Timebomb is not on anyone’s list of top ten Superman villains. Nor on anyone’s top hundred, probably. Mostly, I don’t think anybody remembers this guy exists. His appearances between two comics in the 90s, both of which were about him being trounced and arrested, add up to about five pages. But there’s just enough there that I think he could be spun into something more.

Now, who is Timebomb? He’s a supervillain with very little known motivation. His powers are exactly those of Marvel’s villain Nitro. He can explode himself (or parts of his self) and then reform himself.

I’ve said it before, but I think we need to grow a rotating cast of minor villains who can be used to populate Metropolis’s criminal underworld. Timebomb is pretty perfect for that. He is exactly the type who can be seen in crowd scenes in prison or who can be hired by some mastermind criminal to serve as muscle.

But can such a nonentity as he be given a personality? I think so. Working with the theme of being a “time bomb” I’d make him a guy with anger problems. That’s a trait that could be used in a serious story, but can also be easily condensed for use in short comedic appearances. And the very typical villain desire to prove how tough he is suggests a guy who values violence as a masculine trait. There’s something to contrast against Superman himself.

If I continue my letter grading that I’ve done for previous villains, I think we need to bring Timebomb up to the C-list of Superman villains.

Since January 2013, I’ve been doing those posts on Sundays where I put up sketches of characters and describe them and such. It’s been fun. It was mostly an attempt to keep me doing something every week, while also expanding on the fictional universes I enjoy creating so much.

Since July 2015, I have also, not in the “public” view that is this website, been creating a tabletop RPG that takes place in my fictional universe(s). It’s a lot of work because, for some reason, I decided to build it from scratch, and I have pretty minimal experience with such RPGs to begin with. But I’ve greatly enjoyed doing it.

But these two projects, pretty time consuming as they are, have had an unintended result. While I have now a lot of raw material about my universes, I haven’t gained all that much new actual story content set in those universes. So now I’m gonna stop doing the Super Sunday sketches regularly (they will still pop up on occasion when I can’t think of anything else or what have you), and will try to use Sundays for actual story content, or perhaps discussion of the PDR RPG. I haven’t decided just yet.

Let’s see how this goes.