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!

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!

ALL-STAR ON THE RISE

One of my storytelling role models, Stan Lee himself, openly admits that he has never liked one particular type of character:  the super-hero's teenage sidekick.

You know, all the teenaged Buckys and Robins and Aqualads and Kid Flashes and so forth that have been running around in costumes alongside adult super-heroes since the early history of Batman--Stan never cared for them.  We know what the rationale behind all those characters was supposed to be:  they were meant to give the pre-teen boys who were supposedly the core audience of comic books a reference point, a character with whom to identify, a character they were supposed to imagine themselves as being.  (In Batman's case, Robin was also meant to lighten him up and make his stories seem a little lighter.  Of course that doesn't work any more; the accepted characterization of Batman today is "Dirty Harry in a Cape".)  But anyway, all those sidekicks started a tradition that has persisted in one form or another all the way into present-day super-hero fiction.  

Now at Marvel Comics in the 60s they did it a little differently and had the teenagers themselves be the heroes:  the Human Torch, Spider-Man, the old X-Men.  And they went at their teen characters very differently than DC did.  Over at DC, the sidekick characters--as well as the Legion of Super-Heroes, who were independent teen heroes--were smiling, scrubby-dubby, authority-respecting figures, practically Mouseketeers in costumes.  (That's not true of them any more; we're talking 1950s-60s here.)  The Marvel teens were another matter.  The Human Torch was all hormones and attitude; he ran away from the Fantastic Four at the end of the third issue and was always into cars and girls, only sometimes in that order.  Spider-Man had more teen angst and adolescent anguish than a character on the CW Network.  The X-Men, born with powers that manifested at puberty and feared and hated by common people, were teenage alienation incarnate.  That was the only way that Stan Lee could handle teenagers as super-heroes.  He never liked the idea, and in the book Origins of Marvel Comics he went so far as to call the costumed teen sidekick "a cloying, simpy extension of the hero's personality."  

Stan deemed it irresponsible for adult super-heroes to take costumed kids into battle with them; he thought they had no business putting youngsters in danger and expecting them to battle murderous villains.  No wonder that when Stan and Jack Kirby revived Captain America in The Avengers #4 they killed off Bucky in the backstory, and for years Marvel confined the character to period stories, flashbacks, and time travel stories.  (That tradition has in recent years Soldiered through its last Winter, I'm sorry to say.)  I shudder to think what might have happened if Stan had been writing DC Comics back in the day.  I have this mental image of the Justice League of America weeping over the graves of the early Teen Titans.  Fare thee well, Robin, Kid Flash, Speedy, Aqualad, and Wonder Girl!

But still, the idea of super-heroes with youthful proteges is with us.  It's something we associate with DC a bit more than Marvel.  And it's something especially beloved of gays who read comics.  The reasons why are not hard to understand when you consider that the teen years are the usual coming-out time for young gays, and that this period of life exerts an especially powerful hold on the gay imagination.  So in building the universe of Quantum Comics I wanted to try my hand at having at least one teen sidekick.  I created him for the World Champion.  You remember him, I'm sure, from an earlier post:

Well, the Champ has a sidekick who, in the best tradition of gay comic-book-fan wish fulfillment, is rather more than a sidekick.  After a lot of tinkering with both the character and his look, here's how he came out, so to speak.  Introducing...the All-Star!  TA-DAA...!

Josh Beatty is one of those unfortunate gay youths who encounter hatred, hostility, rejection, and threats of violence where they should never have to deal with them:  in his very home!  When he overhears his own father, a construction foreman, telling Eric's mother that if he ever learned that one of his children was a homosexual, he would thrash that child within an inch of his life--or more--and toss him out like the garbage.  Newly Out but shocked, heartbroken, and fearing for his very life from own father, Josh waited for his chance to escape from a home where he would never feel safe again.  He ran away and never looked back, living in shelters for gay youth until at last finding a haven with an advocacy group that worked with teenage gays and lesbians thrown out by their families for being who they are.  With their help, Josh became an Emancipated Minor and got job training, and when he was old enough he finally got a position as a barista at a gay fitness club in West Hollywood. It was here he met and was instantly in awe of Olympic Gold Medal gymnast Travis Roykirk--just in time for Earth to be invaded by the Ardemian Rief Clan, the event that resulted in the origin of the Environauts!  It was during this upheaval that Travis used the Samson-Vega Patch on himself and became a near-superhuman to help defend Earth.

