VILLAINY A'BORNING!

“I offer the world freedom from want...  Whoever wants to die rather than accept what I offer is free to do so.”

What makes anyone think this way?  How does anyone become so evil?  To learn how it started, we must look back to a night long ago, when something fell from the sky over England and landed on the outskirts of a former countryside manor--and a little boy stole out of the handyman’s quarters to see what it was.

Young Graeme Grimstead, bereft of his parents (as we saw last time), was being raised on the manor-turned-luxury resort by his uncle Nigel Hewitt, the handyman and groundskeeper.  What he found in the forest thicket surrounding the property that night was a small crater strewn with the parts of strange, unrecognizable machinery--at whose center lay a strange crystal with an inner, diamond-like glow.  He gathered up the odd machine parts and pocketed the crystal before anyone else could come and get them, and took them back to the servant’s quarters where he lived.  And that was how Graeme acquired what he would come to call the Quantum Prism.

The Quantum Prism was an alien object, its origin unknown, containing a subtle but awesome power:  an ability to affect reality at the level of quantum mechanics, where all physical laws that govern the universe break down into uncertainty and probability.  The effect of the Prism is that of the ultimate “good luck charm,” conferring a positive outcome for every event onto its holder.  It can also have the reverse effect, that of a cosmic “Hope Diamond,” projecting negative outcomes onto others.  As fate would have it, this alien talisman of “positivity” was now in the hands of what was becoming a very negative young boy.  Graeme had grown to hate the world for allowing poverty and inequality to exist:  For it was these conditions that had made Graeme’s father Roland a chronically unemployed, alcoholic, physically and emotionally abusive husband.  This was why Graeme had lived with his parents in a tenement on the East End of London, where the only lights in his mother’s life were Graeme himself and her gift for art--until the day that a drunken and angry Roland killed her.  This was why Roland was now behind bars for life and Graeme, who had walked in on the murder scene, was permanently traumatized.  And this was why Graeme, coming to live with his Uncle Nigel, had witnessed wealth for the first time, compared it to the misery from which he came--and held it against the entire world that his mother had died at the hands of the monster that was Graeme’s father.

To little Graeme Grimstead, the entire world except for his Uncle Nigel was made up of monsters like his father, or people who created such monsters or allowed them to exist.  And now Graeme, as he would soon discover, had the power to do something about it.

Nigel had learned that Graeme had a knack for tinkering with machinery.  To boost the boy’s morale, he had begun to provide him with simple toys as well as bits of broken devices and electronic scrap, which Graeme had a marvelous gift for working into gadgets of all sorts.  The lad also demonstrated keen mathematical and computer skills, including programming.  His natural talent, coupled with the influence of the Quantum Prism that Graeme kept a secret from everyone including Nigel (at least in the beginning), catapulted Graeme through school and the best universities in England, and on into the business world.  The young Englishman was on a fast track as the British Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, his only rival in computers and high-tech industry being America’s Esteban Vega, who was doing the same thing, but without the boost from an alien power.  Grimstead in the UK and Vega in California were becoming the world’s titans of technology.  The founder of Steadfast Tech, Graeme was a celebrity, sought after in the most elite circles of the very world he had learned to despise as a boy.  But this did nothing to assuage his contempt for humanity.  Graeme’s empire was, for him, an unassailable fortress of money behind which to barricade himself against everything he hated.  The filthy, vulgar, evil world that had made his father a monster and destroyed his beautiful, gentle mother would never touch him.  Its cruel hands would never foul him or contaminate his life.  Nothing would ever touch Graeme Grimstead.  The Quantum Prism would see to that.

Except...Steadfast Tech had investments and holdings all over the world, and was a benefactor of research in universities both in the UK and abroad, including America.  And one of the researchers working under Steadfast grant endowments was an American theoretical physicist named Elise Hall, of California Coast University.  During a visit to CCU to have a tour of where his money was going, Graeme met Elise, and for the first time in his life found something that he wanted to touch him.  Some time in the future we will learn the story of why beautiful Elise took up research into temporal theory and had an ambition to build a working time machine.  Suffice it to say that her beauty, her ideas, and her brilliance reached that part of Graeme’s heart that he had locked away inside a vault of hatred and pain.  They became lovers, and Elise was now the only thing besides his immense wealth and his isolation from the world that made Graeme happy.  The trouble was that Graeme truly did have his heart’s desire--in a way he did not expect.

Graeme didn’t want the filthy, vulgar, cruel world to touch him--and long-term exposure to the energies of the Quantum Prism was slowly, over many years, granting him his fondest wish.  His atomic structure was gradually being thrown out of phase with other matter, with the cumulative effect of making Graeme intangible.  He began to have “spells” and “attacks” of losing solidity, with no way to stop it.  Graeme convened his top scientific minds to address the problem of his phasing, and they determined that it was irreversible and would eventually become permanent.  At some point, the alien power of the Quantum Prism, based on a science that no one on Earth could grasp, would leave its holder as ephemeral as a Charles Dickens ghost, with no hope of recovery.  Only after learning the extent of his condition did Graeme share what was happening to him with the one he loved.

