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?

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. 

TAIL OF THE DRAGON

Well, this may be the Season to Be Jolly with peace and good will and all that, but the King of Dragons, Draco Rex, is always ready for battle, as witness one of the mightiest weapons a warrior ever brandished:  the devastating DRAGON’S TAIL!

As I developed Draco and his powers, it occurred to me at some length that something was missing.  Draco is a hero in the same spirit as another mighty warrior Prince from another comics universe, one who is famous for his very distinctive weapon.  But the image of wielding an invincible hammer didn’t fit Prince Declan’s profile; he needed another tool of battle, one that was as unique to him as the aforementioned hammer is to the chap from the other side of the Rainbow Bridge.  A little bit of thought on the matter produced the perfect answer.  What better weapon for the King of Dragons than an all-powerful tail?  I at once seized on the idea of a whip that would put Indiana Jones himself to shame!

Draco Rex never leaves home without the Dragon’s Tail.  The Tail is a whip made of a fictional metal such as you would only find in comic books, a metal that I’ve named Thraxium.  (In the movie Dragonslayer, the dragon’s name was Vermithrax Pejorative; look it up.  I used the “thrax” part of that monicker to name my substance.)  Thraxium is a metal that completely resists all physical damage; you have to manipulate it at the molecular level to have any effect on it at all.  The fists and powers of the most powerful superhuman opponents can’t so much as put a mark on it, lacking any molecule-controlling powers as I mentioned.  

The Dragon’s Tail has been artfully woven from Thraxium cords into one of the most unbreakable objects in existence.  The cords have also been alloyed with another fictional substance, one that is familiar to devotees of UFO and flying saucer mythology.  The ufology crowd calls it Element 115; to Draco’s people it is Varonium.  This is the purported power source for UFOs that enables them to fold and warp space for interstellar travel.  In Varonia they use it to power their space/time-travel technology.  The Tail is thus made of a Thraxium-Varonium compound.  The Thraxium makes the Varonium safe to handle, and the Varonium gives the Tail some extra-special and very powerful functions.

Using the Dragon’s Tail, Draco can travel back and forth from Varonia in the Junction to this Earth, or to any other Earth in any other time period or alternate history that the Junction has catalogued.  If needed, he can also teleport himself from place to place in the event that he needs to get somewhere faster than he can fly (though his top flight speed is about 300-400 miles per hour.)  But there are other, more awesome things the Dragon’s Tail can do in battle.  By spinning or cracking the whip, Draco can create enormously powerful spatial warps with which to smite his foes!  Imagine you’re a villain going up against the King of Dragons and he cracks his whip at you:  a second later you’re smashed by an onrushing wall of distorted spacetime that at full power can hit harder than a tsunami!  A crack of the Dragon’s Tail can flatten a super-powered enemy from a distance, crush an advancing army, or demolish a whole section of a city in the time it takes to tell it.  Coupled with his other powers, the Dragon’s Tail makes Draco Rex one of the most terrifying and unstoppable champions of justice that an evil-doer can face.  Moreover, the Dragon’s Tail is “keyed” to respond only to the handling of Draco himself or his even more powerful mother, Tiamat, Queen of Varonia.  If it is ever separated from the Prince it will automatically teleport itself back to him.

Limitless strength, invulnerability, the power to summon and control fire and firestorms, flight, and the Dragon’s Tail all combine to make Draco Rex one of the mightiest heroes of the Quantum Universe.  Fortunately, he is also one of the friendliest and most affable--as long as you’re not a bad guy!

WHIP IT...WHIP IT GOOD

"Sirrah, I am a patient man.  But only to a point."  

This would be a typical line of dialogue from the most powerful warrior in the Multicosm, right before he scorches someone with a firestorm, smacks them down with the mightiest muscles in all of space and time--or smites them with the all-crushing power of the Dragon's Tail!

When Quantum Comics Blog returns, we'll see the color versions of these drawings of Draco Rex brandishing one of the most devastating weapons in existence and learn more about the Dragon's Tail.  We'll also see the most awe-inspiring holiday event of all--the 2012 Quantum Christmas Card!  Keep looking in as the Yuletide season gets under way!