After the crisis was over and Earth was saved from the invasion, Josh and Travis met up again and Josh learned that his idol/crush was moving on to get re-trained in combat skills with his newly enhanced body.  Fearing he would never see Travis again, Josh begged the hero/athlete to take him along and let him be trained as well.  He wanted Travis to be his mentor--and more.  Travis found he didn't want to say goodbye to the young boy who so admired and so obviously wanted him, so he accepted.  So, as Travis returned to his own mentors for the battle training that would make him the costumed World Champion, Josh accompanied him and was groomed to be the Champ's partner in life and more.  And this, then, was the origin of the boy the world would come to know as the All-Star.  

Next in Quantum Comics Blog:  A little something I'm whipping up in answer to a fan's request.  And as the spring and summer roll on:  More of The Adventures of Lucky Vega!

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?

FRIEND OF THE DRAGON

While we're awaiting the continued Adventures of Lucky Vega, I have a few other things to show you. To start: Here's a brand-new character that I whipped up as a companion for the mightiest warrior in all space and time, Draco Rex. This reptilian rapscallion is called Baslysk, and he is actually a replacement for another character. Therein lies a bit of a story, as always.

Draco Rex was originally conceived--or originally willed himself into existence--as a supporting character for the Environauts. The strength and presence of the character made it clear that Draco would never be content to be anyone's supporting player; he was a star and nothing less. So I undertook to flesh out his background and where he came from, and as I did so one more thing that occurred to me is that as a mythic hero he was going to need a faithful companion. Every great, conquering hero of the mythic type needs a loyal and trusted fellow traveler, someone who always has his back. In the comic books mighty Thor had Balder (who is conspicuously absent from those movies). Orion of The New Gods had his pal Lightray. The TV Hercules went about his legendary journeys with a sidekick named Iolaus. A character to tag along with the deathless Draco seemed like a good idea.

My first notion for Draco's companion was a character I called Loren Python. As personalities go, Python would be most distinctly different from the mighty King of Dragons. He was a wrestler by vocation, with the power to lunge, strike, and pin an opponent with the speed and strength of the snake for whom he's named, and the ability to tap people's nervous systems with a touch, inducing unbearable pain or euphoric pleasure at will. Python preferred to use the "pleasure" side of his powers, and he loved best to use it on...women! In the matriarchal society of Varonia where Draco comes from, Python--who, being a Quantum Comics hero, was excruciatingly beautiful--was every woman's favorite stud, and he loved nothing better than to serve them. He never slept alone and frequented more than one bed in a day. When he wasn't wrestling, or traveling and adventuring with his best mate, Prince Declan Draco, he could be found servicing some maiden or maidens of the realm. Python made Sam Malone look like Sheldon Cooper.

I opted not to use Python eventually, not because he was a bad character--in fact he was a very clever, fun character--and not because he was so egregiously heterosexual, but because he was also too much of a character for a supporting role. He was a lead character in a supporting player's skin, as Draco himself had started out. I decided at length to put Python away and find some other use for him, perhaps try him out as a gay character on his own at some point. Meanwhile, that left Draco without a faithful companion. What to do, what to do?

The answer came from somewhere else in the reptile family. The Basilisk lizard of South America is a relative of the Iguanas. Basilisks have a distinctively look, with prominent, fin-like crests on their heads and backs. They are among the fastest of the reptiles, so fast that they are famous for running across ponds on their hind legs to escape predators. This knack for running on water is said to be why Basilisks are called "Jesus Lizards". Where that actually comes from is that the first time a white man saw a Basilisk do that, he hollered, "JEE-sus!" and the name stuck. I didn't have a super-speed character in the Quantum Comics universe, and modeling one after the Basilisk seemed a wholly unique way to bring one in. So I sat myself down and designed a reptile-inspired speedster with scales and a crest on his back and one of the prettiest costumes I think I've ever come up with, and there he was.

