jonas was gay and there was a man he loved and lost.  Whether he’s alive now or where he is, remains to be seen.  But it appears that Jonas/Seastorm is going to have one thing in common with the other aquatic heroes before him:  he’s going to be pulled in two different directions, devoted to the sea and the Cetusians and the Farwanderer, but always drawn to life on the land.  And sometimes those two different callings will be in conflict.  (Indeed the way he dresses--or doesn’t dress--is likely to be a conflict in itself!)  All of which makes this pelagic powerhouse another fascinating addition to the Quantum cast.  As Herman Melville wrote:  “There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.”

THE PERFECT SEASTORM

Here’s another one of those characters without which a cast of comic-book heroes is not complete.  You’ve got to have the sea-going, aquatic hero, the champion of the ocean.  For the Quantum Comics Universe, that character is more than just a tempest in a teapot.  He’s a full-on Seastorm.

For the excitingly enigmatic Seastorm, I wanted a character who would be a match for a certain well-known Avenging Son.  That character’s theme song from an old animated TV series that was my first attraction to comic books still gives me a tingle whenever I remember it:  “Stronger than a whale, he can swim anywhere./He can breathe underwater and go flying through the air...!”  So, for my Seastorm, I wanted a character who would be the successor of that Prince of Atlantis--but of course he had to be a distinctly “J.A. Fludd” creation.  I thought I had the character exactly right for a while, but just in the last few days I came up with a better approach to him than I originally had, and I took down the initial concept and did a complete rebuild from, shall we say, the shoreline up.

So, Seastorm is stronger than a whale and can breathe anywhere, and yes, he can breathe underwater and go flying through the air.  But his powers go way beyond that.  The man otherwise known only as Jonas is strong enough to give a serious battle to the strongest Quantum heroes like the Stone and the Satellite, even the Bearcat.  He can resist the pressures and temperatures of the most extreme ocean environments, and indeed “swim anywhere” there is water enough to swim through.  He can see underwater at any depth.  His lean and perfectly sculpted body extracts oxygen directly from the water into his bloodstream.  But from here onward he gets even more awesome.  

Jonas can control any fluid medium.  Not just liquids--fluids.  Scientifically, a liquid is “any substance having a consistency like that of water or oil.”  A fluid is any substance that flows, which covers both liquids like water and gases like the air around us.  Jonas’s powers cover liquids and fluids.  In water, he can change, direct, accelerate, or slow down the movement of any current.  He can actually alter the density and pressure of water to use it as a weapon.  Imagine being swept up in an irresistible whirlpool, or dragged down to the ocean floor by an undersea vortex, or dashed against a reef by a super-powerful current.  Seastorm can do that, and can also torpedo himself through water at super-speeds over great distances.  On the surface of the ocean, he can summon a waterspout.  On land, he can create vortexes, gales, or focused thunderstorm or typhoon effects.  He can change water from liquid to vapor and back again with a thought.  He can also lift himself into the air and fly as fast as an Air Force jet.  With this and his strength, this is not a guy you want angry with you.

And then there are his other powers.  Seastorm can communicate with all cetaceans--the family of marine mammals that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises.  They’re all his allies, meaning if you must battle Seastorm you may also have to contend with a posse of Orca whales who have his back.  And there are other beings in the sea who are Seastorm’s friends and also under his protection.  Who are they, and how did Jonas become their champion?  If you think they’re the denizens of an “Atlantis” like the one ruled by that other Prince of the Deep...come back for the next Quantum Comics Blog where we’ll all “fathom” together the awesome origin of Seastorm.  It’s 20,000 leagues above boring!

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...”

LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE BOYS

The central characters of the Quantum Comics universe are, how shall we say, fantastic “for” a number of reasons.  They are Earth’s most celebrated and loved adventurers, the Beatles of the heroic world:  the Environauts.

