QUANTUM CHRISTMAS CARD FOR 2015!

I know it's been a terribly long time since we've had a post here on Quantum Comics Blog, and for this I blame life simply getting in the way.  I've had a lot of things going on, things that I've had to deal with personally, that have kept me away from the drawing board for an inordinately long time, and to be honest they've cost me a lot of the momentum and motivation for the work I'd been doing.  This has been to such an extent that I finally decided to shut down or put aside all of the work that I had been planning and come back to it later. For the coming year I'm also looking at starting things anew with different work, or fresh approaches to old work, and doing some major re-thinking of the ways in which I do things.  But we'll get to all of that when the time comes. For now, it's time at last for the most awesome holiday event of all, THE QUANTUM CHRISTMAS CARD!

Of course the holiday season would not be complete without a pulse-quickening panorama of pixels.  For this year we return to a prior theme with a twist.  Exactly ten Christmases ago I commemorated the release of the first Tim Story-directed Fantastic Four movie by bringing together the greatest heroes of all time that I didn't create with the greatest heroes of all time that I did.  That was the year the Fantastic Four and my own Environauts faced each other in a sizzling snowball fight!  This year in the Cineplexes there was a movie with the name Fantastic Four on it, which was in no way a reflection of the brilliant creation of Stan "The Man" Lee and Jack "King" Kirby, and whose very existence I mostly ignored.  For the Quantum Card this year I decided once again to bring together the phenomenal Foursome and the ne'er-do-wrong Nauts--and not any bogus Hollywood makeover of the FF, but the real, genuine, no-screwing-around, honest-to-goodness Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four!  To make it even more fun this time I decided to throw in the arch-villains to boot!  Our 27th Card, then, pits both teams against the baddest of all the bad guys:  the Environauts' most mortal enemy Graeme Grimstead and Marvel's greatest figure of evil, Dr. Doom himself!

I hope this year's Card meets with your pleasure as you clobber and flame your way into 2016.  Until next year, Nauts to you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE VILLAIN FORMERLY KNOWN AS PRINCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

VILLAINY ASCENDANT!

Professor Elise Hall never revealed the truth about the death of her fiance, Graeme Grimstead. At the urging of his uncle, Nigel Hewitt, she never spoke up about the alien Quantum Prism with which he had built his high-tech global empire and become one of the richest, most powerful men on Earth. Too many people could be hurt, said Nigel, and too many people’s livelihoods lost. So Elise kept her silence about how the very power that made Graeme a titan had destroyed him, and how in trying to help him she had hastened his destruction. That way, no one including Elise knew that Graeme wasn’t really gone.

Nigel had found his nephew’s dissipating form nearly flickering out of existence in the wreckage of the lab, and had helped him get into an undamaged containment suit. In secret, the two of them had begun to rebuild Graeme’s work. They had learned that the Quantum Prism had not been destroyed in the lab explosion, but that it was shifting randomly across the world. If they could learn to predict its appearances, they might recover it, and Graeme might yet have a chance to re-solidify both himself and his power. But this time Graeme would leave Elise out of it. He wouldn’t burden her with the fear of failing again, and possibly losing him forever. Instead he charged his uncle with the responsibility of watching over her and reporting back on everything she did.

What Elise did was to take a sabbatical from her faculty post at California Coast University. At CCU her favorite pupil was the son of another of the University’s benefactors. Lorenzo “Lucky” Vega’s father was the great Esteban Vega, the most wealthy and powerful computer tycoon in the world except for Graeme, and a man of vast and far-reaching scientific vision. Lucky himself was every bit his father’s son, widely touted as the most brilliant living American under 30. The Mexican-American youth was also a stunningly handsome male beauty--and hopelessly in love with his theoretical physics teacher. Elise had always been touched by her genius pupil and his silent but obvious adoration of her. She had remarked to Graeme how Lucky would sit in her class, watching her with “puppy dog eyes” while showing a breathtaking facility for all things scientific. On the day she left CCU, Lucky had sadly helped her empty her office. Before she climbed into her car and drove away, she kissed him on the cheek and told him, “Some day, Lucky, you’re going to make some girl very, very happy.” She didn’t see the heartbreak and despair on the young boy’s face as she left the campus, perhaps never to see him again.

But fate had other things in store for Lucky Vega and Elise Hall. After Lucky’s father died and he graduated, Earth was invaded from space by the Rief Clan of the planet Ardemius. Their alien biotechnology accidentally changed Lucky and his three closest friends into the super-powered Environauts, world-saving champions of science. And when the Environauts, having saved Earth for the first (but hardly the last) time, were celebrated at the United Nations in New York, Elise pulled some strings with influential people she’d met during her courtship with Graeme to get herself invited. During the party, Elise reintroduced herself to the admiring young student who had made her the proudest Professor in the world. But this time, the boundaries of teacher and pupil and that of an engaged woman and a younger man were no longer there. This time Elise was free to start seeing Lucky as something more than the brilliant boy with the puppy dog eyes. What she didn’t know was that other eyes were on her. Nigel was still watching--and still reporting back to his nephew. And Graeme Grimstead didn’t like what he was hearing.