Baslysk, one of the noblest warriors in the realm of Varonia, was honored with a bath in the mutagenic Dragonblood, from which he emerged with dorsal scales and a dorsal crest--and the power to move faster than the eye can follow. He can run across large bodies of water and up and down the sides of buildings. Blink and you'll miss him--but if you're his foe or the enemy of his realm, he won't miss you. He's a messenger and explorer by trade, and a chrononaut (time traveler) at the side of the Prince when called upon. Unlike the pulchritudinous Python, Baslysk is very much a man's man, honoring women as all men under the rule of Queen Tiamat must, but not bedding them. He's for men only. That's the one boundary he doesn't skirt (pardon the expression). If you ever chance to see a green and black blur out of the corner of your eye, relax; that's just the blazing Baslysk en route to perform some deed of bravery like the large-living lizard guy that he is.

THANK YOUR LUCKY STAR

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.  With this post, the coloring of these model sheets is complete.

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.

The unquestioned leader of the Environauts, Lorenzo Roberto Miguel Vega, mainly called Lucky Vega and known in his super life as LUCKY STAR, is the "Space" character and the embodiment of science and the future.  If you can imagine the elastic leader of another very famous comic-book foursome as a 22-year-old Latino, that's Lucky.  Unlike that character, however, Lucky is not quite so verbose, much more emotionally open, and has an aggressive edge to match his scientific brilliance.  Lucky would have been the youngest of three children if his older brother and sister had survived; the third time Dr. Esteban Vega and his wife Rosita tried to have a child, they finally got "Lucky".  Young Lorenzo, the heir to a computer and technology-industry fortune larger than the budget of the United States, is every bit his father's son.  Esteban Vega, a genius at computers and everything scientific who had a vision of perfecting the human race for its destiny in space, was determined that his only boy would be a man of pure science, free from all superstition, dogma, prejudice, and magical thinking, and embracing higher human principles (not invented supernatural authority) as the source of all human virtue.  That's how Lucky was raised  (which came between his parents when Rosita turned back to the Catholic Church, which Esteban absolutely rejected) and that's who he has become.  Lucky is either personally capable of anything scientific, or able to summon masters of any scientific discipline to his aid.  His scientific genius and resourcefulness are virtually super-powers in themselves and the potential undoing of many a villain.  Lucky is filled with wonder at the incredible things he encounters in his adventures, things that would overwhelm or terrify most other people.  Confronted with aliens, monsters, mysteries of the universe, and strange new technologies, Lucky smiles and uses his favorite expression:  "This is amazing!"  Lucky's amazement is always greater than his fear, which makes him the greatest of heroes.  The ironic thing about Lucky is that for all he has and for all he is capable of doing, at heart he wishes he could be "a regular boy" and wants nothing more than to have the things in his life--friends, girls, sports, fun--that regular boys have.  Lucky is attracted to older women and in love with his college physics professor, Elise Hall, whose ex-fiance, Graeme Grimstead, becomes Lucky's most personal enemy and the arch-foe of the Environauts.  The most touching part of his relationship with his three closest friends and partners is that while he affords them a life beyond their wildest dreams, they in turn are his touchstones to a life that he would otherwise never know.  The bond of loyalty and friendship between Lucky and the others is actually the greatest "power" that the Environauts possess.

Lucky Star can become a living, incandescent body of plasma like that in a neon sign or the Sun.  In this form he can fly as fast as 300 MPH and emit beams and bolts of plasma energy, or give off powerful electromagnetic pulses.  Like a star, he is also a strong source of heat and light.  His corona can melt weapons and projectiles that come near him, and he can dissipate the discharge of energy-based weapons or attacks from energy-powered opponents.  His one vulnerability is to strong magnetic fields, which can disrupt him and force him back to human form, but he's working on that.  Lucky is always working on something, which always keeps his friends' lives exciting and interesting.  When Lucky Star calls his friends together, they know they'll soon be heading into something awesome.  

