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!

QUANTUM CHRISTMAS CARD FOR 2014!

And we're back for the holidays after a long absence which will be explained shortly, I hope to your satisfaction.  It's time now for the 26th annual unveiling of the most awesome holiday event of all:  THE QUANTUM CHRISTMAS CARD!  And here it is.

Making his fifth official Card appearance is Nature's Child himself, Jon Wilde, a.k.a. WILD JON, accompanied this year by boyfriend and lifemate Thomas "Tom" Tierney, who I believe is the first supporting character ever to appear on a Card.  As we look in on Jon and Tom on Christmas morning, we find them in the middle of opening their goodies--or at least some of them!

Now, as for what's been going on the past few months.  We were supposed to have had The Adventures of Lucky Vega fully up and running after that first sequence of strips.  But I've had a lot of personal things going on that put the strip in a stall, and after that loss of initial momentum I started to reconsider some things.  I was happy with the strip as I had it, but I started to realize that I wasn't completely comfortable with the comic-strip format, those tight bands of panels in which I was drawing the story.  I found I wanted the story and the artwork to have more room to be more expansive, as in a regular comic book page.  At the same time I found my heart wasn't really in the idea of starting the whole thing over yet again.  At length I reluctantly decided it was time to change my major project for a while and come back to The Adventures of Lucky Vega more refreshed and really ready to do it up right at a later date.  That left me with the question, to which project should I switch?

For the present state of my personal life, I decided that I should go with the simplest thing I have.  Not simplistic, just simple and comparatively easy to accomplish while trying to negotiate some other things I have going on.  There was only one choice, and it's something as imaginative as you would expect and as sexy as you would like!  As for exactly what the new major project will be...   I've already dropped a big hint, though you'll have to come back for further news to learn exactly what it is I'm up to.  

Meanwhile, please feel free to forward and share this cosmic Card to your friends and loved ones as always.  It's about giving.

Happy Holidays, everyone, from Quantum Comics Blog.  Ho-ho-ho!

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.

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!

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! 

THE LOVE YOU TAKE IS EQUAL TO THE LOVE YOU CREATE

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

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

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

Dr. Franken Furter, eat your heart out!