The origin of the Nauts, as they’re often called, takes the origin of another very famous comic-book quartet and turns it upside down.  Lorenzo “Lucky” Vega, super-rich super-science genius and the smartest kid in the world, takes his three best friends out for a submarine ride to test an experimental technology that catalogues the sounds made by marine life.  While they’re out there, they discover something that has never been recorded before--because it belongs to no ocean on Earth!  It captures them and tries to transform them into the vanguard of an alien invasion.  The intervention of an alien female (whom we’ll be meeting in the future) saves the boys, leaving them still human but super-powered--and making them the only thing that can save mankind from conquest by oceanic beings from another world.  (Meanwhile, Olympic gymnast Travis Roykirk is battling the same invasion, a battle that will result in his becoming the World Champion.)  Lucky’s brilliance and the four friends’ powers make them the explorers, discoverers, and protectors of Earth’s future; the world’s leading super-science heroes and pillars of the superhuman community.  These four boys are the pioneers of everything that is “super”.

The Environauts are so famous and so popular that in the Quantum Comics world you can’t turn on your TV or computer, or open a magazine or look at a newspaper, without seeing, hearing, or reading something about them.  And going out in public?  Remember how the Beatles couldn’t do a thing without being swarmed by screaming girls?  Imagine mobs of screaming girls and guys hurling themselves at you wherever you go.  It can make the business of saving the world even more complicated than you’d expect.

This group shot is the result of my latest tinkering with the team uniform.  As you can see, the Nauts wear the same suit in individual colors with individual symbols as well as a team symbol.  (There’s also an equally sleek-looking “dress” version of the suits, which I’ll have to show you sometime.)  Earth’s greatest heroes are (from left to right) openly gay, biracial Lionel Marshall, aka The Stone, who can transform his body into super-strong, invulnerable living marble; Roger Blaisdell, aka Aquarius, who becomes a figure of living liquid and does all manner of watery power stunts; team leader Lucky Vega, aka Lucky Star, with the power to become a body of living plasma, as in a neon sign or the Sun; and Roger’s big brother Warren “Trey” Blaisdell III, aka Cirrus, who becomes a body of living water vapor and charged particles, a human storm system that can produce all sorts of weather effects.  The powers of the Environauts are meant to reflect the spheres of the natural environment through which life has evolved.  Life as we know it began in the ocean and moved onto the land, certain creatures took to the sky, and man has uniquely begun to reach into space.  So the Nauts are figures of Ocean (Aquarius), Land (The Stone), Sky (Cirrus), and Space (Lucky Star).  

We’ll have individual posts for each of the Environauts in weeks to come.  In the meantime, let’s hear it for the boys.

BUILDING A BETTER BEARCAT

As I mentioned at the end of our previous post, here’s another look at the bludgeoning Bearcat--and his human form, Dr. Russell Lockhart.

I wanted to do another “take” on the character after considering the initial design because it made me think perhaps I had done a little better rendering the “cat” aspect of him than the “bear”.  So I decided to do another sheet focusing on just headshots of the reluctant Russ’s alter ego, and work a little more with the human Russ himself.  My friend Martin in Edinburgh, Scotland wonders if it would be a better look to shave or shed the Bearcat’s mane.  What do you think?

Also last time I was talking about a particular character in a Major Comics Universe, whom I won’t mention by name.  I’ll just identify him as The Ugly, Brutal, Vulgar, Violent Canadian With the Metal Claws Whom I Don’t Like.  This character, as I said, has become one of the standard bearers for everything that is considered heroic in that universe, even though he represents the opposite of what attracted me to comics and made me want to be a fan and a part of the profession.  To me he stands for things that have repelled me from comics and has at times made me want to flee the medium completely as both a fan and a professional interest.  Characters like that, who are among the darlings of the industry and beloved of so many fans, are not at all why I wanted to be in it, and I have long resented their popularization.  

