I’m doing something different this week. I’m not limiting myself either to superhero or supervillain, and I’m doing a group of characters, but not one that would be called a “team”. I’m just going to pick a character I liked from the previous years and flesh out their world a little bit.

The character I choose is Valia, the Space God of Courage. She was uploaded in the very last week of Superhero Sundays, but she made an impression apparently, so in my very first week of Supervillain Sundays, I gave her a villain with Lord Terryr, the Space God of Fear. That wasn’t enough for me, apparently, as the Space Gods of Violence, the Violence Sisters, came along later.

Still, I can do more than that. Here’s some more of Valia’s family:

Genitor

In the beginning there was nothing. The twin Emptinesses were in charge. But then came something. Even the very possibility of something. It was: the Great Genitor, the spirit of creation itself. Genitor fought the Emptinesses for a long time, until he finally had made enough room in which to create a universe. In this new universe, Genitor begat Astrolympians, a group of Space Gods each embodying some concept or another. With this pantheon beneath him, to keep things running, Genitor is able to focus on smaller projects, like inspiring inventors or artists whose creations mean no less to him than that first one he fought so hard for.

My design here is a straight-up Jack Kirby wannabe thing. If you’re creating a pantheon of space gods, I don’t think there is anyone better to emulate. I tried to make a sort of explosion theme (just that thing on his helmet and the general fiery color scheme, really) that is meant to be evokative of the big bang.

Constelli

The Space God of Intelligence is Constelli. Constelli is a decent sort, aware that there’s no particularly good reason not to be. A being of rational thought, naturally, is more likely to ally with Valia than the bad Space Gods who want to tear things down and ruin it for everyone. Typically Constelli is occupied in simply studying creation from a UFO/laboratory, but will come to Valia’s aid when it seems necessary.

The idea is that seeing constellations represents seeing patterns in the world and that is the first step toward rational thought. I think that’s sound enough for a Space God, yeah?

Influence

Unsurprisingly, Influence is the Space God of influence. Unlike Constelli, Influence will work with anyone who wants to sway someone else, good or evil. As long as you are willing to pay tribute, he will work alongside you.

I didn’t actually sketch Influence specifically for this role, but the alien look of him made me associate him with the Space Gods.

Nicole Archibald

Space Gods are fine and all, but you know who isn’t Space Gods? Mortals. The old epics were full of mortals. Let’s have some here.

Carter Archibald was a great civil rights leader whose fearlessness in the face of overwhelming oppression caught the attention of Valia. They fell in love and Nicole Archibald was the result. Now an adult, Nicole is a member of a special police task force for dealing with the sorts of situations that crop up with Space Gods around. She’s aware of her status as a demi-god, but has shut her mother out of her life both because she failed to save her father (who was stabbed to death when Nicole was young), but also because she isn’t quite sure how to feel about the idea that her mother is the anthropomorphization of a concept. It’s not normal to know that you are, basically, half fictional. Nicole is brave, there is no doubt, but she will not admit to being her mother’s child.

So there we go. By this point, Valia is probably the most fleshed out concept I’ve done here with the exception of Justice-Man. And so much of it is still in my head. Imagine if I could actually, you know, tell stories…

The Lightspeed Kid

There is a group called the Weird Assassins. One of them likes to dress up like a cowboy. He always like cowboys as a kid, so when he developed a super power and became an assassin, he figured he might as well be cowboy-themed. It was that easy.

As his name might suggest, the Lightspeed Kid can move pretty fast, though only in short bursts. But he has learned to use these bursts for tricks like drawing his weapons at super speed or even dodging bullets. While that is enough for fighting regular people, and is generally good enough for the cowboy-themed assassin’s business, he has also worked up some tricks for fighting super-powered opponents, like using the momentum from a speed burst to make him jump long distances. All in all, he’s pretty badass and he’s for hire! Do you have more money than you need and someone you want dead? Drop him a line.

Anyway, the way I see it, moving momentarily at super speed would basically be like bullet time, so once I thought it would be a good power for a gun guy.

Otto

Otto is a vampire hunter. He does hunt vampires when necessary, but he is really hunting a vampire. In the singular. He is hunting Killshadow.

He also works for a vampire. His employer is the leader of the criminal cartel who Killshadow is working to destroy. He fitted Otto with enchanted metal limbs, made from holy irons that can not only cause harm to a vampire, but can also smash through a brick wall. But Otto is more than random hired muscle. His revenge is driven by the fact that Killshadow killed his brother. This time, it’s personal!

I had a sketch of this guy and didn’t know what he was. For some reason I thought of vampires, because he’d be posted near October (the Halloweeniest month), and I got it into my head that he’d be wearing those things to fight vampires. I decided to let it roll, so there he is.

Anyway, that’s the end of Supervillain Sunday year. I started at the end of November last year, but I think that was still longer than the Superhero Sunday “Year” was. Which, I think is appropriate. For superhero stories to work, the heroes should probably be outnumbered. That way it feels like they’re the underdogs. Even when they’re not.

