THE BIGGEST LITTLE HERO

Not every Quantum hero is from the good old US of A.  Some of them are from the other side of the Pond.  Great Britain is the home, for example, of the most mysterious of heroes, Hero X.  In time the British government will put together its own team of costumed super-champions, whom the media will dub "Her Majesty's Heroes".  They will officially be called the Battle Line, and they will rightly be considered every bit as powerful as the Wonders, the American team that will include the World Champion, Draco Rex, the Satellite, and the Bearcat.  We'll meet Hero X and all of the Battle Line as we go along.  For the moment, however, we direct our attention to another battling Brit.

Physics student Eric Quill, a native of Woking, outside of London, is called THE POINT.  He is my own personal take on the archetype of the "shrinking hero".  The Point has the power to reduce his volume--i.e. shrink in size--until he is about as big as a .38-calibre bullet.  The analogy to a bullet is especially apt since when he reaches that size, the tendency of electrons to repel each other does something equally remarkable.  It sets up a powerful energy flux in his body that the Point can utilize to make himself shoot through the air like a projectile.  His mass remains the same and the energy flux gives him an invulnerability power as a side effect, which enables young Eric to punch his way through walls, doors, ceilings, objects, and--in the most potentially dangerous effect of his power--other people.  This, as you can imagine, is why when Eric's xenosome-given power manifests, he isn't eager to share the news.  In fact he spends a great deal of time by himself, practicing his powers until he is absolutely sure he can use them safely without the risk of "bulleting" himself through innocent persons!  When he first acquires his powers, his isolation probably costs him a girlfriend (he's another of the straight ones), but it's necessary.

I imagine us first encountering the Point in an Environauts story in which the Nauts travel to England to investigate a strange cosmic phenomenon and wind up battling native English arch-villain Graeme Grimstead.  I see the Point being drawn into this battle and teaming up with Earth's greatest adventurers to help them against their greatest foe.  I also see Eric winning a research grant from Vega Enterprises and deciding to come to California to work on whatever super-project he has in mind.  Once he's in LA he meets up with the Champ and his sidekick, the All-Star (you'll be meeting him in some future post), as well as Draco, the Satellite, and Giantess (a heroine to whom I also have not yet introduced you) in a dire super-emergency to be announced, and the lot of them decide to stay together and form a new team; this, then, is the origin of the Wonders.  The Point and Giantess become a couple in the bargain.  (And yes, there will absolutely have to be a storyline in which the Wonders meet, battle, and team up with the Battle Line; that simply must happen at some time.  It's too irresistible.)

As for Eric's background:  As noted above, our young lad grows up in Woking, England, which happens to be one of the initial settings of one of my favorite stories, The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, and which happens to have a statue of a Martian tripod commemorating that classic novel.  Eric, as a little boy, is captivated by the statue and becomes a huge Wells fan.  Learning that some of the things in Wells's stories have gone from science fiction to science fact (laser weapons, tank warfare, nuclear fission, atomic weapons, and at least the theories of time travel) spurs him towards science as a profession.  Otherwise I thought it would be intriguing to make Eric a "regular, everyday guy"--not someone common, classless, unrefined, and uncultured, but rather someone who, except for his chosen life's work and the "super" life for which destiny chooses him, would be just a regular bloke who likes to watch football and have a pint at the pub.  He'd be a character who would participate in super-hero life while standing a bit "outside" of it and reflecting and remarking on it from the perspective of someone closer to the average man.  The inspiration for the idea actually comes from a song--the British pop hit "Our House" by Madness.  It describes an English family and home life that are perfectly ordinary in every respect, but very special to the parents and children who belong to it.  Eric is one particular line in the song:  "Brother's got a date to keep; he can't hang around"--just a regular, middle-class young Englishman who lucks into a life that's far more than "regular".  And that is the point of The Point.

THANK YOUR LUCKY STAR

With a Webcomic version of The Adventures of Lucky Vega now in thumbnailing, I decided it was time to have a set of final master drawings of the lead characters of The Environauts, both as they will appear when they acquire their super-powers and become Earth's most awesome adventurers, and as they'll appear in the prequel.  With this post, the coloring of these model sheets is complete.

The powers of the Environauts reflect the spheres of the natural environment through which life has evolved (or will evolve as man advances), from Ocean to Land to Sky to Space.