I was talking in E-mails with my brother about this once and he brought up a very interesting point.  My brother suggested I think of the Metal Clawed Canadian as the comic book equivalent of the Wolf Man.  That is, the original movie Wolf Man, the one played in the Universal films of the 1940s by Lon Chaney Jr.  In my immediate family, my siblings and I and most of my nieces are devotees of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and this one particular brother and I are comic-book guys.  My brothers and older sister introduced me to classic Hollywood science fiction and horror and it became part of my identity.  My brother made the analogy between the Metal Clawed Canadian and the Wolf Man because they are both “tortured monsters”.  My problem with the Metal Clawed Canadian--well, one of my problems--is that he seems to have grown to accept and embrace the creature that he is instead of resisting it.  How many times have we read about him thinking that he is “the best at what he does, and what he does isn’t nice”?  He seems to embrace his monstrous, homicidal nature where poor Larry “The Wolf Man” Talbot never did that of his werewolf self.  I see that as the critical difference between them.

Perhaps, then, the Bearcat is my personal redemption of characters like old Edward Talon Hands from Canada.  Perhaps he is my way of taking the whole mentality of such characters and turning it to better thinking and better ends, civilizing that which is uncivilized, if you will.  Russ Lockhart doesn’t like being his other self, and he holds firm to his true, “core” self, a man of science and reason (and the kind of person I most respect).  In that way, I think, Russ resembles another anti-hero I brought up, the Scientist With the Raging Green Monster Alter Ego in Purple Pants.  This character, I’ll admit, is one of the favorite characters of my boyhood, and one to whom I’ve retained an attachment through later life.  (Though my actual favorite characters include the Four Astronauts With Cosmic Ray-Induced Powers, the Super-Soldier Patriot From the 1940s, the Kid Who Climbs Walls and Shoots Webs, and the Mythological Thunder God Who Protects Earth as a Super-Hero.)  Russ Lockhart, like the nuclear physicist who becomes Green Skin Purple Pants, will never embrace being a monster.  Russ will, however, use it--and live with the terrifyingly volatile danger of being the Bearcat--for the good of humanity.  And using power for the good of humanity, after all--not the wallowing in violence and ugliness--is really what super-heroes are all about.  

BEHOLD...THE BEARCAT

A long time ago I heard the name of an old car called a Stutz Bearcat.  I’m not really a “car” person except that I love cars that I think are beautiful (as I love anything that I think is beautiful), but I just thought that was a cool name:  “Bearcat.”  There ought to be a character in comics by that name, I thought, and mentally filed away that name for years and years.  So at last, here he is.

The Bearcat is my take on the archetype of the “raging, rampaging berserker fury” hero.  You know, the kind of hero who in a certain comics universe would turn green with rage and have a predilection for purple pants.  I once had a universe of characters that I had started building in high school.  Most of it is in mothballs now, but a few of its characters and ideas in updated form are part of Quantum Comics.  In that reality the Bearcat was a villain:  an axe murderer who turned into a literal monster.  For Quantum I decided to bring him back as a dangerous, conflicted hero--an anti-hero, if you like.  Such characters have a following, as we know.  You know that other place, the one with the green guy with anger issues and purple pants?  Over there they have an animalistic, murderous anti-hero with metal claws who’s been held up as the poster boy for everything that is considered heroic in a way that I don’t think such a character ought to be, whom I don’t like.  Perhaps, I thought, I could do a better one.

The Bearcat is Russell Lockhart, a genetic engineer by profession.  He works for the government on a project to try to unlock at will the latent super-powers that people carry around in their genes.  In Quantum Comics, in the origin of the Environauts that is the starting point for all super-heroes and super-villains, Earth’s oceans are seeded with alien “xenosomes” that get into the planet’s water cycle and thus into people, making everyone a potential superhuman, but allowing only a few people to hit the super-lottery, so to speak.  The US government and military, as you can well guess, would just love to be able to weaponize the xenosomes, and Russell here is part of the top-secret project to figure out how to do it.  

