If I were thinking ahead, I might have saved these two for sometime near Halloween. Instead, I didn’t:

Killshadow

A young woman was murdered by a vampire and, as one might expect, rose as a vampire herself. But through sheer willpower and hatred she has the strength to oppose the vampire who killed her. That vampire is now the leader of an Eastern-European crime syndicate, so the woman, now called Killshadow, is slaughtering her way through her killer’s army in a bloody swath.

I don’t really have much else to say story-wise, because it is a pretty generic revenge deal. While the easiest inspiration for Killshadow is the 90s-style anti heroes (especially Spawn), but instead of making any kind of comment on those, I’m really trying to comment on the way vampires are treated these days. A lot of people have complained lately about “sparkly” vampires ruining everything, but I’m here to tell you that vampires have been a mess since long before that. Even things that I legitimately enjoy like Blade comics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer treat vampires as hordes of mooks to be mowed down by the hero. What I want is a return to a time when a single vampire was a threat.

Killshadow has ALL the vampire powers. She can turn to a wolf or a bat or to mist. She can flit through the darkness, control vermin and weather, and basically everything the folklore vampires could do. And she is in no way the sexy Vampirella-style vampire. Under that stupid mask she looks total Nosferatu-style. And while her sense of “justice” keeps her killing bad guys (this is still my superHERO-creating year) she does not brood about having to live off blood. She revels in the slaughter of her enemies and enjoys every moment.

Just so you know, I tried about twenty combinations of words like “blood,” “night,” “kill,” “dead,” “dark,” “shadow,” and a bunch of others before I got something that sucked just the right amount and also wasn’t already used too many times.

Queen Deathknell

Built around a portal to the spirit world is the hidden city of Cemeteria. Though the world at large is unaware of the existence of Cemeteria, some supervillain learns about it and, seeking power over life and death, attacks the city. But Queen Deathknell and her army rise to oppose him, saving the day but revealing their presence. Queen Deathknell (Nell to her friends) is a benevolent ruler who maintains order in Cemeteria to keep the world from being overrun by undead, and keeping the afterlife from being corrupted.

It’s pretty common in comics to have rulers of fantastic realms play a big role (You’ve got the Atlantises of Aquaman and Namor, or my favorite, Black Panther‘s Wakanda, just to name a few), so Queen Deathknell is my one of those. I also like to take the imagery of death and treat it as not-evil, which is always nice.

Bludgeonak

There is dimension called the Bronze Zone where there is a world ruled by an evil, powerful warlord called Oppressar. Oppressar holds power with the help of an army of pseudo-mechanical henchmen created from a cosmic-energy factory on the planet’s moon. But during a time of special celestial alignment one of the henchmen was created with more energy than was intended, making it smarter and stronger than its brethren. That henchman, designated Bludgeonak, saw Oppressar for the evil he is and escaped. Now Bludgeonak sides with the scattered rebels who live in the underground tunnels of the Exiled Gods of the Bronze Zone.

I was definitely going for a Jack Kirby vibe with this one (specifically his later crazy cosmic stories). Obviously as I am, at best, a reluctant artist, I don’t think I am fit to hold a candle to Kirby, but I couldn’t commit to a year of superhero creation without visiting his style. Bludgeonak was a character made up on the spot at the time of sketching, and his story made up on the spot again at the time of writing this. I don’t know why I decided to go with the headless torso kind of design (maybe I was thinking of Arnim Zola), but those circles on his chest are supposed to be his eyes. For the record, I’m picturing a color scheme of bright oranges and red mixed with black.

Brain Pain

When J. Paul Dean was born, he seemed like an ordinary child, but as he grew older it was clear that something was wrong. While his body grew rapidly, surpassing a normal adult size by the time he was ten years old, his head never changed from its original infant size and appearance. And apart from the physical aspect, there was something else: he could read minds. In his late teens, he was contacted by the Mind Set, a loose community of mind-powered individuals who gave him a home and helped him adjust to society.

Now, as an adult, Brain Pain has become an adventurer working with the Strange Squad. He’s something of a celebrity superhero, appearing in television interviews and getting book deals. Perhaps most importantly: when he goes into dangerous situations, he wears a helmet.

Brain Pain is one of the characters I thought up as a kid (which is also my excuse for the name). The whole tiny head and massive muscles thing was supposed to be a twist on the frail telepaths with big heads that are the more common formula. It’s just clever enough that it stuck around in my memory.

In the interests of working through my catalogue of characters a little quicker, today I’m going to introduce not just a couple of heroes, but an entire team. Just take a handful of the characters that don’t impress me enough on their own and throw them into a group, right? It works in comics, it will work here too. And so, I give you:

The Guild of Crime Fighters is not the top-level hero group of their world, but they are still devoted fighters of crime. They’re the street-level heroes who may not be the best, but that just means they work harder. They are:

Crescendo

Derrick Addison is Crescendo. He’s a former boxer with a flair for style and a trumpet that can shoot sonic blasts.

I like this guy’s design. I’m picturing his suit being blue and red, though I can’t make up my mind about which parts are which color.

Twinhammer

Rosie Stewart is Twinhammer. She’s got superhuman strength and two powerful hammers she can use to channel that strength directly into the faces of bad guys.

I sketched this character and struggled for days to come up with a decent name. Then I just decided to name her after those hammers she’s holding. The fact she has that “T” sort of design going on make me assume it was the right name.

The Whirl

Omar Kapoor is the Whirl. With the ability to control air (or water if he happens to be in water) so that it swirls, he can probably also use it to glide and cushion himself when falling. That sort of thing.