AGE OF AQUARIUS

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.  These model sheets are in the process of coloring right now, but I'm continuing a preview of them 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.

Roger Blaisdell, a.k.a. AQUARIUS, is the youngest Environaut and the team's embodiment of the "Ocean."  Indeed there is not much that Roger loves better than the sea; whether he's surfing at a semi-professional level or working as a lifeguard, he's happiest in or near the ocean.  He's an aspiring actor and model as well; typically his favorite thing to model, as you might guess, is swimsuits.  Roger would like to be a movie star, but his life as a hero may keep him performing on a very different stage.  Roger skipped a grade in school and is almost as intelligent, in his own way, as his best friend and the Environauts' leader, Lucky Vega, a.k.a. Lucky Star himself.  Roger is the person that Lucky loves and trusts the most (except for Lucky's lady love, Professor Elise Hall) and is the second in command of the team in spite of being the youngest.  Taking the lead is a role to which Roger has long been accustomed; in his very dysfunctional family he was always running interference between his alcoholic mother and big brother Trey and their emotionally withholding father.  Roger and Trey tease each other back and forth, but an unbreakable bond of love runs through their relationship and extends to Roger's interactions with the team; Aquarius is the emotional "glue" that holds the Environauts together.  Perhaps because of his home life, Roger has always been romantically attracted to girls who are different from his family:  black girls, Latin and Asian girls, girls of every type but blonde and Caucasian.  His greatest love will not even be from Earth:  Nerelle, the ocean-exploring alien lass who is directly responsible for the origin of the Environauts!

Aquarius has the power to transform himself into a body of living liquid and perform a variety of water-related power stunts.  He can become waves and sprays of water that can hit with the force of most powerful waves that surfers ride, or the discharge of the strongest fire hose.  He can envelop a foe in his own liquid body or use his body to protect one of his partners from falling or being thrown.  Perhaps his coolest ability is the power to control his own surface tension.  Aquarius can pass through another body of water without dissolving into it, grab and hold onto something while he is liquid, or flow up and down walls and across ceilings.  He can also assimilate moisture from the atmosphere or an outside source if he needs to replenish himself.  When Aquarius is on the job, the surf is up and the bad guys are sure to go down.

SKY HIGH WITH CIRRUS

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.  These model sheets are in the process of coloring right now, but I'm continuing a preview of them 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.

Warren "Trey" Blaisdell III, the sexy CIRRUS, is the "sky" character.  Trey, the oldest of the four friends, is the classic "reformed bad boy," a once wayward youth with a heart of gold.  A recovering alcoholic and drug addict who's done prison time for possession and sale of illegal narcotics, Trey is the member of the Environauts who feels as though he has the most to prove to the world, and to his friends.  He's also been by far the most sexually active of the lot; by his own reckoning he has bedded every girl he's met since he was 14.  His adventures in the circle of Lucky Vega will bring him to the one girl that he'll want for life--if he can convince himself that he deserves her.

Cirrus possesses the power to become a living body of water vapor and charged particles, a human storm system who can shape himself into fog, invisible water vapor, a thunderstorm, freezing rain and hail, gale-force winds, even a small tornado.  He can generate lightning at will and has been known to threaten to show his opponents "what ball lightning tastes like".  The most aggressive member of the team and the one least patient with fools and authoritarians, Cirrus is the one that the other Environauts are most likely to have to hold back for the good of everyone.  To his credit, Trey is unswervingly loyal and would unhesitatingly lay down his life for the others, especially his little brother Roger (Aquarius), whom he calls "the Squirt".  Though he is a loose cannon, Cirrus always has everyone's back.

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. 

