I messed up the scheduling and this post is going up late. My apologies to the hundreds of zero people who were waiting for it.

Volcanocles

What happens when a radioactive meteor falls to Earth and lands in a radioactive volcano? Volcanocles happens!

Volcanocles, the volcano that walks like a man, is a fearless champion, a raucous warrior, a man of rock and magma who strides the Earth like the heroes of old. With the strength of a demi-god and the powers of a volcano, Volcanocles is a larger than life figure like those of myth. He is very concerned about his reputation and will go out to fight monsters just for the renown and he will challenge other heroes to competitions. Still, he’s one of the good guys and his grand sense of honor means that you can count on him to be on your side when there’s some big and important threat to deal with. And afterward he will be the first one to buy you all drinks (alcohol works on man-volcanos, I guess).

Diamondtough

The Fighting Diamond was a superhuman vigilante who fought crime in her crime-addled neighborhood for a decade until her powers faded. She missed the superhero life, but found other, perhaps superior, ways to support her community as a lawyer. Eventually she gave birth to a daughter, Maggie, who, upon reaching puberty, developed the same super strength and amazing durability that the Fighting Diamond had had.

Styling herself as “Diamondtough” Maggie starts her own superhero career, against the wishes of her mother, who has come to realize that beating up criminals isn’t necessarily the best way to improve the world. Maggie, meanwhile, is very aware that her powers will probably not last forever and could fade like her mother’s did and wants to do as much as she can with them as fast as she can.

Diamondtough was one of those drawn-on-the-spot sketches. We’ve got a pretty simple premise here: rebellious teenage daughter in conflict with mother. I threw the concept of her superhero identity being a legacy thing, because it really gives the mother more credibility on the topic.

It’s the first comic update of the month, and as always that means it is a Little Choy kinda day.

Who is Choy insulting today? Why it is the former Ensign Jones from the Starship Renewal.

The Phone Guys also happen:

If I were thinking ahead, I might have saved these two for sometime near Halloween. Instead, I didn’t:

Killshadow

A young woman was murdered by a vampire and, as one might expect, rose as a vampire herself. But through sheer willpower and hatred she has the strength to oppose the vampire who killed her. That vampire is now the leader of an Eastern-European crime syndicate, so the woman, now called Killshadow, is slaughtering her way through her killer’s army in a bloody swath.

I don’t really have much else to say story-wise, because it is a pretty generic revenge deal. While the easiest inspiration for Killshadow is the 90s-style anti heroes (especially Spawn), but instead of making any kind of comment on those, I’m really trying to comment on the way vampires are treated these days. A lot of people have complained lately about “sparkly” vampires ruining everything, but I’m here to tell you that vampires have been a mess since long before that. Even things that I legitimately enjoy like Blade comics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer treat vampires as hordes of mooks to be mowed down by the hero. What I want is a return to a time when a single vampire was a threat.

Killshadow has ALL the vampire powers. She can turn to a wolf or a bat or to mist. She can flit through the darkness, control vermin and weather, and basically everything the folklore vampires could do. And she is in no way the sexy Vampirella-style vampire. Under that stupid mask she looks total Nosferatu-style. And while her sense of “justice” keeps her killing bad guys (this is still my superHERO-creating year) she does not brood about having to live off blood. She revels in the slaughter of her enemies and enjoys every moment.

Just so you know, I tried about twenty combinations of words like “blood,” “night,” “kill,” “dead,” “dark,” “shadow,” and a bunch of others before I got something that sucked just the right amount and also wasn’t already used too many times.

Queen Deathknell

Built around a portal to the spirit world is the hidden city of Cemeteria. Though the world at large is unaware of the existence of Cemeteria, some supervillain learns about it and, seeking power over life and death, attacks the city. But Queen Deathknell and her army rise to oppose him, saving the day but revealing their presence. Queen Deathknell (Nell to her friends) is a benevolent ruler who maintains order in Cemeteria to keep the world from being overrun by undead, and keeping the afterlife from being corrupted.

It’s pretty common in comics to have rulers of fantastic realms play a big role (You’ve got the Atlantises of Aquaman and Namor, or my favorite, Black Panther‘s Wakanda, just to name a few), so Queen Deathknell is my one of those. I also like to take the imagery of death and treat it as not-evil, which is always nice.

Now that I’m travelling to various locations around the city for work, and riding various elevators, I’m noticing something: Most elevators don’t have cameras in them. The elevators of my own building have had cameras for most, if not all, of the time I have lived here. I have a tendency to talk to them when I’m riding, for my own amusement. Now that I’m in all these other buildings and I don’t get to do that, riding in elevators has become sad and lonely. If I can’t mug for a camera, how am I supposed to spend my time? Not being weird? Psh.

Haiku!

A watermelon
is coming to my table.
It will not leave whole.

Since I am confident that everyone everywhere is curious for updates on my shaving situation, here’s the scoop: The Three-Blade Razor I was using at last report has turned out to suck. The blades seem to have dulled after not even a month of usage (shaving about once a week), which does not compare well to the actual disposable razors I’d been using for some time prior, which got through at least as much time without giving me problems. I haven’t thrown out the three-blader just yet, because I might be able to get more use from it, but I did open up the fabled five-blader to finish off the half of my face when the three-blader couldn’t cut it. I don’t feel justified giving a review to the five-blader until it does a full face-job, but it looks good so far. And if its blades can endure, five blades may be the next thing PDR is willing to endorse.

In other news related to PDR’s jaw, my jaw has been sore all day since I woke up. My theories are thus: Either I slept on it funny, or I was attacked and punched in the face by some manner of Dream Demon. In the more likely case, the latter, the fact that I only suffer a sore jaw proves that I bested the Dream Demon because I am kickass awesome.