First Monday of the month and that means it is time to check in on Little Choy:

Who is that that Little Choy is insulting today? Why, it’s some guy who had a cameo appearance in the third issue of my Space Army comics! Note to self, try to find a way of improving the quality of the Space Army scans sometime.

As usual, there’s also Phone Guys:

Okay, we’re out of July, so instead of looking back at old characters I created as a kid, let’s see what new things I’ve got to offer:

Halberd Man

Dirk Carson worked for the movies. He was a stunt man and weapons expert specializing in medieval and fantasy epics. Dirk’s brother was a director and the two often worked together. It was a good time, but eventually Dirk’s brother wound up in debt to some crooked businessmen. Increasingly desperate, he embezzled from the studio. When Dirk found out, he offered to help, but it was too late, his brother was captured, then killed by a hitman before his case could go to court. Dirk, unable to find justice for his brother through legal means, Dirk wound up throwing together a ridiculous costume from the studio wardrobe and using a halberd to seek his own revenge. The Halberd Man now stalks the night, bringing down the criminal empire that is responsible for his brother’s death.

There’s a lot of superheroes (and villains) based around old-style weaponry. The most popular is going to be your archer characters, who are all descended from Robin Hood, really, but you can find characters with swords and whips and axes and hammers. So anyway, it was with that in mind that I picked some obsolete piece of weaponry and make a superhero out of it.

Horribloid

Roaming the countryside is a creature, the creation of a mad scientist who tampered with things man was not meant to tamper with. The Horribloid! Large, strong, brutal, it hides in caves and woods, roaming wherever it may. It is occasionally seen by people, who flee before its fearsome visage, but it seems to want nothing to do with people and keeps to itself. Or so it seems. In fact, the Horribloid is not alone. The Horribloid is able to communicate with animals, and has friends among the birds, rabbits, foxes, and other animals of the area. In the service of his friends, he has become something of a superhero to these animal civilians, a strange visitor who devotes his time to their protection.

This is one of those cases where I drew something and then had to make up a story to go along with it. I look at this guy and I think of the kind of monsters that might show up in some Golden Age comics, but since this is a good guy I had to flip some of the story points around. But then you just get Frankenstein’s Monster, so I threw the bit about animal-talkin’ and I had something new.

Well, I’ve had the new phone almost a week now. Here’s some thoughts on the experience so far: I don’t like the fact that when I pick up my phone, I have to hit an additional button to make it be a phone. My old phone, I flipped it open and it was a phone. This one, I do a swipe of the screen and it is still a computer, not yet a phone. I have to then tell it to be a phone. Similarly, if I answer a call from my apartment intercom to buzz someone in, I used to be able to just answer the call and hit the nine key. Now I have to answer the call, then tell it to give me a keyboard, and then I can hit the nine. I also had an issue with my phone doing things while it was in my pocket, so I had to set it so I trace a pattern with my finger before it I can even get into the thing. I’m an old man! I don’t want to be spending all my time turning my phone into a phone!

One definite upside: the ability to use apostrophes when texting. My old phone couldn’t do that.

Here’s this:

Here’s the final pair of characters from the Justice-Man supporting cast:

The Lupine

J. Aaron Stallone was an orphaned boy who had superhuman powers. He came to the attention of the the super-agency BEST. Given that Justice-Man had been through a similar experience, it was decided that the established hero should work with the boy to try to help him adjust. Though it was not the intention, Stallone was able to turn this into a position as a sidekick. Styling himself as Justice-Kid, Stallone was allowed to come along on some of Justice-Man’s simpler missions for a few years, while learning from BEST in his off hours. That wasn’t enough, though, and eventually Stallone created another secret identity, that of the Lupine, so that he could sneak out at night and fight crime on his own. The mysterious wolf-based vigilante made a big name for himself and Justice-Man and BEST had no reason to expect that anything was wrong with Stallone.

That continued until the day the Lupine was arrested after killing and eating a couple of criminals. BEST and Justice-Man were confused and horrified when the Lupine was unmasked. Stallone is now in prison, but still considers himself a good guy (he insists that the fact he only ever ate criminals makes it okay) and Justice-Man still visits once a month, hoping to find some way of helping him.

So anyway, the story of Justice-Kid is basically a worst case scenario of the whole teen sidekick thing. I mentioned that the Lupine still considers himself a good guy, and that’s true. For stories I hope to tell someday, that will be important. It is worth noting that Stallone’s powers are in no way wolf-like. He’s got glowing super punches, for example. His logic with his costume choice is that it would be nuts for him to use an identity that gave away the kind of powers he had. There’s a method to his madness.

The Old Sage

There is a mysterious old man who has been a mysterious old man since at least the 1930s. He hangs around on the edge of the superhero community appearing when there are problems of some mystical or cosmic significance, seemingly using magical abilities, though he won’t admit to it. They call him the Old Sage because his true identity is unrevealed (he insists that it is unimportant). Justice-Man, however, knows more than most. Over the years the two have worked together many times and Justice-Man has learned that the mysterious stranger is actually from another dimension, a fantastic realm of magic and monsters. He has travelled the cosmos to fight evil and uses the superheroes of Justice-Man’s world as a handy workforce. Perhaps his methods are a bit underhanded, but Justice-Man has grown to trust the strange wizard, and so the Old Sage continues to serve his purposes from the edges of rational thought.

There were times when young PDR was creating his superhero universes when he would decide that it would be best (or more “realistic”) if he tried to make his superhero universe Hard Sci-Fi, meaning having no magic or aliens or anything that didn’t really exist. That never ever worked out for long. “Realistic” superhero fiction is not what PDR actually wants out of superheroes. Anyway, during the times when PDR was creating his superhero universes, he was also creating fantasy universes. That’s where the Old Sage comes from, my fantasy universe, and he’s travelled to the superhero world to be the Dr. Strange-style magic man.