THIS DRAGON'S NO DRAG ON YOU

In a previous post I introduced you to Earth’s most awesome adventurers, the Environauts.  As I was brainstorming the exploits of the Nauts (which are still in the works), I naturally began to look for the other characters, heroes and villains, who would populate their stories and make their world exciting.  And it was at this time that I was browsing a Barnes & Noble  bookstore and came upon a book called When God Was a Woman.  The title intrigued me enough that I wanted to give it the flip-through, and on doing so I learned that there was once a time, before Christianity, when people worshipped a divine female creator--a monotheistic religion centered on a Goddess.  And even more intriguingly, in the religion of the Goddess, snakes were considered sacred animals!  In our culture, of course, most people live in an instinctive, phobic fear and loathing of all reptiles (except, usually, turtles).  But in the Goddess religion, snakes were revered as having a direct pipeline to divinity!  Which would lead me, in a roundabout way, to creating one of the most powerful heroes in the Quantum cast.

I have always loved reptiles.  I had iguanas as pets in high school, and for almost 16 years I had a Boa named Ralph.  I emphatically don’t share people’s general loathing of these beautiful creatures.  And I was fascinated to learn that there was once a religion that felt the same way.  It especially caught my interest because of what I knew about how Christianity had secured its power in the world, by making a disobedient woman responsible for all the ills of humanity--a woman who, according to the myth, had gone against the wishes of a male God and listened to a talking snake!  By making a woman responsible for man being cast out of Paradise and making a snake the instrument of her downfall, Christianity had effectively discredited women and reptiles for centuries to come and set itself up in an enduring patriarchy.  Well, I didn’t need a snake lobbing an apple at me to know that there was a story--perhaps a lot of stories--in that!

So, for one of the first Environauts sagas, I imagined that Lucky Star and his friends would battle a monster named Cerastes.  He would be a humanoid/dinosaur being, torn between a comic-book-advanced intelligence and an insane need to kill, destroy, and enslave other life.  Cerastes came from an alternate universe where the killer asteroid from 65 million years ago missed Earth and the Age of Reptiles never ended.  He came to this Earth as a conqueror in pre-Christian times and was responsible for human myths about dragons.  And the race of beings from which he had mutated, the more benevolent, reptilian Varons, had helped an uncomprehending humanity to stop him.  (The name Varons comes from Varanus--the scientific name of monitor lizards to which the Komodo Dragon belongs.)  The human followers of the Varons were, of course, snake-revering Goddess worshippers.  But after the rout of Cerastes, the Varons feared the cultural contamination of our world, where humans were barely into the Bronze Age.  So they took their human followers away to the place called the Junction, a kind of nexus of alternate realities, and helped them to cope with the things they had learned about the way the universe really works.  They also helped them to transform Earth’s dragons back into the birds from which Cerastes had mutated them, leaving us with only the mythology instead of the reality of dragons.

With me so far?  Good, because here’s where it gets really interesting.  By the time Cerastes struck again, the followers of the Varons had created a matriarchal, snake-and-dragon-honoring society called Varonia, composed largely but not exclusively of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic humans.  And the Varonians had learned how to create a mutagenic chemical that resembled blood, which they called the Dragonblood.  By bathing in the fateful Dragonblood, any person who had earned the privilege could emerge with superhuman powers.  (In dragon mythology, bathing in the blood of a dragon makes you invulnerable.  Learning about myths and how to use them is very valuable in storytelling, as you can see.)  During the battle between Varonia and Cersates, a family of valiant “dragon-slayers” had at their foe.  Brave Fintan Draco was slain in combat.  His wife, Tiamat, fell into the Dragonblood and nearly drowned.  And their son, Declan, dived in to save his mother.  Both were dramatically transformed.  Tiamat, because of the length and depth of her immersion, acquired cosmic-level matter/energy powers.  She was effectively a living goddess.  Declan, who had dived deep and also been deeply immersed to save his mother, grew large, powerful, dragon-like wings.  He gained virtually immeasurable strength and invulnerability, the power to summon and control any quantity of heat and fire, and the ability to take flight by using his heat powers to create air currents to support his mighty wings.  At a gesture, he could create a firestorm that could incinerate a city, call any outside fire to his hand, or snuff out any flame with a thought!  After Declan used his newfound and terrifying powers to put down Cerastes, his mother ascended to Queen of Varonia and dubbed her son Draco Rex--”King of Dragons,” the mightiest warrior in all of space and time!