Now Russell is really not the militaristic aggressor type.  In fact all he really wants to do is make good money, live a quiet life, stay out of people’s way, and keep other people out of his way.   Unfortunately, as Mr. Spock in Star Trek once pointed out, humans are very good at getting things that they don’t want.  Russell is an escapee from a toxic home filled with family members a lot like the people for whom we find him working, “Type A” men pumped up on testosterone, aggression, and archaic perceptions of manhood who all became cops and soldiers and firefighters--and womanizers, and frequently alcoholics.  Russell was “the runt of the litter” who was quiet and introverted, intellectual, and bisexual, ignored by his father and taunted and picked on by his brothers.  He couldn’t get out of there fast enough, and his interest in science was his ticket.  When the Army came calling on Russell’s gift for biotechnology, he wasn’t exactly keen to do it, except that he imagined the money he could earn working for them would buy him a very comfortable, very quiet and stress-free early retirement.  And besides, with his mind, he could play in the arena of the soldier boys and pumped-up authority figures like his father and brothers and show them the superiority of intellect over brute force.  Hold that thought, Russell; here comes the twist.

There is a (fictitious) foreign country that I call Toraq.  I won’t tell you exactly where Toraq is.  Just picture a place in the Eastern Hemisphere where it’s really hot, they have a lot of sand and a lot of oil, it’s rife with religious fundamentalism and they’re not at all enlightened about women, and they really don’t like Americans.  (See?  Pure fiction, right?)  The rulers of Toraq have gotten wind of the US military’s secret superhuman project and they feel very threatened; after all, these Americans have a way of stomping all over countries like theirs to get what they want.  So into our country they’ve sent operatives who are part of Toraq’s own project to tap the xenosomes.  (Of course ours would not be the only country trying this.)  The Toraqi xenosome formula is unstable and dangerous; the people on whom they’ve tried it were the genetic equivalent of suicide bombers, sacrificing their lives in exchange for a promised reward in the next life.  (There were a lot of imaginary virgins in the deal, no doubt.)  Their formula either kills the subject or produces a super-power so volatile that it destroys the subject and everyone else around him.  The Toraqi’s evil plan is to abduct Americans, inject them with the formula, and use them as living weapons.  And one American they’ve targeted is Russell Lockhart.  Their reasoning:  If he dies, good; that’s one less American scientist.  If he dies and destroys or cripples the Americans’ superhuman project, also good; it’s a setback for us.  Win/win.  The trouble is, Russell doesn’t die.  He hits the super-lottery and draws a power that doesn’t kill him, but it does make him very angry, as strong and invulnerable as a superhuman can get, and very, very dangerous.  It makes Russell everything he never wanted to be.  He becomes aggressive and violent to the point that he’s on the razor’s edge of going totally berserk, with the strength to lift or press 90-100 tons and invulnerability in direct proportion.  He becomes the Bearcat.

To cut to the chase here, it takes the World Champion and the new hero team that he’s just formed, the Wonders (one of whom is the Satellite, whom we met in the previous post) to get the Bearcat (mostly) under control.  This has the benefit for the Wonders of giving them another immensely strong and powerful member and a relationship with the government that is to their mutual advantage, with high-level privileges and clearances.  To the government, having the Bearcat in the Wonders relieves them of most of the responsibility for controlling him, though there’s always the possible complication of military intervention if the Bearcat proves impossible to restrain.  And for Russell, who really doesn’t want to be a superhuman or a hero at all, being in the Wonders means keeping the military’s hands off him.  It’s a better thing, he decides, to throw in his lot with the other super types than with the Army.  The one silver lining in the whole setup for poor Russ is that he isn’t constantly stuck in the form of the Bearcat; unwilling as he is, he can summon his monstrous self when it’s needed.  So the reluctant scientist becomes a dangerous hero (and a handful for his teammates), and a startled and awestruck world must behold the Bearcat!

Watch for more of the Bearcat in the next post!

THE LOVE YOU TAKE IS EQUAL TO THE LOVE YOU CREATE

We all know that characters in comics can do things that people in Life as We Know It cannot.  But that isn’t limited to characters with super-powers.  For instance, suppose you are a character in comics and you are a man in your 50s who’s led an unhappy, unfulfilled life in which you’ve never had the love of your dreams.  In fact, what if you met and worked with the man who was everything you wanted, but he was exactly the type who never wanted you and was a heterosexual besides?  And suppose this man died, leaving you in grief for what could never have been.  If you were such a character and you also happened to be an expert in robotics and artificial intelligence...perhaps, just perhaps, you would set out to design, build, and program the man of your dreams and make him everything you ever wanted, created to love you!  In The Adventures of Lucky Vega that’s exactly what a man named Professor William Favor did.  The result of his work to create the love for which he’d hungered all his life was an android named Tycho!

