People With Phones Talking On Those Phones
Super Sunday: The Hateful King’s Supporting Cast
Last week I made a supporting cast for Valia, who is a character I sketched with little thought, but she then caught my imagination and grew. This week, though, I’m doing a cast for a character who came to me fully formed. I knew right from the beginning I wanted to tell the story that involves the Hateful King.
The king of Thrakodacia, Balus is a very good guy. For his entire adult life Balus has ruled his country in politics, but also kept a secret from the rest of the world: his country has been at war with a demonic sorcerer called the Hateful King. Even now, in the Twenty-First Century, Thrakodacia is a scene of swordfights, monsters, flying carpets, and fantastic adventure. But this has been a drain on the good king. He’s getting tired of the battle and wants to end it once and for all, but will this cause a slip-up that could be his undoing?
Balus is unapologetically intended to basically be a Disney prince. He’s generically good and handsome, the perfect opponent for someone as bad as the Hateful King. He’s even got a cute pet bat that is unusually intelligent.
Lendela is a sorceress ostensibly serving King Balus. She tends to come and go as she pleases and, of course, is absolutely cryptic about everything, but she has Thrakodacia’s best interests in mind, she assures everyone. It is largely through her efforts that the situation in Thrakodacia has not spread to the outside world, and it is true that she has long been training the country’s forces to fight the various supernatural entities. But still, she tends to come and go as she pleases and is absolutely cryptic about everything. But nobody knows where she goes and why she won’t just reveal whats he knows.
Lendela is the Merlin figure of this story. There’s a period in the evolution of the King Arthur legend during which Merlin was a sort of hybrid between Christianity and paganism that I would try to recreate with her. She’s strongly affiliated with the Orthodox Church of Thrakodacia, but she’s also into some other things that Balus and friends might find very unwholesome.
The Hateful King’s ultimate goal, naturally, is world domination. Obviously one person would have a rough time ruling the entire planet, so he wanted to start a family that would rule with him. He married another demon/human hybrid and, though the marriage did not last, it did lead to the birth of one child. Anticipating a great and violent future for his son, the King named him Gravefiller. Though he was not exactly pleased that the boy turned out so small, he never lost his hope that the Prince Gravefiller would be a fierce warrior and trained him endlessly in the ways of battle. As a teenager, the boy ran away from home.
After living in the wilderness for some time, the boy was found by King Balus’s men and brought to live with them. In this new home he found people who cared about him for things other than his potential as a fighter, and as a result, he was much more willing to fight. Joining the good guys in the fight against his father, Gravefiller is a fierce warrior after all.
I drew this guy and it wasn’t until I was coloring him that I realized he was basically a rip-off Etrigan. Oh well. Different skin color and background means it isn’t a ripoff, it’s an coincidental homage. Anyway, Gravefiller has a magic ring that can control fire.
Another red-skinned freak, the seven-foot-tall monster of a man has served the Hateful King for a long time, in a lot of battles, and has the scars to prove it. While the Hateful King is not a weakling by any means, it is right for a king to have soldiers, and the Bludgeon is the strongest and most loyal. The Bludgeon earned his title by surrendering himself fully to the King, becoming more a weapon and a tool than a person. He wants nothing more than to serve.
I have a great many more character ideas for this particular story and I hope to get them on here someday, but for now this will do and we’ll be back to the two characters a week after this, with the next approximate year’s theme.
Phone Guys 6th of October
Super Sunday: Valia’s Supporting Cast
I’m doing something different this week. I’m not limiting myself either to superhero or supervillain, and I’m doing a group of characters, but not one that would be called a “team”. I’m just going to pick a character I liked from the previous years and flesh out their world a little bit.
The character I choose is Valia, the Space God of Courage. She was uploaded in the very last week of Superhero Sundays, but she made an impression apparently, so in my very first week of Supervillain Sundays, I gave her a villain with Lord Terryr, the Space God of Fear. That wasn’t enough for me, apparently, as the Space Gods of Violence, the Violence Sisters, came along later.
Still, I can do more than that. Here’s some more of Valia’s family:
In the beginning there was nothing. The twin Emptinesses were in charge. But then came something. Even the very possibility of something. It was: the Great Genitor, the spirit of creation itself. Genitor fought the Emptinesses for a long time, until he finally had made enough room in which to create a universe. In this new universe, Genitor begat Astrolympians, a group of Space Gods each embodying some concept or another. With this pantheon beneath him, to keep things running, Genitor is able to focus on smaller projects, like inspiring inventors or artists whose creations mean no less to him than that first one he fought so hard for.
My design here is a straight-up Jack Kirby wannabe thing. If you’re creating a pantheon of space gods, I don’t think there is anyone better to emulate. I tried to make a sort of explosion theme (just that thing on his helmet and the general fiery color scheme, really) that is meant to be evokative of the big bang.
The Space God of Intelligence is Constelli. Constelli is a decent sort, aware that there’s no particularly good reason not to be. A being of rational thought, naturally, is more likely to ally with Valia than the bad Space Gods who want to tear things down and ruin it for everyone. Typically Constelli is occupied in simply studying creation from a UFO/laboratory, but will come to Valia’s aid when it seems necessary.
The idea is that seeing constellations represents seeing patterns in the world and that is the first step toward rational thought. I think that’s sound enough for a Space God, yeah?
Unsurprisingly, Influence is the Space God of influence. Unlike Constelli, Influence will work with anyone who wants to sway someone else, good or evil. As long as you are willing to pay tribute, he will work alongside you.
I didn’t actually sketch Influence specifically for this role, but the alien look of him made me associate him with the Space Gods.
Space Gods are fine and all, but you know who isn’t Space Gods? Mortals. The old epics were full of mortals. Let’s have some here.
Carter Archibald was a great civil rights leader whose fearlessness in the face of overwhelming oppression caught the attention of Valia. They fell in love and Nicole Archibald was the result. Now an adult, Nicole is a member of a special police task force for dealing with the sorts of situations that crop up with Space Gods around. She’s aware of her status as a demi-god, but has shut her mother out of her life both because she failed to save her father (who was stabbed to death when Nicole was young), but also because she isn’t quite sure how to feel about the idea that her mother is the anthropomorphization of a concept. It’s not normal to know that you are, basically, half fictional. Nicole is brave, there is no doubt, but she will not admit to being her mother’s child.
So there we go. By this point, Valia is probably the most fleshed out concept I’ve done here with the exception of Justice-Man. And so much of it is still in my head. Imagine if I could actually, you know, tell stories…