I wanted to draw a character with a vortex kinda thing going for him, but then I drew a sucky vortex. I don’t know how the professionals erase ink on a drawing, but PDR just rolls with it.

The Human Cloudburst

Jessica Nagano is the Human Cloudburst. With the power to “storm up” she covers herself in cloud and can shoot rain and generate lightning and thunder.

This is a character who I think could have merited a solo post, had I been better at drawing clouds. I’m not, so now she’s on this team. There’s a number of superheroes who have names like “The Human Whatever” and I think it is good to have some women in that category, so we don’t think of men as the generic model of a human.

Toughskull

Daniel Garcia is Toughskull. Toughskull is tough and wears a skull mask. He’s a superhuman vigilante who intends to clean up the streets or die tryin’.

This is another case where I drew some hero and had no idea what to name it. Just stuck a couple of words together and we’re done. This stuff is easy. His role on the team would be the troublemaker, I bet. He’s the guy who would always want to go off on his own. And he’d have a rivalry with Twinhammer about who was strongest. That sort of thing.

Noblewoman

A married couple saved a wounded alien from criminals, but in the process their unborn child was wounded. The alien recognized the nobility of their actions and used its powers to mend the child in the womb. When she was born, she had amazing powers. When she grew up she became the Noblewoman, using her powers to try to make the world a better place.

Noblewoman has your basic set of powers. She can fly, she’s super strong, all that stuff. The excuse for the powers is a connection to higher spatial dimensions. Her version of X-Ray vision is actually an eye that extends into this fourth dimension and can see “around” objects in the third dimension. That sort of thing.

It seems like every comic writer has a Superman homage character. You’ve got Hyperion, Apollo, Supreme, Omni-Man, the Sentry, Homelander, Samaritan, Crusader, and that’s just off the top of my head. Superman is obviously pretty influential on the genre, so with a Superman-homage you can explore some of the core elements of the genre by toying with him. Noblewoman is my take. She’s the top hero of her world, a staunch defender of truth and justice and such, and she’s the leader of a team of heroes. Possibly more than any other character I’ll introduce this year, I’ve got a lot of story ideas for Noblewoman and would love the opportunity to do something with them some day.

Surrealist

The Surrealist is a mind-bending crimefighter. He’s an expert with sleight of hand and magic tricks. Inside his cape are dozens of secret pockets with flashbangs, smoke bombs, and remotes for a hundred different gadgets. The Surrealist is master of preparation, with stashes of tricks stowed all over the city ready to use. And if he knows ahead of time where an encounter with an enemy might occur he’ll set up large-scale illusions to disorient the criminals.

But all of that is a distraction to hide a bigger secret: The Surrealist has super powers. He has a hallucinogenic touch. By laying hands on a criminal, the Surrealist can administer a trip, the mood of which is up to him: tranquil and relaxing or downright traumatizing. It’s probably best to stay on his good side.

The Surrealist is my Batman homage to go along with Noblewoman’s Superman homage. He’s a guy who has a hatred for crime, a lot of money, and questionable ideas of how to use money to fight crime. For the record, the cape (and a hood you can’t really see), is black, so he can pull it over himself and hide in shadows. The costume and mask are shining silver that dazzle and amaze when he reveals himself. He’s a showman. He and Noblewoman would be friends and colleagues, but would work in pretty different circles.

I like it in old comics when you end up with non-human super-folk who dress in the style of human super-folk. I find it fun. Here’s some things along those lines:

Drona of the Ultimate Ants

There is an ant-hill in the American South-West where the ants are superintelligent. These Ultimate Ants have created an underground city that rivals the greatest human capitals. Drona is the super-powered champion of that ant-hill.

Drona is an ant-man with the basic super-strong, super-fast, and flying type powers. But he’s about an inch tall. I like the idea of this tiny superhero when he has to leave the ant-hill and interact with heroes way bigger than he is.

One of the most likely inspirations for the Ultimate Ant-Hill is probably the Bottle City of Kandor and the Superman Emergency Squad. The Ultimate Ants are different from the Hypercolony that I have in my SecGov Universe, in that the Ultimate Ants act like a city of people that are ants, the superintelligent ants of the Hypercolony is a colony of ants that act like ants, and are worshipped by human cultists.

The Astro-Hero

The alien world Zunoltia is a pretty nice place, but that makes it a nice target for alien invaders. Fortunately, the cosmically-powered Astro-Hero is there to save the day. The Astro-Hero’s powers include manipulation of gravity and light, either of which would be powerful, but together she is can make short work of all Zunoltia’s enemies. But she does not limit herself to protecting only her homeworld, the Astro-Hero soars all over the galaxy fighting against injustice wherever she finds it.

I’ve discussed my desire to see more aliens that don’t look like humans before, so there’s a bit of that to the Astro-Hero, but also as a female member of her alien species, it’s even more important that she look less human. Alien women in comics, even when they’re explicitly of species that are evolved with reptilian or avian traits, have the massive mammaries that superhero comics love so much. So the Astro-Hero hits checks my boxes for both improving depictions of aliens and of women. So that’s that.

Both of these guys were drawn on the spot with little forethought. Basically, I wanted to have some of that type of superhero that has a chest-emblem, and these were the results. The weird alien symbol on the Astro-Hero’s costume is a Zunoltian character of some kind, maybe it means “Astro-Hero” or whatever. Drona’s ant emblem is symbolic of his ties to his ant community. There you go.