HAIR OF THE DRAGON

Of late I’ve been thinking about the design of Draco Rex, whom you’ve met in previous posts.  Specifically, I’ve been wondering about his hair.  Should he wear it so short?  Declan Draco comes from an ancient Celtic culture that was “boosted” into super-advanced intelligence and technology by the space-time-traveling Varons.  Draco’s people possess power and knowledge that we do not, but in certain ways they’ve kept true to their roots.  They’ve retained their archaic English speech pattern, and while they’ve shed the supernatural beliefs of their “Goddess” religion, they still characterize the physical creative forces of the universe as female.  I wondered, being the warrior Prince of such a culture, would he really wear his hair short when it would probably be the custom for men to wear it longer, perhaps down to the shoulders?  So I did a little experiment to see how it would look, just a quick drawing in the sketchbook.  I admit I didn’t even reference the face with his master drawing; I just whipped out the old pencil and went at it.  For that matter I didn’t even bother with his costume; that wasn’t my interest here, only the locks.  Not a bad result for a first pass, I should think.

VILLAINY A'BORNING!

“I offer the world freedom from want...  Whoever wants to die rather than accept what I offer is free to do so.”

What makes anyone think this way?  How does anyone become so evil?  To learn how it started, we must look back to a night long ago, when something fell from the sky over England and landed on the outskirts of a former countryside manor--and a little boy stole out of the handyman’s quarters to see what it was.

Young Graeme Grimstead, bereft of his parents (as we saw last time), was being raised on the manor-turned-luxury resort by his uncle Nigel Hewitt, the handyman and groundskeeper.  What he found in the forest thicket surrounding the property that night was a small crater strewn with the parts of strange, unrecognizable machinery--at whose center lay a strange crystal with an inner, diamond-like glow.  He gathered up the odd machine parts and pocketed the crystal before anyone else could come and get them, and took them back to the servant’s quarters where he lived.  And that was how Graeme acquired what he would come to call the Quantum Prism.

The Quantum Prism was an alien object, its origin unknown, containing a subtle but awesome power:  an ability to affect reality at the level of quantum mechanics, where all physical laws that govern the universe break down into uncertainty and probability.  The effect of the Prism is that of the ultimate “good luck charm,” conferring a positive outcome for every event onto its holder.  It can also have the reverse effect, that of a cosmic “Hope Diamond,” projecting negative outcomes onto others.  As fate would have it, this alien talisman of “positivity” was now in the hands of what was becoming a very negative young boy.  Graeme had grown to hate the world for allowing poverty and inequality to exist:  For it was these conditions that had made Graeme’s father Roland a chronically unemployed, alcoholic, physically and emotionally abusive husband.  This was why Graeme had lived with his parents in a tenement on the East End of London, where the only lights in his mother’s life were Graeme himself and her gift for art--until the day that a drunken and angry Roland killed her.  This was why Roland was now behind bars for life and Graeme, who had walked in on the murder scene, was permanently traumatized.  And this was why Graeme, coming to live with his Uncle Nigel, had witnessed wealth for the first time, compared it to the misery from which he came--and held it against the entire world that his mother had died at the hands of the monster that was Graeme’s father.

To little Graeme Grimstead, the entire world except for his Uncle Nigel was made up of monsters like his father, or people who created such monsters or allowed them to exist.  And now Graeme, as he would soon discover, had the power to do something about it.

Nigel had learned that Graeme had a knack for tinkering with machinery.  To boost the boy’s morale, he had begun to provide him with simple toys as well as bits of broken devices and electronic scrap, which Graeme had a marvelous gift for working into gadgets of all sorts.  The lad also demonstrated keen mathematical and computer skills, including programming.  His natural talent, coupled with the influence of the Quantum Prism that Graeme kept a secret from everyone including Nigel (at least in the beginning), catapulted Graeme through school and the best universities in England, and on into the business world.  The young Englishman was on a fast track as the British Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, his only rival in computers and high-tech industry being America’s Esteban Vega, who was doing the same thing, but without the boost from an alien power.  Grimstead in the UK and Vega in California were becoming the world’s titans of technology.  The founder of Steadfast Tech, Graeme was a celebrity, sought after in the most elite circles of the very world he had learned to despise as a boy.  But this did nothing to assuage his contempt for humanity.  Graeme’s empire was, for him, an unassailable fortress of money behind which to barricade himself against everything he hated.  The filthy, vulgar, evil world that had made his father a monster and destroyed his beautiful, gentle mother would never touch him.  Its cruel hands would never foul him or contaminate his life.  Nothing would ever touch Graeme Grimstead.  The Quantum Prism would see to that.

