Exomek

The Chief Conquerist of the Dobraxu Expansion Army, the diminutive alien Marjantar may not seem like much of a threat, but inside the high-tech Exomek vehicle, Marjantar becomes a near-unstoppable threat on whatever world they may be trying to conquer. But near-unstoppable is not unstoppable, as Marjantar has learned time and again in their efforts to conquer Zunoltia, where the Astro-Hero is ever there to defend against such threats.

With the loyalty of dozens of fellow Dobraxu soldiers, also using vehicles similar to the Exomek, Marjantar repeatedly attepts to make moves against Zunoltia. A failure of this magnitude could hurt Manjantar’s standing in the army, so they must try again and again, each time with more desperation.

I don’t think I have much to comment on for this one. I knew I wanted to give a villain to the Astro-Hero, so when I drew an alien invader, it seemed like a good fit. And, just to be complete, let us say that inside that vehicle there, behind the controls, Marjantar has a snake-like lower body, coiled around some more controls.

Killercat

There is a group called the Weird Assassins. If you’ve got a problem with someone who isn’t just a normal joe, you need an assassin who isn’t a normal assassin. That’s where the Weird Assassins come in. For a price these strange individuals will help you bring down anyone, no matter what.

Killercat is one of the Weird Assassins. Lewis Ridder has enhanced agility and reflexes as a result of cosmic energy released by a superhero fight in the middle of a city when he was young. He resents superhumans for what they did, though he has managed to find a way to make it pay off for him. Offering his services as a Weird Assassin helps Lewis put his children through school, keep food on the table, and he gets to end the occasional superhuman in the process.

This is another character who existed as a sketch in my files, nameless and storyless, so I decided to make up some stuff. The phrase “Weird Assassins” came to me and I figured I should work with that. After all, as normal as a guy in a cat suit being hired to kill people would be in the context of superhero comics, that’s some weird stuff man. Anyway, all too often a superhuman assassin in comics would be a killing-obsessed angry person with no life, so I though I’d do something otherwise here. I can expect I’ll probably end up doing more Weird Assassins over the course of the year.

Zapgunner

With his green skin, antennae, and high-tech pistol, the Zapgunner is, in fact, not an alien being. Bernard Einhorn was a feeble two-bit conman, scamming people in bars just to get by. During one such con, Einhorn was trying to convince a scientist that he had proof of extraterrestrial life. He had no such thing, but his claim was overheard by an actual undercover alien, who thought his cover had been blown. In a panic, this alien arranged things such that Einhorn would be trapped in an apparently alien form, distracting the scientist while he made his escape.

And so Einhorn was transformed into an alienoid form, but he also found the real alien’s raygun. Quickly noticing its power, Einhorn was able to escape the scientist and start using his strange new energy weapon to go on a crime spree he would never have been capable of when he was a frail loser criminal. With the help of this strange fortuitous transmutation, the Zapgunner had his the big leagues. Once barely worthy of the notice of the police, he is now an opponent of the Guild of Crime Fighters.

Termination Dwayne

Dwayne Nelson, a resident of Hoboken, is a troubled man. Dwayne has issues with alcohol, with anger, with authority. Of all the people you would want to wind up in a high-tech battlesuit, Dwayne is the last. But, somehow, Dwayne has indeed become mentally bonded to a high-tech battlesuit. Isn’t that always the way?

But having a powerful suit of armor capable to bringing down buildings and standing up to military shelling has not made Dwayne’s ambitions any grander. He is still more likely to rob a liquor store than to try to conquer the world. To make matters worse, the bond between Dwayne and his high-tech battlesuit functions even from a distance. Even when HAULER brings him in and Dwayne is separated from his suit, he can mentally control it to come and break him out again.

The name “Termination Dwayne” is something that I thought up very young, and a sketch of the character has been in my files. Now he gets his chance to shine! Or whatever. Dwayne’s full name and the fact he was a drunken loser were all there in my notes with the sketch, so I didn’t have to add much here tonight. I tied him to HAULER because a drunken crook seems like the sort of thing a cop-powered robot would be used to arrest.

Dayguard

Do monsters only come out at night? Do only shadows hide lurking evil? Is the sunlight a safe place? No. Monsters live in the daytime. Evil exists in in the broad daylight. If there’s any safety in sunlight it is thanks to the Dayguard.

Since time immemorial, a champion has been chosen to protect the world from mystical beings and evil spirits that walk among us. They live in our cities, not our wilderness. They can look like us, they can look like animals, they can look like monsters, or they can be invisible, but they are there. And the Dayguard is the only one who can find them. Many Dayguards of old have been locked up as insane, but Kennedy Light, the current Dayguard, strives to continue her work no matter how thankless.