So where do the Environauts come into all this?  In the story as I first saw it, Cerastes attacks Earth yet again, in the present day, and this time the Nauts come out to battle him.  In the midst of this battle they picked up an ally--Serpentyne, warrior Princess of the Realm of Varonia!  (At the time, I was interested in developing female characters in orbit of the Nauts, to appeal to the core demographic of comic books.)  The really interesting thing was what happened when I first imagined Serpentyne’s intro scene.  I saw her emerging from an access point between this world and the Junction--but much to my surprise, she didn’t come alone!  There was someone else with her, a blond male fitness-magazine type with dragon wings and the attitude of someone you’d expect to see slinging a hammer in some other comics universe.  I hadn’t planned on this character; I hadn’t thought of him or in any way deliberately set out to create him.  He was just there, unbidden, a completely spontaneous act of creation.  Moreover, he was Serpentyne’s big brother!  Somehow, this character possessed such strength and power that he had willed himself into existence out of nothingness.  And he was so forceful that once he was there I couldn’t un-create him and he practically took over the story.  He even turned out to be gay and attracted to the Environauts’ strongman, Lionel Marshall, a.k.a. The Stone (much to Lionel’s delight).  Any character who can do that without my doing anything to summon him, I reasoned, was someone I had better just accept.  So I worked with Draco Rex and modified the story to provide him with an origin, and there he was.  This is the only time a thing like that has happened to me.  Usually, as the storyteller, I’m the one doing the creating.  Draco Rex brought himself into being and hurled himself to front and center!

Next time we’ll learn about that formidable weapon you see the King of Dragons carrying.  As you may suspect, the Dragon’s Tail is far more than just a whip!

COMING OUT PROUD

Today is National Coming Out Day, a day when gays and lesbians (and bisexuals and transgendered people) are encouraged to declare themselves bravely and proudly.  The first National Coming Out Day was October 11, 1988.  My own personal Coming Out Day was October 11, 1987, and I remember it to the day because the preceding day, October 10, is the wedding anniversary of my best friend from art school.  It’s true.  For this occasion, then--my 25th birthday, as it were--I thought it was well past time to get two particular characters together here on Quantum Comics Blog.  One of them you’ve already met, the intrepid Idol.  The other has also made a cameo appearance in that same post:  the senses-sizzling Sentinel, a.k.a. Pride!

The character of Pride, conceived by my friend Andy Mangels, is based on a design by an artist named Greg Phillips, who meant the character to be featured in the now-defunct Blueboy magazine.  Phillips originally christened his creation “The Sentry,” and I have the original Sentry design somewhere buried among my souvenirs.  When Andy latched onto the character for the indie-comics anthology Gay Comics, of which he was Editor, he redubbed Greg’s character as "Sentinel" and created his own origin for him.  He also called upon me to be Sentinel’s artist.  (I knew Andy’s work previously from Marvel Age, an in-house promotional magazine of Marvel Comics; it happened we were both members of ATDNSIN, The APA That Dares Now Speak Its Name, an Amateur Publishing Association for gays who read and work in comics.)  In this way a collaboration was struck.

With some modifications to Greg’s original design--some of which Andy wanted, like the forearm hair, and some of which were my idea, like the driving gloves with triangular cut-outs--we debuted Sentinel in Gay Comics #16, and the launch of the character was both my entrée into professional comics and my coming-out statement to the world.  Sentinel was kind of a landmark creation.  He was one of the first comic-book heroes who were cast in a very classically mainstream heroic mold; he was obviously the conceptual kin of Superman and Captain America.  His adventures were straightforward, serious, and dramatic, with humor used strictly for characterization.  His stories were not campy, not funny and frivolous, not a lark.  He was a traditional and conventionally masculine super-hero who happened to be romantically and sexually attracted to men only.  Today there are a number of such characters in mainstream comics; my favorites are the Wiccan and the Hulkling in The Young Avengers and Striker in Avengers Academy.  There’s also the very high-profile Canadian mutant Northstar in Alpha Flight and The X-Men, who actually preceded Sentinel but had a very tortured and convoluted storytelling history.  But Sentinel, at the time, was quite a unique creation; there weren’t many characters around like him.

I’ll tell you a couple of funny stories about the debut of Sentinel.  As I said, the debut of the character was my declaration of identity to the world.  When I was first Out, I decided I would just be myself and neither advertise nor hide who I was; if the subject came up I would deal honestly with it, and that was all.  Working in Gay Comics changed all that.  If you’re a contributing artist to a gay publication and you’re doing newspaper interviews and public appearances about it, as I was, you effectively do not have a closet.  So this was my way of claiming my gayness in the eyes of everyone, including my family and friends.  The consequence of all this was neither a bang nor a whimper.  