What’s next for Super Sundays? I ain’t saying yet, but it won’t start for a few weeks anyway. We’ve got other things to deal with first…

Dr. Gross

A brilliant scientist devoted to improving the human body, Dr. Gross’s experiments came to a tragic end when a simple accidental jab of a needle into her finger transferred a virus into her bloodstream. The virus took over her body and reworked her into a living, walking biomass. After some time, Gross’s mind reestablished control, though traumatized by the experience, and Gross took up her experiments again, this time hoping to find a way to reverse her condition. Unfortunately, doing super-science costs a lot of money, so she turned to crime to finance her experiments. Luckily, attempting to modify the human form in this way has given her a number of superhuman women to serve as her henchmen.

Rolling Chaos

Questa Simonson was homeless and perfectly willing to make some cash by signing up for strange experiments. Gross made her into Rolling Chaos, a cyborg who can transform into a compact vehicular form capable of dealing out immense damage. Being her first such experiment, Questa is Gross’s longest-serving and most loyal crook.

Distortia

One of Gross’s experiments resulted in a woman who now exists in a terrible state of flux. Bulging and pulsating seemingly at random, Distortia is frequently in constant pain, though that pain lessens when she focuses her power into other things, which inevitably tears them apart. Though she blames Gross for her fate, she stays with the team because of the hope that Gross will one day be able to reverse the condition.

Electrissa

Electrissa is the quiet one. With electric eel-style shock powers, and some aquatic mutations to go with it, she is a useful member of the team, but she doesn’t associate too closely with the others.

Ruinmaker

The woman now called Ruinmaker was the only of the Gross Girls who actively sought out Gross because she wanted superhuman powers. She got them. Ruinmaker is a deadly thing, strong and terrible, capable of healing extremely quickly. This kind of rapid cellular regeneration is of particular interest to Gross, who thinks it may be the key to finding her cure. Ruinmaker doesn’t really care. She just likes being the strongest.

In spite of the juvenile name, this is not a collection of characters I created in my youth (though there was a sketch of the one who became Rolling Chaos in my notes). I’m nearing the end of the Supervillain Sunday year and I wanted to use up a batch of the sketches that I didn’t have any particular idea, so I took a bunch and crammed them into this one team. Distortia, especially, was just a particularly poorly drawn sketch that I decided to go with anyway. But in the end, I used a bunch of sketches, and that is what is important.

Yorgok

Yorgok is a traveller from another dimension. A ten foot tall, monster-lookin’ guy, he wandered onto Earth one day through some kind of swirly portal that appeared in the air. Though his mission is purely one of exploration, he does not consider the living things on Earth to be his equal, so he treats us as we would treat ants. Armed with a super-powerful raygun, Yorgok goes about all manner of scientific surveys of the planet, happy to kill any humans who come too close.

I fully admit that the primary creative factor of this character is that I noticed that I hadn’t done a Super Sunday character that started with the letter Y. At the time of sketching, I didn’t feel like just making someone who was called “The Yellow Werewolf” or something easy like that, but apparently I was fine making up a gibberish name. Also, I am a fan of rayguns, so I threw one of those into the mix.

Seems like a cold-blooded alien scientist might be a good villain for a robot with a personality, like the Robotomaton.

The Verman

The Verman is a humanoid rat guy with a penchant for murder. As one might expect, he spends a lot of time hiding in sewers and other dark areas, only coming out to strike. The Verman seems to be of human-level intelligence, but makes no effort to communicate with humanity, so his origins and desires remain a mystery. He wears armor and uses weapons, but how he got them is unclear. The only thing anyone knows for sure about the Verman is this: he is dangerous.

The superhero Club Man was an exterminator in Ogretropolis, so he is perhaps the ideal opponent for this humanoid rat guy. A tough, but kinda dumb human versus tough, and unusually intelligent vermin.

Fight Mite

Two inches tall, but superhumanly strong, the Fight Mite has something to prove. He wants to prove that being tiny doesn’t mean he isn’t tough.

But what is the origin of the Fight Mite? Even he is uncertain. As far as he knows, he woke up in a crater over a decade ago, but before that he can remember nothing. Are there more like him? Is he alone? These are questions he occasionally ponders when he isn’t busy beating people up.

Not much to say here. He might make a good opponent for Drona of the Ultimate Ants, the only superhero I’ve created for this so far who would be smaller than Fight Mite. Of course, Fight Mite wants to prove himself against bigger foes, so losing to someone even smaller than him would be pretty humiliating. And then I didn’t want to think of a background for him, so I made him mysterious. That’s how real comic writers do it after all.

Krytag

Krytag is a dual being, at once a humanoid being and, at the same time, a flying serpentine being. Though the bodies are connected by a tether, so they can’t get too far from one another, but each has abilities that can help Krytag in his role as the advance scout for an alien invasion. The humanoid body is strong and talented in alien martial arts, the serpent is amazingly quick and wrap itself around things with a powerful squeeze (it can also pick up its other half to carry it around). This singular double-team is more than a match for many of Earth’s protectors.

The planet Zesstak, ruled by a fascist dictatorship, has an army of such soldiers, each sent alone to a world to find out how conquerable they may be. Krytag is loyal to his species, but he is also enjoying the freedom his assignment. For the first time since being drafted into the army, he is on his own, making his own decisions. Earth represents a chance for Krytag to let loose, so he is not particularly interested in a speedy resolution to the mission.