I continue my sketching villains for the hero I created in Junior High:

Fire Queen

The Fire Queen is Janet Faulker, the matriarch of a powerful family of supervillains. The ability to create and control flames has been in her family family, which has made it easy to make a fortune as arsonists, saboteurs, enforcers and assassins. In time, this family became the top crime family not only in their home country of New Zealand, but throughout much of the Southern Hemisphere. But now, the family has a problem. One of Janet’s daughters, Jessica, has gone against the family. Now calling herself “Combustion” Jessica has become a superhero, fighting not only crime in America, but also against her flame-slinging family back home. Janet does not hate her daughter, she does not want to kill her, but sometimes a mother has to do something she doesn’t want to do, for the good of the rest of her family. Janet can’t let one upstart child ruin all the hard work her parents and grandparents had put into their lives. Janet can’t let one runaway tear down everything that should provide for the other children and grandchildren. Janet has to kill Combustion and as many of her superhero friends as it takes.

I had mentioned the Fire Queen in my childhood notes, but never did a sketch. I basically went with a woman with even more fire than Combustion had. With a goal that simple, I feel I was successful.

Grimface

Justice-Man was given by an unknown organization, designed to be an ultimate assassin. While he was freed by the good guys and chose a life of crime-fighting, there were other children used as weapons by the unknown organization. When Justice-Man and his allies finally did stop the organization, many of their operatives were in the field and had nowhere to go.

Grimface has no memory of his childhood. As far as he knows, he has always been as he is now. His cyborg enhancements made him an ideal assassin of superhuman targets, but now he is on his own. He has learned enough to blend in. He poses as a homeless man and lives on the streets in plain sight, but where nobody looks. But he always carries a bag with him, in which he keeps a strange mask. When he wants something, he wears the mask, and there are few who can stop him from getting what he wants.

Unlike all the other villains this month, Grimface was not something I dug up in my notes. Sure I have dozens of other Justice-Man villains among those notes that I could easily have thrown in here, but I figure that if my imaginary character has continued having imaginary adventures since my junior high years, he has probably made some new enemies in that time. (Besides, Super Sunday is supposed to be about me creating new things, so next week we get back to that.)

I will now continue my month-long look at supervillains I created for the Justice-Man character when I was little:

Smash Man

An expert in super-genetic sciences, Rich Rogers originally made a name for himself as a supercriminal by enhancing himself so that he could throw glowing punches strong enough to shatter stone. With these powers he did the usual thing: bank robberies and superhero fights, but eventually he wound up in prison.

But the Chopper broke him out and put him in charge of the science division of his massive criminal empire. With nearly unlimited resources at his command, Smash Man now routinely makes clones and strange monsters, as well as giving superhuman abilities to those who can afford it. He is one of the Chopper’s most loyal agents, so much so that he is considered by some to be second-in-command, though Chopper is not willing to officially give that role to anyone. This has caused tension among some of the other potential seconds in command (including one of Chopper’s sons), but so everyone is too scared of Chopper to risk being upfront about these issues.

I assume that, as a child, I thought I was being very clever by making a guy called something like “Smash Man” a brilliant scientist. Also, there was definitely my standard “glowing hands to avoid drawing hands” thing in play here.

Sally “Chainsaw” McQueen

Sally McQueen, unlike the majority of old people, is handy with a chainsaw. Also, she’s a mass murderer. For decades this old lady lured or kidnapped or stalked people and tortured them to death. Any investigators who came close to discovering her identity would wind up dead, including a police tactics units who raided her home and were slaughtered by a variety of traps. It was not until Justice-Man took an interest in the case that the murderous career of Chainsaw McQueen came to an end.

I’ve been mostly drawing my Justice-Man characters as if they were fifteen years older than they were when I created them, but McQueen was already elderly back then. If I got to tell stories of Justice-Man, I’d have to assume she was an early enemy of Justice-Man and has probably since died in prison. Oh well!