I’ll grant you my brother was curious and my aforementioned best friend from art school was set back on his heels a bit, but everyone else?  My mother looked at the first Sentinel story, thought it was wonderful, and was glad I was getting work.  That’s it.  My sister Janice went to Florida to visit my (now deceased) father on his birthday and came back with the story of how my father, at his birthday party, took out his copies of the Sentinel stories from Gay Comics and showed them to his neighbors, saying, “Look what my son did.”  This account tickled me because I remembered the story of what supposedly happened with one of my personal heroes, Gene Roddenberry, when Star Trek went on the air for the first time.  As Gene told it, after the show was over, his father went up and down the street apologizing to the neighbors for the foolishness they had just seen and promising them that Gene would be back to writing good old sensible All-American Westerns and crime shows straight away.  Hearing that my father had bragged to the neighbors about Sentinel, I couldn’t help thinking, Well, I’m one up on Gene...

There were six episodes of Sentinel in all, the first five of which I drew.  My work on these features represents a time when I was developing my own sensibility about super-heroes as something other than the cliché of the costumed mass of muscle and brawn who didn’t necessarily have to be beautiful or graceful or have any kind of sex appeal.  I wanted my characters to be different.  I wanted them to be masculine, strong, forceful, powerful, yes, by all means; they were super-heroes after all.  But darn it, I wanted them to be beautiful.  I wanted them to be graceful.  I wanted them to be sexy as all get-out.  And my rendering of the sententious Sentinel at the time reflected that.  In retrospect, what I should have done was to try to capture those same qualities in a character who was...well, at least bigger.  Sentinel should have been a physical specimen somewhere between Captain America and mighty Thor.  I made him more like a costumed Chippendales dancer instead.  It’s one thing I would change if I were working on the character today, and the drawing accompanying this post reflects that.  The artist who followed me on the final published episode of the character--Brandon McKinney, I think his name was--made him physically more of the kind of figure that I should have done, and I give him props for that.

And speaking of the later episodes of the character...

Our hero had a bit of a naming problem, owing to the usage of the same name(s) by larger comic book companies.  In other comics, “Sentry” was originally the name of a series of super-powerful robots created by the Kree Empire of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.  After Andy and I did our character, “The Sentry” was also used as the name of a powerful but psychotic super-hero who supposedly preceded the Fantastic Four.  “Sentinel” is the name of a series of giant robots that hunt mutants.  It is also a name briefly used by the first-generation Green Lantern, a character who of late has ironically been rewritten as gay!  Because of the issue of replication of names (and the fact that the other parties using the names were bigger gorillas than we were), Andy decided on a re-christening of our hero, and after some brainstorming he had our post-Stonewall paladin adopt a new monicker:  Pride!  And so he was called in his final installments.  

Idol is a character that I created in the same spirit as Pride.  He’s the same kind of character and stands for the same things.  If in some jaunt between comics universes the two of them ever crossed paths, they would recognize their kindred spirits and be great allies and friends.  (They would not hook up, because each has a non-super-hero boyfriend and is monogamous.)  It’s for that reason that on this National Coming Out Day I thought the two of them should meet in some fashion.  So, however Out you may be, take this drawing as a sign that there is a better life to be lived and greater strength and integrity to be found out of the closet than in.  Happy Coming Out Day, everyone.

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...”

WHEN WE RETURN...

Quantum Comics Blog will be back soon with the color version of this drawing and some story notes about it.  Keep checking in!

TRUE IDOL

If you lived in Los Angeles in the world of Quantum Comics and you happened to look up and see rainbow-colored trails of light in the sky, you could rest assured that any villains or evil-doers in the vicinity were in big trouble--because you’d know Idol was on the job!

Just one look at Idol tells you exactly who he is:  He’s out, he’s proud, and he’s got more than enough power to back it up.  Even when you see Mark James Worthy out of costume, his Human Rights Campaign “Equal Rights symbol” tattoo and his fuchsia triangle ear stud put his identity right out there.  Idol’s costume takes its inspiration from the ACT UP “Silence Equals Death” graphic--but there’s even more to it than that.  Idol is a character in the spirit of another character for whom some people remember me.  I used to be the artist of a series of super-hero strips in Gay Comics that starred an All-American gay super-hero called Sentinel (later called Pride).  Though I didn’t create the sensational Sentinel, I always liked him and considered him my “beloved stepchild”.  (You see him below on the cover of Gay Comics #20, penciled by me and inked by George Perez.  He’s the star-spangled blond hunk at the center of the composition.)  I wanted to do another character who would symbolize the strength and pride of gay America and embody it in a classical super-hero.  That character, then, is the intrepid Idol.