Except...Steadfast Tech had investments and holdings all over the world, and was a benefactor of research in universities both in the UK and abroad, including America.  And one of the researchers working under Steadfast grant endowments was an American theoretical physicist named Elise Hall, of California Coast University.  During a visit to CCU to have a tour of where his money was going, Graeme met Elise, and for the first time in his life found something that he wanted to touch him.  Some time in the future we will learn the story of why beautiful Elise took up research into temporal theory and had an ambition to build a working time machine.  Suffice it to say that her beauty, her ideas, and her brilliance reached that part of Graeme’s heart that he had locked away inside a vault of hatred and pain.  They became lovers, and Elise was now the only thing besides his immense wealth and his isolation from the world that made Graeme happy.  The trouble was that Graeme truly did have his heart’s desire--in a way he did not expect.

Graeme didn’t want the filthy, vulgar, cruel world to touch him--and long-term exposure to the energies of the Quantum Prism was slowly, over many years, granting him his fondest wish.  His atomic structure was gradually being thrown out of phase with other matter, with the cumulative effect of making Graeme intangible.  He began to have “spells” and “attacks” of losing solidity, with no way to stop it.  Graeme convened his top scientific minds to address the problem of his phasing, and they determined that it was irreversible and would eventually become permanent.  At some point, the alien power of the Quantum Prism, based on a science that no one on Earth could grasp, would leave its holder as ephemeral as a Charles Dickens ghost, with no hope of recovery.  Only after learning the extent of his condition did Graeme share what was happening to him with the one he loved.

At first Elise was naturally horrified--both at Graeme’s condition and the fact that while she had trusted him with everything in her life, he had never told her anything about the Prism or how he had used it.  She was furious, as any deceived lover would be--but as Graeme’s mother Penny had loved Graeme’s father in spite of himself, Elise still loved Graeme.  She stood by her man and tried to help him.  As his fiancee, she refused to let him keep her off the experimental team studying the Quantum Prism and looking for a way to reintegrate her intended.  By this time Graeme was forced to live in special containment apparatus resembling spacesuits.  It was on Elise’s watch that an attempt to scan and probe the interior of the Quantum Prism resulted in an explosion that wrecked the laboratory complex and might have taken Elise’s life if Nigel hadn’t managed to get her to safety.  But in the upheaval, Graeme was lost, his containment suit ruptured and his intangible body dissipated.  In trying to save her lover, Elise had seemingly lost him.  Or had she?  The same fate that put the Quantum Prism in the hands of a wounded, angry boy was not finished with Graeme and Elise--not yet.  When Quantum Comics Blog returns, we’ll see how this disaster only set the stage for evil yet to come!

BRING ON THE BAD GUY, PART 2

For this post, let me paint you a picture all in words.  Just read, and imagine it with me...

That’s the way of the world.  Plant your flowers, grow a pearl.  Child is born with a heart of gold.  The way of the world makes his heart grow cold.  So sang Earth, Wind, and Fire back in 1975.  As witness we need look no further than the evil that was born long ago in a tenement flat on the East End of London, England.

Here lived the Grimstead family:  Roland Grimstead, his wife Penelope (“Penny”), and their little boy, Graeme.  Penny Hewitt Grimstead was a beautiful, gentle lady--far too beautiful, too gentle, and too much of a lady for the life she led.  What little money she could scrape together, she spent on her paintings--delicate, refined watercolors--and on her doting, adoring young son.  Graeme worshipped his mother, thought she was the center of the whole world, because of her kindness and humor and the little bits beauty and gentility that she brought into their hardscrabble, public-dole lives.  Unfortunately, whatever money did come into their flat that was not from the public dole came from Graeme’s father, who was everything that Graeme’s mother was not.