Champion of Doom

The Greater Toronto Area is basically gone. Too many robots, monsters, and supervillains over too long a time, and the city could not last. That part of Canada now resembles a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with roving gangs and mutant troublemakers. The Champion of Doom, having proven himself among the toughest of this hellscape’s denizens, is the leader of an especially violent biker gang. Often lending his services to criminals outside of the Toronto Wasteland, for things like smuggling or human trafficking, the Champion of Doom and his servants frequently come into conflict with Justice-Man and his allies.

The idea that Toronto is destroyed by all the supervillain activity in Toronto led to its destruction was not originally part of my Junior-High-Era notes, but things like the surviving Justice-Man comic, in which young PDR wrote “an estimated 90 000 000 dollars” of damage is done to the city, kinda led me down that road. It presents some story possibilities that I think would be interesting to explore.

K-Roy

K-Roy was an early creation of Dr. Blade. One of only a few dozen robotic intelligences the villain created before he left the Earth altogether to found an orbital city. Before leaving the planet, K-Roy and the other intelligent machine soldiers fought against superheroes in various world conquest plots, but in space Dr. Blade’s robot army has grown sedentary. They prevent any human exploration of space, but apart from the occasional hit and run raid, they have been content to simply live in their city much like the humans do below, as ordinary civilians. K-Roy himself has made a space for himself as a philosopher and educator of other new intelligences.

K-Roy himself is not all that important a robot. He’s just one of an army of hundreds, maybe thousands, created by the mad scientist Dr. Blade. Since my goal on Super Sundays is to create sketches of characters who have not appeared elsewhere, I could not use Dr. Blade himself. He has shown up in the old Justice-Man comic, as well as one Little Choy. So, I found a robot among my notes and used him as an example of Blade’s greater army. Other Dr. Blade robots have been seen Hanging out in space and another was also a Little Choy victim.

The orbital robot city of Dr. Blade would function in stories as one of those fantastic locations that heroes have to visit from time to time. Still, as Dr. Blade gets older, he could perhaps find his desire to rule the world more urgent and he could be a significant thorn in Justice-Man’s side once more.

Some surprise hours at work mean I’m running late on this Super Sunday, but who cares right?

Last year, during the Superhero Sundays, I spend July doing the supporting cast of my Justice-Man character. This year, I’ll do some of his villains.

The Chopper

The Chopper is Justice-Man’s arch-nemesis and he’s the most feared man on the Earth. Samuel O’Hara inherited powers from his father: He can generate blades of telekinetic force from his forearms that can cut through pretty much anything. That’s neat and all, but it isn’t a power that would alone make someone the most dangerous in a world full of superhumans, but O’Hara makes up for that by being a ruthless and cunning criminal mastermind. O’Hara started as a serial killer in his teens. Eventually he was caught, but his powers caught the notice of a mysterious unknown organization. Freeing the Chopper to use him as a field agent, and later as an instructor for other agents, the organization gave O’Hara the time and freedom he needed to sow the seeds he would later use to build a criminal empire. This same organization would later use a teenage boy as a weapon, the same boy who would become Justice-Man, but by then the Chopper was on his own.

Now, decades later, Chopper’s biggest asset is his ruthlessness. He runs an international organization that includes armies of robots and cyborgs all completely loyal to their brutal master, but law enforcement agencies, and even superheroes, are reluctant to work against him. Chopper’s powerful army keeps other, potentially worse villainous groups from gaining a stronger footing, and any good guy who does try to oppose them is met with swift retaliation against friends and family. Only Justice-Man is willing to do anything against O’Hara and even the other heroes tend to think he is riling up a force he shouldn’t.

Powersaw

Powersaw was once a woman who just happened to find some sort of magical unbreakable saw that seemed to be able to cut through anything. Using this as a mercenary, the woman took the name Powersaw. As time went on, she had the blade cybernetically attached to her arm, and since then has been replacing more and more of her person with cybernetics. She’s not worried about losing her humanity, though. After all, a person who discovers a magic saw blade and her first instinct is to use it as a mercenary isn’t all that high on humanity to begin with. Justice-Man encounters a lot of superhuman mercenaries in his career and Powersaw is one of the toughest.

It was not intentional that I scheduled two villains who could cut through anything today, but I don’t care. Deal with it.

