The Strondovarians have plenty of kinds of vehicles, including wheeled ones, flying craft, and boats. We’d recognize all of that here on Earth. But one of the most popular kinds of conveyance on planet Gurx are what we’d call “Mechs” (and they’d call “Strenyacav”). You know the ones: armoured machines that are like big robots with a living pilot. Strondos love those.

One element of Strondovarian technology, relevant not just to the mechs, but all electronics and machines designed by Strondo culture: it’s all designed to be modular and universally compatible. Parts and components can be salvaged and reused with easy. And planned obsolescence would make designers into pariahs. All this, combined with the generally lackadaisical Strondovarian attitude toward possession of material goods, has resulted in a culture of mech pilots that have their own unique custom designs, but don’t specifically own their own mechs. When they need a mech, they’ll grab the nearest available one and quickly modify it to match their preferences. Often this is done simply by bringing the mechs into large hangars that perform the customization based on the pilot’s profile as it is registered in the Knowledge Bank. In a way, this makes mechs the largest reactive devices a Strondo is likely to use.

This is a pretty standard Personal Mech as one might find being used by security forces. Designed for a single pilot, they can probably fit a single passenger if they’re not specced so heavily that there’s no room left. In addition to security or combat, single-pilot mechs will often be adapted to roles such as construction or exploration of dangerous areas.

The standard design of a Personal Mech is made to emulate the exoskeletal Vootuph species found on the planet Gurx, and as such will occasionally be referred to by the names of such species if the resemblance is enough that the Strondos find the comparison funny.

This second example has a body plan much more like that of a Strondovarian, and is much more massive in physical size, standing as they do around 50 metres tall on average. While they’re often designed so that a single Strondo can pilot them, to operate one of these to the full extent of its potential usually requires two or three pilots working together in the cockpit.

These massive machines have peaceful uses, they have much more room for transportation of passengers for example, but they are generally designed for combat. On planet Gurx, it is now rare for combat of this sort to be necessary, but every city has several such mechs waiting for a day when gigantic fighting machines may be needed.

All of my Superman Thoughts posts are arbitrary ideas and niche beliefs about characters I don’t own and about which my opinions don’t actually matter, but usually I can defend my beliefs well enough. Not so this time. This time it’s really just an idea I had and liked:

Jon Kent should be a psychiatrist.

Jon is the child of Clark Kent and Lois Lane. In the comics that DC is publishing now, he has grown and taken on the role of Superman for Earth. In spite of certain elements of what they’ve done with him (they’ve tied him intimately to the Batman characters since the beginning, and you know I don’t like that) I like Jon a lot.

Jon is a good chance to do things with Superman that are different from Clark. They’re positioning him as a more “activist” superhero than his father and the only problem I have there is that Clark should also be seen that way. Right now they’re exploring his sexuality. He’s Bi, as I always said I’d want to write Clark, except I would never have been willing to split up Lois and Clark to explore it. With Jon you can. But one aspect I’ve not seen covered at all and which would give us a real place to play up his differences from his father is his occupation. What does Jon want to do with his life outside of superheroing?

Well, as I said above, I think he should go into psychiatry. He could become a Superman for Mental Health, as it were. When Marvel’s superhero psychiatrist, Doc Samson is written to my liking, he’s the type who still has to get into superfights and stuff, but he does it with the intent to help the person he’s fighting. He cares deeply about deescalating and talking. Obviously one doesn’t need to be a psychiatrist to do those things (when Clark is written well, it’s true of him), but doing it as a profession is different.

With Clark, investigative journalism is the perfect choice. It’s a story engine that lets him seek out the corruption in society and find ways to help people. With Jon, psychiatry could be the same thing. It just fits, and it’s different from his father.

I know I have no way of getting this to happen, but I’ve now put it on the Internet and that’s a start. If Jon ends up a reporter like his parents, they’ve failed the character.

It’s something I’ve complained about very often: I don’t think superhero comics give enough focus to the normal human supporting casts of their heroes and villains. Therefore, it should be no surprise that, even though the Rocket Racer has a large family, there has been little to no focus on the supporting case of this, if we’re being very generous, Z-list Marvel character.

While Bob’s family are one of his primary motivations as a character (he is the oldest of seven children and feels like he needs to help his ill single mother support the family), they have hardly been seen. Only one of them has a name (his mother, Emma), and only half of his siblings have even been depicted (most likely the three youngest). We know that Bob’s father left the family when Bob was a teenager and that Bob thinks he is a loser. Every other detail about Bob’s family is an unknown that can offer potential stories.

But if anyone cared about tapping that potential, I worry they’d ruin it. I dislike so many of the things that are usually done with superhero supporting casts that I fear those would be the first stories told using the Farrells. Naturally I have plenty of story ideas I don’t want to give away, so what I’ll do now is list some things I absolutely don’t want to happen to them:

• First of all, don’t kill them all. One of the first instincts superhero writers have is to take things away from the heroes to create a momentary burst of drama. It’s usually done in a damned lazy way, and if someone were to kill off Bob’s whole family, it’d be such. I may not like it, but I admit you could kill one or two. If Emma dies, it would be sad, but I feel like it’d be a bit of a relief to Bob and he’d hate himself for it, so there’s story potential there. If someone HAD to kill off one of his siblings, at least there would still be more to work with. If Bob’s father died, it could prompt a story about Bob’s relationship with his father, and that is something we need, though this way would cut off potential for ongoing stories on the topic.
• On the topic of Bob’s father, they should absolutely not reveal him to be “important” in some way. Obviously he is important in that he is Bob’s father, but I don’t want a reveal about how he is a super-secret government agent or a secret supervillain or an alien prince or something. The fact that Bob is from inauspicious roots is a core facet of the character and we need more “unimportant” people in our fiction.
• Similarly, I wouldn’t want to reveal that any of his siblings are mutants. Mutants are randomly-powered people who can manifest in the Marvel world, so there is no in-universe reason that one of his siblings couldn’t suddenly gain powers, but I just find it would be too much of a coincidence. If one of them became a hero or a villain as a result of what Bob has been through, that would be a believable consequence of what has come before, but one of them who just happens to have powers strains credibility.
• But of course, I wouldn’t want all of his siblings to become superheroes or villains. Much like the killing, if it happened to one I could accept that because there would be more. But what I want from this family is a look at a normal family with few means trying to get by in the world of superheroes.

I know I’ll never be happy unless I’m the one who gets to reveal the details of this family, but if someone else bothered to do it, I could accept that if they avoid these potential pitfalls.