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!

QUANTUM CHRISTMAS CARD FOR 2012

As the holiday season looms ahead of us, it’s time to share my annual tradition of an original super-hero Christmas Card.  Here, then, is THE QUANTUM CHRISTMAS CARD FOR 2012.

In an earlier post we met THE QUANTUM, a hero that I originally created as Wonder Boy and later redesigned and rechristened.  In this year’s Card, the Quantum returns, this time in a battle scene in which he faces off with a scourge of the season who should be familiar to fans of classic Yuletide TV specials.  To underscore just who it is that Corey Lonigan is battling in his super-powered form, we’ve also brought in some special guest stars:  Rudolph the Uncanny Ungulate and his elfin ally, Hermie!  If you know your tinsel-time TV, you should be able to figure out on what show this year’s card is so righteously riffing.  If not...well, where have you been since the early 1960s, for one thing; and for another, as I write this, the encore telecast will be on CBS tomorrow night (December 14, 2012.)  So you have no excuse!

If you enjoy the Quantum Christmas Card, I hope you’ll share it with your friends and loved ones through a link on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, or your own E-mail.  It’s here to spread a little fun for the season.  And may this season find you happy and may you keep it well.

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!

HERE BE A DRAGON

For all my artist and storyteller friends:  Did you ever have a character will himself into being with no deliberate effort on your part?  In the next post of Quantum Comics Blog, you'll see the color version of this master drawing of a character who did exactly that!

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.