At first Elise was naturally horrified--both at Graeme’s condition and the fact that while she had trusted him with everything in her life, he had never told her anything about the Prism or how he had used it.  She was furious, as any deceived lover would be--but as Graeme’s mother Penny had loved Graeme’s father in spite of himself, Elise still loved Graeme.  She stood by her man and tried to help him.  As his fiancee, she refused to let him keep her off the experimental team studying the Quantum Prism and looking for a way to reintegrate her intended.  By this time Graeme was forced to live in special containment apparatus resembling spacesuits.  It was on Elise’s watch that an attempt to scan and probe the interior of the Quantum Prism resulted in an explosion that wrecked the laboratory complex and might have taken Elise’s life if Nigel hadn’t managed to get her to safety.  But in the upheaval, Graeme was lost, his containment suit ruptured and his intangible body dissipated.  In trying to save her lover, Elise had seemingly lost him.  Or had she?  The same fate that put the Quantum Prism in the hands of a wounded, angry boy was not finished with Graeme and Elise--not yet.  When Quantum Comics Blog returns, we’ll see how this disaster only set the stage for evil yet to come!

BRING ON THE BAD GUY, PART 2

For this post, let me paint you a picture all in words.  Just read, and imagine it with me...

That’s the way of the world.  Plant your flowers, grow a pearl.  Child is born with a heart of gold.  The way of the world makes his heart grow cold.  So sang Earth, Wind, and Fire back in 1975.  As witness we need look no further than the evil that was born long ago in a tenement flat on the East End of London, England.

Here lived the Grimstead family:  Roland Grimstead, his wife Penelope (“Penny”), and their little boy, Graeme.  Penny Hewitt Grimstead was a beautiful, gentle lady--far too beautiful, too gentle, and too much of a lady for the life she led.  What little money she could scrape together, she spent on her paintings--delicate, refined watercolors--and on her doting, adoring young son.  Graeme worshipped his mother, thought she was the center of the whole world, because of her kindness and humor and the little bits beauty and gentility that she brought into their hardscrabble, public-dole lives.  Unfortunately, whatever money did come into their flat that was not from the public dole came from Graeme’s father, who was everything that Graeme’s mother was not.

Roland Grimstead was an unintelligent, uneducated, bitter, hard-drinking, angry man, whipped and beaten by a life in which no job ever lasted and any kind of prosperity was a dream or a cruel joke.  And the recipient of his anger was the woman he had gotten pregnant and married.  Penny had always seen, or tried to see, the good in Roland.  She had tried to help him and tried to love him.  What she had gotten back all too often was his belt or his fist or the back of his hand.  Sometimes the beatings were truly terrible.  But Penny took them all--to keep her husband’s hands off their child.  When Roland flew into one of his frustrated, liquor-soaked rages, Graeme ran and ducked for cover and shuddered and cried at the pain he knew was being inflicted on his mother.  

Why did Penny stay with Roland?  Did she love him in spite of the abuse?  Did she still see the good in him in spite of it?  Did she pity him and see him as the victim of a world in which he was never good enough?  Did she see no better alternative for a single mother with no money of her own?  Could she not bear to separate a son from his father--even that father?  Did she, like so many other battered wives, see no way out?  Perhaps it was any or all of the above.  Penny’s brother Nigel tried many times to talk her into leaving, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.  Tomorrow, she thought, it could be better.  Tomorrow, she thought, he could be better.  So she stayed, and little Graeme lived half his life in beauty and gentleness, and half in terror.

Then, one awful day, Graeme returned home from playing to find that his father had gone into one rage too many, too badly.  There sat Roland Grimstead, drunk and weeping, on the kitchen floor, in a pool of blood--Penny’s blood.  She lay there at his knees, her skull cracked from Roland having furiously banged her head against the kitchen counter.  His mother slain by the monster she had married, the traumatized Graeme ran back into the streets and hid in the rubbish in an alley until the police, who had arrested Roland, came to find the boy.  Anguished, curled up inside himself, Graeme was bound over as a ward of the state until his grieving Uncle Nigel claimed him.

Nigel Hewitt worked as a handyman and general laborer on a country estate outside of London.  Once the property of wealthy noble landowners, the estate had been converted to a lavish resort for well-to-do tourists and business people.  Graeme refused to leave London until he and his uncle collected all that was left of Penny--her beautiful, delicate watercolors--to take with them to Nigel’s spare lodgings at the estate.  There the little boy lived with his uncle, and saw a very different world from the one he had known in the city.  It was the kind of world that his mother would have painted:  graceful, refined, elegant.  He looked at the resort, and the people who visited and stayed there, and something occurred to Graeme:  It was a world where only some people, certain people, were allowed.  It was a world to which only people of means were admitted, a world from which all others were barred by a wall of money and culture.  For want of money and its refining influence, all there was for a person was the kind of world from which Graeme had come, a world of dirt and cruelty and despair and anger.  It was the kind of world that discarded and destroyed beauty--like his mother and her art.  Graeme realized that people allowed these two unequal worlds to exist side by side, with most people living on the side that was ugly and harsh.  Seeing the difference between wealth and poverty, seeing that people allowed it to exist and didn’t seem to care, or that they believed it was the right and proper thing, and intuitively understanding that this gross disparity of lives was what had made his father a monster and cost Penny her life, little Graeme Grimstead learned to hate.  It was a hatred he would come to bear for all mankind.

People let this be--people who keep everything for themselves and leave nothing for everybody else.  That’s why Daddy was so mean and so mad; people like these made him that way.  I hate them.  I hate them all.  One day I’ll get them.  One day I’ll make them pay.  I’ll get the whole bloody world.  

Such thoughts in anyone’s mind can be dangerous.  But such thoughts in the mind of a boy who discovers that he is a genius--that’s something else again.  Because all it takes is a the anger of a wounded but brilliant little boy in the right place at the right time, with the right means at his command, to create an epic villain--the world’s greatest villain.  Next time we’ll learn how that evil, once planted, took root, and see the menace that grew from it--a menace that only the power of the Environauts could challenge!  For into the life of an angry little English boy would come...the Quantum Prism!

BRING ON THE BAD GUY!

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

--Graeme Grimstead!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!