However, Graeme had a plan already in place, and the young Lucky Star was unwittingly a part of it. Graeme had learned that the Quantum Prism projected invisible lines of force across the surface of Earth, and where those lines randomly intersected was where the Prism would appear. He had constructed a device to track the shifting and crossing of the lines and anticipate the alien object’s movements. All that it needed was a power source strong enough to boost its efficiency--and the powers of a given young hero would serve his needs perfectly. Using a magnetic field inducing technology, Graeme attacked Lucky and interfered with his powers to capture him. Then, he stripped the boy nearly naked and shackled him into a device that would use Lucky’s powers as a battery for the Prism-tracking device. Once Lucky was his captive, reduced to bondage for the use of his powers, Graeme had Nigel bring Elise to him.

Elise was shocked that her fiance still lived--but greater than her shock was her horror at what he was doing to brave young Lucky! She realized for the first time that the man she had thought she loved was a misanthropic, paranoid villain as he seethed with hatred of all humanity. She saw Graeme for who he really was as he continued to covet the very thing that had made twisted him with evil. “The Quantum Prism is my responsibility!” Graeme ranted. “Only I have the vision to use it as it must be used! The world is filthy, unfeeling, treacherous, a place that makes monsters! Can you imagine such power in the hands of a madman or a tyrant?”

Lucky and Elise were helpless against Graeme as he tracked the Quantum Prism to, of all places, a country club in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Lucky’s partners, Aquarius, Cirrus, and the Stone, however, were not so helpless. They traced Lucky’s discarded costume with an emergency signal that the nanotechnology in the Environauts suits is programmed to give off if a suit is separated from its wearer, on a frequency that only the suits know, which can’t be jammed by an outside party. At once, the three remaining Nauts showed up in Lake Tahoe, angry at the abduction of their leader, and the battle was on. Graeme claimed his prize and relished his triumph--until he faced an enraged Lucky, who was justifiably livid over being abducted and used! In a moment of fury and loathing, Lucky lashed out and destroyed the Quantum Prism in Grimstead’s hand, causing both a rupture in Grimstead’s containment suit and a momentary spacetime vortex that almost engulfed the country club golf course! When all died down, it seemed that Grimstead was truly gone--but the appearance was short-lived: for the madman’s containment suits have programming of their own. The one in which he was housed at the moment of his mixed victory and defeat transmitted Grimstead into another suit at another location. From this unknown place, Grimstead transmitted a dire warning to his new foes: “You have taken from me my greatest power, with which I would have remade this wretched world. For that, from this moment onward, the four of you are all marked men. It is not a question of whether I’m going to destroy you--only how, and when. Watch your backs, Environauts--especially you, ‘Lucky Star”--and beware of Graeme Grimstead!”

So begins the greatest and most dangerous personal enmity of all time: the ongoing clash between the valiant Environauts and the deadly Graeme Grimstead, on which the fate of the world may rest. This first battle leaves the lines drawn and the hostilities declared, but it also marks the beginning of the lifelong romance of Lucky Vega and Elise Hall, which serves as more fuel for Grimstead’s hatred. Not only has Lucky destroyed the Quantum Prism, this “upstart boy” is now sharing his bed with the only woman--indeed, the only thing besides the Prism--that Graeme has ever loved. From this point on, Graeme Grimstead will live for two things. The vile and greedy world that destroyed his mother and buries the masses in the poverty that made his father a monster must be first punished, then transformed. And most of all...Lucky Vega must be crushed and the Environauts must die!

And Graeme may yet have the power to do just that: For while his Prism is gone, his immense wealth remains in every part of the world. With that wealth comes immense power, the ability to buy himself a country to use as a power base from which he cannot be removed and a platform from which he and his super-technology can threaten the rest of humanity at will. For the Environauts, Graeme Grimstead will be the nightmare that never ends. But those are all stories for another time.

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!

BRING ON THE BAD GUY!

Okay, you visitors to Quantum Comics Blog.  I’ve come to a decision.  You people have simply had it too good for too long.  That ends now.  As of this moment, we’re going to get some evil going on in here!  And in the world of Quantum Comics there is no greater evil than the arch-enemy of the Environauts!  My friends, meet the villain to be most feared and dreaded

--Graeme Grimstead!

When I went looking for the greatest enemy of the Nauts, who would be the greatest villain in the Quantum cast, it was with specific needs in mind.  He had to be a European (British, as it turns out) rich enough, powerful enough, and possessing such command of comic-book super-science as to be a rival for Esteban Vega himself--and ultimately Esteban’s son, Lucky, who would become Earth’s greatest force for good.  He had to be ruthless but tragic, morally blind but righteous in his own way.  He would need a base of power from which he could not be easily removed, which would position him as a potential threat to the entire human race against which he bore a colossal grudge.  Indeed his hatred of mankind would be equalled only by his passion to make the world a better place--after his own twisted fashion.  The nemesis of the Nauts would have to be both a monster and an aristocrat, a fiend with a broken heart, a wounded boy who grew up to inflict pain and torment.