I’m a nocturnal person and I think of the night as a perfectly pleasant time. Other people don’t feel that way, which is why so many horror takes place in the dark. But that is not a requirement of horror, so when I drew and named Dayguard on a whim, I decided that it might be good as a setting for Daylight Horror stories.

Montoroloxi the Magnificent

Planet Szunkring is highly a highly advanced world with sprawling metropolises and wonderful technology. But there is another side to Szunkring. The world’s abundant resources are fought over and those who get some use their resources primarily to get more and protect what they have. As a result, those with wealth have power and those without, have little. This division has created a suffering, desperate class of beings, some of whom are fed up and resort to violence, but others who just dejectedly go about their lives, unable to live up to the potential their great world should allow. But then there is Montoroloxi! Having invented a powerful suit of armor that can fly, lift great weights, survive direct bomb blasts, and much more. With this power Montoroloxi is fighting the status quo. Living in the wilderness, Montoroloxi has begun his quest to change things by helping the lower class. Raiding the rich and the corrupt, Montoroloxi finances his quest to build schools and hospitals for those who can’t afford the existing ones. Montoroloxi’s radical actions are not unnoticed, though. He has caught the attentions of the Council of Bosses, a corrupt group among the wealthy, have put their Security Minions into service to seek out the armoured upstart and bring him down. Can Montoroloxi survive to see his plans to fruition?

Montoroloxi is based off an old sketch of mine. The idea that he is some sort of power-armored alien Robin Hood is new, though. What does he look like under the armor? I’ll decide that the day that it actually matters. I have no idea where I came up with that weird idea for how his planet works.

In the interests of being easy on myself during this, the busy school season, I am going to rattle off some easy superheroes for a couple weeks. Instead of thinking up new characters and ideas, I’m going to use draw sketches of characters that already exist in my notes for my Hover Head stories.

As I mentioned last week, the New Superhero Team is a sort of rival group for the Team of Superheroes. Here we have two more members of that team:

The Sound Effector

Once a prominent sound technician, Amber Yoiks’s life changed after she helped record an album by a prog rock band made up of wizards. Accidentally inhaling some of their “Mystical Smoke”, Amber gained the ability to see, touch, and control sound. For example, if she heard a “POW” it would appear before as a floating word in a starburst, which she could then throw like a shuriken, or ride like a hoverboard, or just expand to make it deafening. With powers like that, she figured “might as well be a superhero.” You heard it here first.

Algo

When you are on a superhero team that routinely fights alien invaders, it can start to seem like you just don’t like aliens. That’s not the sort of image a group wants to foster, so that’s why the New Superhero Team brought in Algo, the Token Alien. With a ton of weird and wonderful powers, Algo is not only useful, he’s also a constant source of entertainment. He’s one of the good ones!

Astrona

Space is full of mystery. The human mind is only capable of knowing so much and there is so much more than that in the universe. Astrona is from that part. Although she takes the form of a humanoid woman, Astrona seems to be some sort of living embodiment of the idea of helping others. She soars the cosmos detecting what she calls “scarred stars” which have been poisoned by negativity. Around these stars are often planets with societies that have problems (disasters, tyrannical rulers, plague, etc.) and Astrona comes down as a sort of messianic figure and helps them, which heals the star.

Astrona is just my attempt to make a trippy cosmic sci-fi character in the style of the seventies comics when cosmic was an in-style thing. The problem is, I haven’t read all that much of the trippy cosmic sci-fi from the seventies, so I’m kinda phoning it. In case it isn’t obvious that is supposed to be a sort of Saturn-style ring around her. I have no idea how that works either.

Konwaag, the Magic Hunter

Konwaag comes from a planet that we would describe as post-apocalyptic. The world, once a high-tech utopia, was brought to ruin by a cult of wizards who sought to take over. Although the wizards were overthrown, the cost was too great. Konwaag grew up in the aftermath of this war and saw the damage that magic did, so when he found a trove of war-time technology designed specifically for hunting down wizards, and a space ship to go with it, he set about the universe to hunt down those who would tamper with magical forces.

I’ve mentioned more than once that I like aliens to look less human, but this is a character I drew from an old sketch I had lying around. I’m going to claim that under his costume Konwaag has all sorts of things that make him look less human…

Anyway, I don’t think Konwaag could stand on his own as a hero, probably, but I like the idea of him being a rival to another superhero, sort of like how Vartox was a rival for Superman, except instead of fighting over women, the hero (let’s say Noblewoman) would have to prevent him from attacking magic-users who aren’t evil, but they’d still work together against legitimate threats.