Tycho is an android, programmed to be Professor Favor’s companion, servant, and committed lover.  He is a fully sentient, artificially intelligent being.  He even has free will; he is actually capable of breaking up with Professor Favor and leaving him!  But he doesn’t--because in the way of so many sentient beings for as long as sentient beings have existed, he adores, worships, and is devoted to his creator!  In a twist that some characters (such as Lucky himself) find bizarre and disturbing, Tycho never even calls William Favor by his first name; he is given to addressing and referring to his creator as “The Professor” or “Sir” in spite of the intimate (to say the least) nature of their relationship!  And Tycho is even equipped to defend himself and his master from danger; he is superhumanly strong and possesses electrical and magnetic powers. 

To make things even more intriguing, though the man in whose perfect likeness Tycho was made is dead, the lover android is the exact image of one who is very much alive.  David Strayhorn, the man Professor Favor loved, was part of Dr. Esteban Vega’s space initiative, working both to perfect humanity for life in space and perfect man’s ability to travel to the stars.  David Strayhorn died in a test of an experimental space-warp engine.  But Strayhorn’s look-alike son, Jeff, is still with us, just as heterosexual as his late Dad--and sleeping with Paloma Reyes, Dr. Vega’s head of security and Lucky’s fitness and self-defense instructor.  Suffice it to say that when Paloma first gets a look at Tycho she is in for a very embarrassing surprise when she thinks the artificial being is her favorite bedmate!  And from there, things keep getting interesting...

Dr. Franken Furter, eat your heart out!

HE IS THE CHAMPION, MY FRIEND...

"He is the Champion, my friend.  And he'll go on fighting to the end..."


With the 2012 Olympics just a little more than a month away, what could be more fitting than a hero who was an Olympian?  Ladies and gentlemen, it's the one-and-only World Champion!

Travis Roykirk is a character I've had for many years who has existed in different forms, but he has always been a gymnast with an Olympic Gold Medalist background.  Men's Gymnastics is one of the few sports that I will actually take time to sit and watch on TV, and I look forward to seeing it in every Summer Olympics.  I think of male gymnasts as not just superb athletes but beautiful artists, and I like their sport not for its competitiveness but its grace and beauty and its expression of personal, physical excellence.  (Of course that doesn't stop me rooting for the Americans; I am a little competitive.)  


In his last iteration before this one, the openly gay and proud World Champion was an Australian clad in a gymnast's outfit in the colors of the Olympic flag (blue, yellow, black, green, red, white).  As I thought about him I realized that my heroic cast was lacking one primal archetype:  the all-American, flag-wearing hero in red, white, and blue.  This was my motivation for changing his origin to make him an American and for re-doing his costume to its present design.  Travis, prior to becoming the World Champion, appears in The Adventures of Lucky Vega as a gymnastics champion and a hardbody Martial Arts competitor specializing in Tae Kwon Do and the Bo staff.  Hardbody training transforms bone, causing it to lay down more tribeculae (calcium structures) after being traumatized.  In this manner bones grow denser, harder, more durable.  Ancient martial artists rendered their bones denser by striking sand, stone, and iron.  I picked all this up from an episode of a program called Fight Science on National Geographic Channel featuring an Australian fighter named Bren Foster who is one of the most spectacularly beautiful specimens of manhood you will ever see.  He went on to star as Quinn in the daytime soap Days of Our Lives!  


Watching Bren and learning about hardbody training, I naturally began to spin the whole idea into concepts for my work; I had been looking for details to use in the origin of the World Champion and this was a natural.  It sets up things that happen to Travis after his Olympic Gold Medal wins, when he becomes the chosen protege and surrogate son of a man named Jack Samson who is the world's leading exercise and fitness mogul (and the father of a brave young gay lad who died standing up to bashers).  It is because of his closeness with Samson that Travis becomes the recipient of the Samson-Vega Patch, a super-body-enhancing skin patch created as part of a project to prepare humans for life in space.  Wearing the Patch takes Travis from physically superb to nearly superhuman and is a critical step in his odyssey to become one of the leaders of the world's emerging super-heroes.