But how to create such a character was the question.  In another comics universe, where we’re acquainted with a very famous cosmic quartet, such a character exists, and he is their arch-foe.  He is an armored tyrant with a face ironically scarred as the result of his own vanity, a heart that loves only power, a contempt for the humanity that he blames for the persecution and deaths of his parents, and the ability to bring forth nightmares of science virtually at will.  That character is the villain against whom all the other villains in that world are measured.  Creating such characters is not easy (indeed, it took this villain’s creators a couple of years to work out all his details), but not impossible--if you know how to go about it.  We see the results here:  Grimstead as he battles the Environauts for the first time, clad in a containment suit that keeps his physical form integrated (for reasons we’ll understand as we go along), and Grimstead as he appears next, a sinister figure in black leather and sculpted, ribbed spandex (think “Locutus of Borg Meets The Matrix”).  Study him well, for none others who live are as deadly as he!

I often look to culture, popular and otherwise, outside of comics for inspiration.  To cast my master villain, I looked to television for an example of where to start.  Some of you may remember one of my favorite series of the 1990s, Sisters.  In one season of Sisters there happened to be a character named Simon Bolt (the late Mark Frankel).  Simon was a British financier and tycoon, phenomenally wealthy, and--because of who played him--virtually surrounded by a blinding force field of sexy male gorgeousness.  (If you ever happen to see another, shorter-lived 90s show, the undead drama Kindred:  The Embraced, Mark Frankel was also the lead vampire in that.)  Seriously, the guy was beautiful beyond belief.  But Simon was also a very tragic man.  He was essentially a modern-day Charles Dickens character, who had brought himself up from an English childhood of crushing, heartbreaking poverty and grief to become a global captain of industry and finance.  But doing so had cost him, for in the process Simon had euthanized his wounded inner child and smothered all the love and warmth in his heart, becoming pretty much a Star Trek Borg in a business suit.  It took the love of one of the Sisters--Sela Ward as Teddy--to turn Simon from a wealth-and-empire-building cyborg back into a human being.  I decided to start constructing my Environauts arch-villain with Simon as the model.  Graeme Grimstead, like Simon Bolt before him, would be an Englishman who demonstrated what happens when Ebenezer Scrooge doesn’t get his ghosts!

Now, as we’ve discussed (and will soon talk about again), the leader of the Environauts and the de facto lead character of Quantum Comics is Lorenzo “Lucky” Vega, who in his superhuman identity will be called Lucky Star.  On Lucky’s handsome young Mexican-American shoulders ride the core values of Quantum storytelling:  heroism, courage, beauty, intelligence (in his case ferocious intelligence), science, wonder, adventure, romance.  In trying to round out the character of Lucky, I came up against a particular challenge.  While he shouldn’t be perfect (because perfect people aren’t interesting unless they’re Mary Poppins), if he’s too screwed-up and neurotic his stories become about how screwed-up and neurotic he is and the sense of wonder and adventure is lost.  So I decided that instead of making him so dysfunctional that he defeats our purposes, I would give him a particular twist of character to make him a little more intriguing.  And what I settled on was that he would be inept with girls his own age and primarily attracted to older women!  I liked that idea because the notion of the hot young boy and the older female “cougar” has caught on in popular culture these days.  (It’s even been a couple of sitcoms.)  Lucky’s cougar, I decided, would turn out to be the one true love of his life.  That meant she had to be not just a beautiful woman approaching 40, but a woman of that type who would be more or less his equal--the equal of a boy who happened to be a comic-book super-science genius!  And for the inspiration for that, interestingly enough, I needed only peer into my own past!

Don’t arch your eyebrows at that; I have no cougars of my own.  But when I was in college, there was an instructor on whom I had a wee bit of a queer boy’s crush.  I once took a college course in fantasy literature as an outlet for my special imagination (one of the very few that I had--I wasn’t as happy a student as I hoped to be after high school).  The instructor for this class was a lady that I’ve never forgotten.  Her name was Alice Hall Petry.  She was very pretty, had light brown hair, a sharp, quick mind, a fine wit, and an appreciation for imaginative things.  In other words she was “my kind of gal”.  I liked her and enjoyed her class, both for the subject matter (including Frankenstein and Alice in Wonderland!) and for her.  So it was that when I set out to create Lucky Vega’s inamorata, I recalled Alice Hall Petry, switched her professional interest from literature to science, and created Professor Elise Hall.

What has this to do with our arch-villain, you ask?  Remember how Sela Ward as Teddy taught Simon Bolt how to love again?  Well, guess what Elise Hall once did for our ultimate bad guy--and imagine how someone like that might feel if his lover happened to leave him and take up with a gorgeous and much younger Mexican-American genius super-hero!  That’s only a part of the motivation of the supremely evil Graeme Grimstead.  When Quantum Comics Blog returns we’ll learn the whole story of how a little boy from a London tenement became the most evil and dangerous man on Earth--and the monster that the Environauts can hold at bay but never defeat!