I think I’m done doing Superheroes on Sunday for now. It wasn’t a year, as I said it would be, but since I started doing two a week at one point, I think I’ve earned the right to move onto villains when I feel like it.

But before I do that, let us review what has come so far. I said I would populate four universes with superheroes. With the creation of the Beam(s), I started fleshing those universes out a bit. But now I’ll go considerably further.

Let’s say that superhumans and supertechnology first appeared in the late 1800s. The sort of scientific advancements you’d expect to see in a novel by Wells or Verne contributed to a sort of steampunk society. As time went on, portals to other dimensions (like the Narnia or Oz books) allowed humanity glimpses of other worlds and allowed still more technological progress. By the 1930s, pulpish heroes had adventures all over the world and on other planets. By the time the 1940s rolled around we got heroes that resemble those of our Golden Age of superhero comics. With a history like this it is not a surprise that by the modern day humans are spread throughout the galaxy and Earth is a complex world of advanced cityscapes. Superheroes here are relatively common, employed by law enforcement agencies and governments, but also rogues and vigilantes.

This pulp/sci-fi/Golden Age world would be home especially to heroes that fill those niches. Gus Comet is definitely here, as are the Red Shark and the Green Camera. Other possibilities include Astro-Hero, Bludgeonak, ProboscAce, Halberd-Man, and the Scarlet Cannon.

Suppose that the coming of the superheroes happened during the Second World War. Their arrival ended the war years earlier than in our world, and the world had to adjust to all these colorful costumed characters. In the 1950s World War Three occurred, a war between superpower nations with superpowered soldiers. At the end of that war, William Block was the Secretary General of the United Nations and he created a unit called Block’s Elite Strike Team, which would grow to be the primary peacekeeping unit in a world filled with superhuman threats of all varieties. Through the 60s a slew of “super-criminals” came into being, many disillusioned WWIII veterans, and accordingly superpowered crimefighters came as a result. As society grew more accustomed to famous people with code names, it became common for celebrities who didn’t fight crime to take on aliases (a singer might call himself, the Mighty Voice or Songmaster or who knows what other nonsense). Supervillainy has had its effect on society as well: street gangs wear capes and masks to show their colors, and even some of the world’s military uniforms have been designed to look like super-costumes. On this Earth, superhumanity is a world-shaping force, and their constant fighting is starting to reach dangerous levels that could result in the end of humanity itself.

This is the world that is home to my Justice-Man character and all the supporting cast I made for him. Most of the other characters I made circa Junior High call this world home. That includes: Rhinoceros Woman and Rabbit, Helm, and the Strange Squad (including but not limited to Cut-Up, Forcefieldo, and Brain Pain). But it isn’t only the heroes I created then, many of the ones invented for Super Sunday would also be in here. Securer, Vanquisher, HAULER, and the Crew of the Cosmic would also be among this world’s multitude of heroes. The overall feel of this world, with its long history of superhuman activity and the overabundance of costumed chaos, kind of reflects what I would have seen in comics during my formative years (and today).

The bad universe. A world where bad guys are winning and good guys are few and far between. The coming of superhumans here has not been pretty. The world’s most advanced remaining societies are now dystopian nightmares and the countries that aren’t as lucky have been reduced to almost post-apocalyptic scars on the surface of the Earth.

The most prominent heroes here are Lex Techno and his Raid Force Zero (Captain Fire was a member of this group). The Blue Cloak and Killshadow. And to keep things organic, I’ll throw in some who were not specifically created to be in especially dark worlds, like Monstrona.

A universe where superheroes haven’t yet had a huge effect on society and the jury is still out about how they will change the world. Will they bring about an end to crime and warfare, or will society crumble? This is the universe where I’m placing most of the characters who have turned up in Super Sunday that I find the most interesting. In a way it is what I consider my ideal superhero universe to write about.

Home to: Noblewoman and the Surrealist. Skullserpent. The Orbzoid. Horribloid. Volcanocles. Queen Deathknell. Drona. Demonoclast. Securitaur. The Astounding Gunk. The Guild of Crime Fighters.