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!

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.

The New Superhero Team was founded by Ms. Super Robot Rocket Girl, a former member of the Team of Superheroes. Ms. Super Robot Rocket Girl decided that the most logical reason to be a superhero is to become famous and live like celebrities. The rest of the team didn’t want to go along with that, so Ms. Super Robot Rocket Girl went off to found her own team. Here are some of the members:

Queen Stronga

Queen Stronga, the queen of Strongania, is one strong queen. Stronga is used to the finest things in live, but she is not some pampered royal. Having been ritually bathed in space steroids since she was an infant, Stronga is fully capable of punching a hole in a diamond guillotine and could easily shrug off the blast from a dozen exploding powder kegs. Long Live The Queen.

The Foggy Knight

Fogbert G. Knight starred in so many martial arts movies that he suddenly became a real martial art master. Now he has the mystical ability to melt into shadows and has a sword that can sense the blood of enemies. Foggy Knight does his own stunts.

Helm

As he hit puberty, Craig began to suffer headaches. He heard voices and had trouble focusing his vision. He was lucky in that his parents were medical scientists who were able to discover the cause: Craig was developing some kind of superhuman mental powers. His headaches were caused by the fact that he could hear the thoughts of others. His loss of vision was because his vision was capable of detecting thought currents in the air. He was being overwhelmed by his new mental senses and it was killing him and that, in turn, began to cause him to emit powerful bursts of telekinetic energy. The invention of the Helm saved him. Built to block the information that reached Craig’s brain. He was alone with his thoughts again.

In the years since, Craig has tinkered with his Helm and improved. He can open apertures that allow mental impulses to filter in, and with practice he has learned the “language” of these impulses, so he can now essentially read minds. The telekinetic bursts that he can emit are also highly focused now, a useful weapon. All this made Craig a popular consultant for law enforcement agencies, who will often call on Helm to help solve fantastic cases.

Helm is the organizer of a loose-knit collection of mentally powered characters (I’ve mentioned them before). He’s somewhat inspired by Cyclops of the X-Men, though I am confident that many other examples could be found of characters who are trapped in something to contain their powers.

The Scarlet Cannon

Siobhan Reilly has a giant cannon in place of her right arm. It can be used to shoot things. It wasn’t always that way. In fact, she once had a right arm, but one day woke up with a cannon. That’s not a particularly normal situation, and perhaps is less than ideal, but Siobhan had decided to accept her lot in life. She has a giant cannon in place of her right arm. And so, she dresses in a red outfit and fights crime.

I admit, I had no particular idea where I was going with this one (and it shows). I decided I wanted to do another superhero with a color in their name and this is what happened. Such arbitrary methods can create unforeseen greatness, but not always. Still, if someone has to be a D-list superhero, the Scarlet Cannon is perfectly happy to do it.

N-Tangle

Clarissa Jurgens has created an experimental suit that connects her nervous system to a collection of billions of strong, prehensile nanofibres. Clarissa can control these as if they were a part of her own body, winding them together to create thick cords or using them individually to perform delicate tasks on a minor scale. Using this suit to become the superhero N-Tangle (the N can stand for Nano- or Neuro- or anything else needed, Clarissa insists), Clarissa is living out her childhood dreams of fighting crime, though she soon finds that it is a lot more serious and a lot less fun than she expected. She struggles to stick with it, if only because she doesn’t know what else she wants in life.

Ridiculous hair. Just ridiculous. I don’t even know what is going on there. And also, if I had named the character before doing the sketch, I probably would have tried to work an N onto the outfit. I picture her being able to swing though the city like Spider-Man, using her to brace herself.

Skullserpent

Misti Drake has divided her mind. While she is still in complete control of her body, she simultaneously is within the Skullserpent, a floating snake-like entity with a human skull for a face. Most people don’t have that. Misti uses her mystical second self in a quest to locate and destroy a society of magical criminals called the Night Fellows. This evil order, intent on world domination in the name of their dread leader Karaksus the Uncontrollable.

Skullserpent’s design looks so much like a villain that I considered saving it until I got to the villain creation portion of my Super Sundays. To me, she looks exactly like someone who would be on a group of villains created in the 80s to fight some team of superheroes or another. But I decided not to go that way. The fact that she doesn’t look like a hero is one of the reasons that she should be a hero, I think. I mean, sure, I already did that with Queen Deathknell, but why not do it again?

God’s Butler

When you least expect it, you may come across a mysterious, but polite, being, apparently a robot, who only identifies himself as God’s Butler. Speaking in a warm, pleasant voice, he will explain that he has taken a physical form to go on a travel holiday across Creation. If there is any truth to the story is something that simply can’t be known, but what can be known is that if some crime, a murder, a theft, or anything, happens to occur while God’s Butler is around, he will do everything in his power to solve the case.

There’s not much to say about this one. It is very much a superhero that I know nobody else was going to think up. It’s a straight up Murder She Wrote-style amateur detective formula, except it stars a robot with religious undertones and, since he’s on a tour of Creation, instead of just going from small town to small town, he can go anywhere from space stations to jungles to… small towns, I guess.

The Blue Cloak

Network City is the world’s information capital. Boasting the most high-tech computer technology it is home to the world’s biggest tech companies and banks. Like any city, Network City has a thriving criminal underbelly. This one based largely on corporate espionage and hacking. Accordingly, the Blue Cloak has appeared.

None can say for certain what lies beneath the Cloak, for those who see if are seldom capable of telling the tale. It is rumored that the Blue Cloak is capable of travelling through the Internet and appearing in front of wrongdoers in the act. Nobody can say for certain if he works for the police (though they deny it) or one of Network City’s many companies (though he does not seem to favor one in his work). Legends even go around that he is not human at all, but the avatar of some artifical intelligence protecting its own interests.

The inspiration for this one is a vague desire to do cyberpunk superhero and a drawing of a guy in a cloak. Since he’s not addressing any particular societal issue or anything, I guess I might as well just use him to further flesh out the universe where Lex Techno and friend reside.