Roland Grimstead was an unintelligent, uneducated, bitter, hard-drinking, angry man, whipped and beaten by a life in which no job ever lasted and any kind of prosperity was a dream or a cruel joke.  And the recipient of his anger was the woman he had gotten pregnant and married.  Penny had always seen, or tried to see, the good in Roland.  She had tried to help him and tried to love him.  What she had gotten back all too often was his belt or his fist or the back of his hand.  Sometimes the beatings were truly terrible.  But Penny took them all--to keep her husband’s hands off their child.  When Roland flew into one of his frustrated, liquor-soaked rages, Graeme ran and ducked for cover and shuddered and cried at the pain he knew was being inflicted on his mother.  

Why did Penny stay with Roland?  Did she love him in spite of the abuse?  Did she still see the good in him in spite of it?  Did she pity him and see him as the victim of a world in which he was never good enough?  Did she see no better alternative for a single mother with no money of her own?  Could she not bear to separate a son from his father--even that father?  Did she, like so many other battered wives, see no way out?  Perhaps it was any or all of the above.  Penny’s brother Nigel tried many times to talk her into leaving, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.  Tomorrow, she thought, it could be better.  Tomorrow, she thought, he could be better.  So she stayed, and little Graeme lived half his life in beauty and gentleness, and half in terror.

Then, one awful day, Graeme returned home from playing to find that his father had gone into one rage too many, too badly.  There sat Roland Grimstead, drunk and weeping, on the kitchen floor, in a pool of blood--Penny’s blood.  She lay there at his knees, her skull cracked from Roland having furiously banged her head against the kitchen counter.  His mother slain by the monster she had married, the traumatized Graeme ran back into the streets and hid in the rubbish in an alley until the police, who had arrested Roland, came to find the boy.  Anguished, curled up inside himself, Graeme was bound over as a ward of the state until his grieving Uncle Nigel claimed him.

Nigel Hewitt worked as a handyman and general laborer on a country estate outside of London.  Once the property of wealthy noble landowners, the estate had been converted to a lavish resort for well-to-do tourists and business people.  Graeme refused to leave London until he and his uncle collected all that was left of Penny--her beautiful, delicate watercolors--to take with them to Nigel’s spare lodgings at the estate.  There the little boy lived with his uncle, and saw a very different world from the one he had known in the city.  It was the kind of world that his mother would have painted:  graceful, refined, elegant.  He looked at the resort, and the people who visited and stayed there, and something occurred to Graeme:  It was a world where only some people, certain people, were allowed.  It was a world to which only people of means were admitted, a world from which all others were barred by a wall of money and culture.  For want of money and its refining influence, all there was for a person was the kind of world from which Graeme had come, a world of dirt and cruelty and despair and anger.  It was the kind of world that discarded and destroyed beauty--like his mother and her art.  Graeme realized that people allowed these two unequal worlds to exist side by side, with most people living on the side that was ugly and harsh.  Seeing the difference between wealth and poverty, seeing that people allowed it to exist and didn’t seem to care, or that they believed it was the right and proper thing, and intuitively understanding that this gross disparity of lives was what had made his father a monster and cost Penny her life, little Graeme Grimstead learned to hate.  It was a hatred he would come to bear for all mankind.

People let this be--people who keep everything for themselves and leave nothing for everybody else.  That’s why Daddy was so mean and so mad; people like these made him that way.  I hate them.  I hate them all.  One day I’ll get them.  One day I’ll make them pay.  I’ll get the whole bloody world.  

Such thoughts in anyone’s mind can be dangerous.  But such thoughts in the mind of a boy who discovers that he is a genius--that’s something else again.  Because all it takes is a the anger of a wounded but brilliant little boy in the right place at the right time, with the right means at his command, to create an epic villain--the world’s greatest villain.  Next time we’ll learn how that evil, once planted, took root, and see the menace that grew from it--a menace that only the power of the Environauts could challenge!  For into the life of an angry little English boy would come...the Quantum Prism!