Wearing the red, white, and blue with pride, Travis Roykirk is truly the Champion of the World!

ONE GIANT LEAP FOR THE QUANTUM

I often think about questions of identity and self-image.


For instance:  Some people think the desire for physical beauty is shallow and superficial.  Is it really?  And some people I've known have seemed to believe that everyone else in the world is "pretentious," or that any attempt to distinguish yourself in the world or to stand out from other people is just a neurotic bid for attention or merely a pose.  But is that actually so?  Can there be nothing sincere about it?  Not according to some people.  To some, personal distinction is not a legitimate concern.  You have no business believing you are, or wanting to be, any more special than anyone else, regardless of your mind or your gifts or anything you may have to offer.  Anyone who wants to be anything more than another sheep in the flock or another brick in the wall (apologies to Pink Floyd) is pretentious.


And who are we, really?  Are we the selves that we present to the world?  Or are our real selves, our truest and most legitimate selves, the people that we are inside?  I tend to think it's the latter.  The real "you" is the "you" of your dreams.  Much of the business of living is, or I think should be, the attempt to peel away the falsehoods of the people we are in common life and expose the real self within; or to turn ourselves inside out and release the people we carry around inside us.  That's why we go to the gym and go on diets and patronize plastic surgeons and follow the latest fashions.  I'm sure it's also one of the motivations for going to school (or going back to school), for taking classes and pursuing degrees and keeping ourselves in growth.  Part of it, a very significant part, is the quest to transform the self.  Remember what Yoda once said to Luke Skywalker:  "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!"  


And that's the way I see super-heroes.  The super-hero is a metaphor for our dream selves.  He is an ordinary person turned inside out.  He's the person who has reached inside and woken up the "luminous being" sleeping within him.  In his physical beauty, in his superhuman powers, he is the human who has shed the shell of the mundane and become who he really is.  And that's one of the reasons we've always loved super-heroes.

The character of the Quantum is based on this theme.  I originally called him Wonder Boy and he originally had a different costume.  I renamed and made him over because in Wonder Woman in DC Comics there was once a teenage character to whom the Amazons gave the honorary title of Wonder Boy, and on seeing this I thought at once, Now all DC has to do is trick out this kid with powers and a costume and have him recruited by the Teen Titans or Young Justice, and I'm going to have to scramble for a new name.  So I decided to be proactive about it.  And besides, having a hero called the Quantum in a brand called Quantum Comics makes the same kind of sense as Marvel Comics hanging onto the name Captain Marvel (and creating a succession of characters to keep the trademark in play, forcing DC to call any comic book starring the original Captain Marvel "SHAZAM!")  


The Quantum is a character that I created to address issues of identity and self-image.  What you're seeing is one character with two distinct physical forms, one of them super-powered.  Corey Lonigan is a college student majoring in computer game design.  He is handsome but not the athletic "jock" type and frequently feels invisible in the presence of such boys as well as attractive girls.  But he acquires a power that complicates the "game" of his life quite a bit.  Corey is a metamorph with the power to become...well, the taller, even handsomer, wondrously muscled figure you see in the costume here.  And in this other form, Corey is not only super-strong and invulnerable; he can fly and can assimilate, process, and shoot energy from any source.  Corey takes to calling his other physical self "The Quantum" and embarks on a secret life as a super-hero who gets the kind of attention and respect that at times eludes him in his original form.  But because he's a smart boy, it all makes him wonder what it is that people really see in him when he's "that way," and whether it's all for real and whether it's all really worth it, and whether the Quantum could ever have what people think of as "a real life."  He even wonders whether the nature of his transformation might be a message he's unconsciously trying to tell himself.  Does the Quantum being that kind of specimen mean that Corey is gay and trying to come out?  Yes, in the Quantum we have a super-hero who is a questioning heterosexual!