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

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

AGE OF AQUARIUS

With a Webcomic version of The Adventures of Lucky Vega now in thumbnailing, I decided it was time to have a set of final master drawings of the lead characters of The Environauts, both as they will appear when they acquire their super-powers and become Earth's most awesome adventurers, and as they'll appear in the prequel.  These model sheets are in the process of coloring right now, but I'm continuing a preview of them here.

The powers of the Environauts reflect the spheres of the natural environment through which life has evolved (or will evolve as man advances), from Ocean to Land to Sky to Space.

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

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

SKY HIGH WITH CIRRUS

With a Webcomic version of The Adventures of Lucky Vega now in thumbnailing, I decided it was time to have a set of final master drawings of the lead characters of The Environauts, both as they will appear when they acquire their super-powers and become Earth's most awesome adventurers, and as they'll appear in the prequel.  These model sheets are in the process of coloring right now, but I'm continuing a preview of them here.

The powers of the Environauts reflect the spheres of the natural environment through which life has evolved (or will evolve as man advances), from Ocean to Land to Sky to Space.

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

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

BEYOND THE SEA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PERFECT SEASTORM

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

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

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

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

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

LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE BOYS

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

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

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

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

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

BUILDING A BETTER BEARCAT

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

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

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

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

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

BEHOLD...THE BEARCAT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch for more of the Bearcat in the next post!

LAUNCH OF THE SATELLITE

Illustration--a craft of which comic book art is a subset--is a profession in which you are encouraged and paid to steal.  We call it "swiping," to be nice about it, or "using reference," but it's stealing, it's allowed, and we're taught to do it.  We steal images for our use to make our work look more convincing.


However, there are some things you can't steal or swipe, even for reference, because there are very good laws against appropriating people's registered trademarks.  In that case we employ another trick:  Reworking something so that it is not a recognizable trademark, but if you're savvy enough you can still figure out where it came from.  I always envied the logo of the defunct Saturn automobile company.  I always thought that design should be the symbol or emblem of a super-hero, not a car.  But I couldn't just lift the logo from Saturn as it was designed:

To use it for my own character-design purposes, I had to transform it a bit.  And that's how I came up with the costume of this Quantum hero--The Satellite!

The Satellite is not a character that I created just to steal (or adapt) someone else's ingenious graphic.  For a long time I have searched for just the right character with whom to do an African-American version of my most prevailing hero archetype:  the Prince.  Quantum Comics will be full of Princes.  They're as common to my work as Princesses are to Disney movies.  The Prince may be defined as the most exceptional of men (even by the standards of Quantum Comics heroes), the man you most want as a champion, a rescuer, a leader, and a lover.  Lucky Vega, who will become Lucky Star, leader of the Environauts, is the most prominent of the Princes.  Wild Jon is another.  It was important to me to bring on a Prince who's black.  I put a great deal of time and thought into coming up with exactly the right character with which to do this.  I wanted him to be a character who would reflect all of my hopes for blacks in America to see all the beauty and greatness in themselves, to see themselves as not just rappers and basketball players and gangsters.  I took extra care in creating the Satellite--and his civilian identity, Max Thoroughgood.


My concept for Max is that he is a life-loving playboy from the richest African-American family in the country.  The secret of his family's wealth is that long ago they discovered a massive meteorite laden with extraterrestrial gold ore, and have used the sale of portions of the alien gold to build their fortune.  However, some of them have also resorted to less than scrupulous means to maintain and grow their empire, rather like an African-American version of the Ewings of Dallas, and when young Max finds some of the skeletons in the family closet, he's ashamed.  Not so ashamed that he completely gives up his hedonistic ways and his prolific pursuit of women (yes, he's one of the straight ones), but ashamed enough to want to find ways to redeem his family honor and turn his fortune to something good.  To that end he uses his genius with material science and engineering to create a super-suit and become a hero!  And he has an even loftier ambition:  to use some future upgrade of his suit to become the first man to orbit the Earth without a spaceship!


The Satellite's suit contains a technology that works in much the same way as the powers of another hero, the Quantum.  It is lined with an array of transducers that can store and process energy from any source and use it for a variety of effects, including flight, and has musculoskeletal enhancers to give Max superhuman strength when he's wearing it.  The suit is made of a diamond fibre and boron carbide combination with self-sealing resins that also makes Max invulnerable like a suit of super-armor.  Max's genius makes the Satellite one of the major players and heavy hitters in the Quantum Comics universe.  The Satellite:  a hero sure to put you in orbit!

HE IS THE CHAMPION, MY FRIEND...

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


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

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


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


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


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

ONE GIANT LEAP FOR THE QUANTUM

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


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


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


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

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


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


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