Super Sunday: City Bird In The Wilderness

The Situation

An albino pigeon, sick of the city life, goes to the wilderness to try to find a better way. And it sucks and he makes a mess of it every time.

The Characters

City Bird

City Bird is the only recurring character on this show. He’s a boorish jerk who just wants everything to go his way with no personal effort. So, having moved out of the city (both because he was getting sick of that life, and because he’d burned a lot of bridges with the pigeons there) he is now trying out “simpler” life in the woods. One week he’ll try living with some raccoons, the week after he mooches off some moose, and so on. He’d also have to learn to avoid predators, with only his city wits to get him through.

Notes

I feel like this is a terrible idea that could still somehow produce a show that would amuse me.

Let’s say the wilderness City Bird is wandering is the same one that the Horribloid is in. Why not?

Super Sunday: Bella Harrison and Bunnra the Mighty

Bella Harrison

Bella Harrison is an enlightened old black woman who offers wise spiritual advice to white people who are having problems. It happens all the time. Some white person is losing confidence before the big game, or a married white couple is drifting apart, or some white detective just can’t seem to pull together the necessary clues to solve the case. One conversation with Bella and her down-to-earth wisdom helps to turn everything around.

But this skill has not gone unnoticed. People in power have caught on that Bella always seems to know what to do. A secret government task force was formed. At first they just monitored as she advised white people, but then they tried to go undercover and solicit advice for a made-up problem. Bella saw right through the ruse and fled. Now Bella is on the lam, always one step ahead of the task force that wants to know her secrets, even if it means bringing her in and dissecting her brain.

The Magical Negro is, of course, a patronizing attempt at white people who make movies to create black characters who are so great that the people who make the movies can’t possibly be racist. Instead of creating black characters who were realistically human, they did this. Naturally I needed to get onto that bandwagon and make it weird.

Bunnra the Mighty

Bunnra was, for a time, just an ordinary rabbit used in ordinary magic acts. She would “vanish” into a hat or “appear” from a sleeve. It was a good enough gig for a rabbit, she supposed, but it didn’t last. One day, the magician who owned her bought a used hat that he thought would add a touch of flair to his act. What he didn’t realize was that this hat was actually once the property of a genuine wizard. If he’d placed it on his head he would have been instructed in all manner of mystical arts, but before he did so, he wanted to make sure Bunnra would fit, and so it was that she was the one who was privy to the secrets of the cosmos. Soon being in a magic act is not enough for her and she returns to the woods to be back with her own kind, as a magical rabbit queen!

I started a tradition when I got rabbit-themed Superheroes and a rabbit-themed Supervillain into previous Super Sunday years. Had to keep it going. I think she and her realm of rabbits would have to meet the Horribloid.

Super Sunday: The Wine Taster and The Sword-Snout

The Wine Taster

Suppose you’re at a party, or any kind of social gathering for that matter, and you see one person among the crowd wearing a strange mask, sipping from a glass of wine, and seemingly focused very intently on you. Maybe you turn to someone you know and ask what the deal is, but when you turn to look back, they’re gone. You’ve just been a victim of the Wine Taster.

The Wine Taster is an Unsettling Oddity, a being who exist solely to cause confusion, create insecurity, and make people ill at ease. These sorts of emotions cause the psychic plane to roil and bubble, generating the energy on which the Oddities feed. While more predictable entities might try to create outright fear in their victims, the Oddities look down on those as lacking in subtlety. They’re the snobs of the mystical entity set.

As with last week’s entries, I’m exploring characters who would exist in the world of the Secret Government Robots comic, in which the Oddities are one of SecGov’s fellow weird governments.

The Sword-Snout

In the forests of Upper Canada a most strange and monstrous creature has been reported. Hunters have spotted a large rodentlike beast, the size of a wolf, but with a blade protruding from its face. It has been seen running through other animals, such as deer, rabbits, or even birds. It has been seen feasting on their remains. But no hunter has reported being attacked. Or at least, none that has ever been attacked has managed to report it.

This one was at least partially inspired by a recent few hours I spent reading about Fearsome Critters. I like that sort of thing. After I’d done the sketch, I figured it would be a good opponent for Horribloid.

Super Sunday: The Monster Serpent and the Phantom Rabbit

The Monster Serpent

Snakes have a bad reputation. It’s a shame, really, ’cause plenty of them are pretty nice.

The Monster Serpent, however, is not nice. This monstrous snake is as cruel and cunning as any stories snake has ever been. The countryside around her lair is unusually empty, for even the animals have come to fear the dire snake that feasts on any who come within its range. When hungry, the serpent will leave her grounds to hunt for any animals, including wolves, bears, and even humans. The only being brave enough to defend the nearby animal population from this beast is another beast, the Horribloid.

The Horribloid is one of the ideas I had during the superhero year that I came to like more than I ever expected. I built up this whole superhero/Lord of the Rings/Watership Down sort of setting and it took off in my mind. I wanted to come up with a villain for that setting that is not a human and this was the result.

The Phantom Rabbit

When Chuck Grosnington was bombarded by radioactive space energy, he mutated into a hulking pink rabbit man strong enough to shatter steel and leap miles at a time. Calling himself the “Phantom Rabbit” he has decided he can do whatever he wants now, so he rampages around and acts like a total jerk.

I can still remember the day when I was in my late teens, working at my summer job and, quite bored, I drew the Phantom Rabbit. I just liked the idea that, in spite of their being nothing remotely “phantomy” about the character, he insisted on being called “The Phantom Rabbit”. Anyway, when I realized that I managed to do two rabbit-related heroes last year, I knew I had to get at least one rabbit villain, so the memory of this character came back.

“Monster Serpent” and “Phantom Rabbit” seemed like a good pair to put up in one post.

Super Sunday: Halberd Man and Horribloid

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.