Corey Lonigan/the Quantum, more than any other costumed champion, is a character who questions himself and everyone and everything else--because when you're one boy who is two boys, you have to assume that nothing in yourself or the world around you may really be what it seems!

WILD JON!

I don't know how I managed it, but somehow I actually forgot to create a new post for this week!  Well, let's make up for that straight away, shall we?


Before you stands the simplest, yet perhaps the most complex, of all Quantum heroes:  WILD JON!  He's a character who will be introduced in one of The Adventures of Lucky Vega, but there's enough to him for adventures of his own to go on forever.  Wild Jon is an example of how I sometimes don't draw inspiration necessarily from comics but from media and entertainment outside of comics.  The inspirations for this character actually come from the movies--in particular certain Walt Disney movies and, if you can believe it, the musical Across the Universe!

Jon actually dates back to a series of illustrations that I created, that I sold on eBay:  Jungle Jon, Prince of the Wild.  After I saw the movies Across the Universe and Enchanted I was so touched and moved by them that I wondered if I could capture some of the feelings that I got from them in super-hero form.  Across the Universe, if you'll recall, was a musical incorporating Beatles songs, telling the story of a boy named Jude who came from Liverpool, England (natch) to find his natural father in America, and in the process found true love and the social turbulence of America in the 60s.  What touched me was the purity and simplicity of Jude's spirit.  All he really wanted was love.  He wasn't a screwed-up, neurotic character; he was a boy with very pure motives.  No one has greater trouble in this world than people with pure motives, a fact well illustrated in the story of young Jude.  (And with great music to boot!)  


Enchanted, the long overdue self-parody of the Walt Disney company, was another story of a character with pure motives, and one that shrewdly tore down and rebuilt everything that people have ever loved about Disney movies.  It was also one of the very essence of Disney-style romance, and I especially admired how they made Manhattan seem like a magical storybook kingdom.  I tried to take that feeling on board for my own creation, as well as using elements of other Disney flicks such as the Disney Tarzan (obviously) and Bambi.  All of that went into the mix of creating Wild Jon.


Our young hero, Jon Wilde, is more than he appears to be.  He is in fact the Prince of a race of human/animal shape-changers from an alternate, perhaps future, Earth that is modeled after those shows you may have seen on cable TV that imagine what Earth would be like if all the humans disappeared.  His father is a wealthy Englishman who traveled to that world by means I won't reveal (because it's one of my cleverest ideas!) and became the consort of a wolf/human Princess, giving her a son, Prince Jon.  Unlike the rest of his tribe, Jon is not a shape-changer, but he possesses a unity with the natural world, a range of animal-like powers, and the ability to befriend and command all beasts.  Through other twists I won't tell you (which include the death of Jon's mother in a twist inspired by Bambi), Jon's father brings  him to this world and raises him in what the narration will call "the enchanted kingdom of Manhattan," where he grows up to be the wild but princely boy you see here.  (I imagine the whole thing being narrated in the style of an ongoing bedtime story, complete with "Once upon a time...")  Jon's one true love, whom he recognizes by scent alone, is Tom Tierney, a law student who represents everything that Jon is not:  rational, intellectual, analytical, methodical, orderly.  Tom and the animal-like, instinctive, emotional, spontaneous, wild Jon are total opposites, but theirs is a love of two individuals who complete each other by being what the other lacks.  And basically, there is a purity and innocence of spirit about Jon that the world cannot touch no matter what it does, which melts Tom's skeptical, clinical heart.


There's a lot more to the stories of Wild Jon:  the Museum that his father builds in Manhattan with a penthouse at the top where Jon lives; the evil, jealous Queen Cynbar of the world where Jon comes from, who can become a terrifying harpy; her enforcer, Shaag, who can morph into a murderous Sasquatch Bigfoot with immense strength; the means of travel between the two worlds that I'm still not going to tell you...  I'm still working out a lot of it, but the saga of Wild Jon will be one of the most fascinating parts of Quantum Comics.