The origin and intro story for Idol is one that makes me smile to think about it.  One warm night in Santa Monica, an engineering student named Mitch McGrath meets the most perfect boy he’s ever seen--young fitness instructor Mark James Worthy--browsing in the CD section of a bookstore.  They head for the cafe where they drink and talk and quickly fall in love.  Mark takes Mitch home to bed.  They lie together afterward, deliriously happy.  Thinking Mitch is dozing, Mark decides to step out for a bit in just his tighty whities and enjoy the cooling night.  Mitch wakes up, spies Mark slipping out to the side of the pool, thinks his new boyfriend is going to take a dip, and is ready to join him--when suddenly Mark lifts himself into the air and flies off in a rainbow streak!  A stunned and disbelieving Mitch at once realizes that he is sleeping with a super-hero!  When Mark (who’s been giving LA’s night life quite a show, clad only in his underwear with his aerial celebration of new love) flies back home a short time later, he has some major explaining to do.

Thus Mark shows himself to Mitch in costume for the first time, and Mitch calls him “some kind of costumed idol”--a name that will stick.  Mitch learns his super-powered lover’s origin.  Mark is the only child of Evan Worthy, a realtor who came out to himself only after marrying heterosexually; and Carol James Worthy, a caterer with bouts of depression.  Evan was prosperous but miserable, finding happiness only in an affair with another realtor, Patrick Sayers, who encouraged him to come out--and he did, ending his marriage and sending Carol into a tailspin.  The embittered and depressed Carol did everything to poison the mind of their son Mark against his father, railing against the “selfishness” of gays and their supposed agenda of destroying and tearing apart families.  Carol’s manipulations came to nothing when Mark realized his own gayness and Carol attempted suicide with pills and alcohol.  Still loving his mother but unable to live any more in a toxic home, Mark went to live with his father and Patrick while Jenny went into therapy.  Then a car crash claimed the lives of Mark’s Dads, leaving Mark with their money and property, his budding fitness-trainer business, and a life filled with grief.

Reeling from his losses, Mark felt himself being bombarded with the conflict over gay rights in the media (a painful reminder of his mother) and began to shut himself off from the world until he couldn’t stand it any more.  One fateful day he felt the need to run--not to any specific place or destination, just to run.  Pushing himself to his physical limits, he tripped and fell off a trail, rolling down a hill into a wooded area, and sprawled unconscious in the brush.  There he lay--until IT appeared.  It was something incredibly ancient, older than humanity, shaped like a large, hollow triangle.  It called out to Mark’s mind and he stepped into the center of the strange object.  There he was charged with immense power, and a costume and a set of wristbands with a symbol identical to the mystery object fashioned themselves onto his body.  (The wristbands enable him to switch back and forth from common clothes to his costume.)  Mark had been chosen for a purpose that he would understand if he used his new powers in the way they were intended.  His mission was simply to protect the world and humanity and be a force for good.  What was the mysterious object that endowed Mark with powers almost like those of a god?  What was he meant to do?  All this he would learn if he simply returned to the world and lived the full measure of his love, his pride, and his power.  Free of the despair that had overcome him and ready to engage with the world again, Mark returned home, recommitted himself to his business, opened his eyes to new adventure--and met the boy with whom he now planned to spend his life.  And that’s where a wonder-struck Mitch came in.

Idol is one of the most powerful beings ever to live on Earth.  He occupies the highest percentile of strength and invulnerability of all superhumans, a category that he shares with the Bearcat and some other characters you’ll be meeting in the weeks ahead.  He can fly faster than a supersonic fighter jet in Earth’s atmosphere and reach near-light speeds in space.  He can live and travel in space without a spacesuit.  The telltale signature of Idol’s presence in an area, as we noted earlier, is the rainbow-colored trail of bent light that he leaves behind him when he flies.  He can create force fields to protect others, and generate force beams capable of demolishing buildings with one blast.  He can sense energy in any form in any place.  He can emit a light so strong that it seems to turn night to day, which he does at Mitch’s suggestion during an adventure that happens later on their first night together.  Idol is as super as super gets.

Silence may equal death and action may equal life--but pride, power, and valor add up to Idol! 

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.