With the power to create an unbreakable sphere of pure force around himself, Forcefieldo is a member of the Strange Squad, the world’s foremost superhuman explorers. When not on missions with the Miami-based superhero team, he returns to his home in Nairobi to fight crime there.

Forcefieldo is a pretty generic superhero. That is kind of the point, though. Forcefieldo is a Kenyan, but that is not represented at all in his superhero identity. Far, far too often in comics when a character is from any country other than America, or any ethnicity other than white, they’re some stereotype. There are exceptions obviously, especially as time goes on and more characters are created, but, man, it’s crazy how many not-exceptions there are. So anyway, this is my attempt to add one more to the exception pile.

For the record (there’s a record, right?), Forcefieldo and the Strange Squad are both from my old notes. The Strange Squad in particular was my Fantastic Four rip-off team, though my version progressed from the 60s to the present (well, the 90s, which was the present at the time) and recruited new members as others came and went. Forcefieldo joined the team in the 90s. I’ll probably have more Strange Squad characters show up this year, since reaching into my notes will usually be quicker than thinking up someone new.

Two superheroes this week! I created this duo as a duo, so they’re a duo. One is superhumanly strong and tough, the other quick and agile. One can punch through a bus, the other can jump over a bus. They fight crime. They are:

Rhinoceros Woman and Rabbit.

We’re not even a month into this thing and I’m already presenting my second rabbit-themed character. What does that say about me?

I have mentioned in the past that I made a comic about a guy called Zappo back in elementary school. What I haven’t brought up yet is that on the inside cover of that comic I, emulating what I saw in real comics, created an advertisement for another comic. That advertisement was for the adventures of Rhinoceros Woman and Rabbit. That makes these two among the very earliest superheroes I ever created. Still, this is probably the first time that I’ve drawn them since. I don’t have that Zappo comic any more, which is a shame, but I still have a pretty good memory of how these characters looked. Rhinoceros Woman, with her shoulder pads and horns, and Rabbit’s weird sunglasses/angular ear-like-things are exactly the mental image that’s been in my head for about two decades. Rabbit is pretty ridiculous, I admit, but I’m pretty proud of the fact that Rhinoceros Woman, probably the first female superhero I ever dreamed up, is not the standard “Hot Woman” that 99.99% of female superheroes are.

I’ve always been a fan of male-female friendships in fiction that ARE NOT given any kind of sexual tension. This is probably the rarest kind of relationship depicted in our society. I’ve bet we’ve seen more “innocent child/alien or robot” pairings than truly platonic male/female friendships in movies or on television. But these two are friends, partners in crimefighting, and nothing romantic. That said, at some point, probably well after elementary, I decided that Rabbit was probably gay. That helps to reinforce their just being friends, obviously, but it also defeats the significance of the platonic-ness of their relationship. What I want is more relationships between heterosexual man and woman who are nonetheless not in a Will They Won’t They plot. Still, there’ll be time for that in the future. For now, I’m also going to let Rabbit stand as the first gay superhero I created too.

I have never bothered to think up origins for these guys. If I ever need to, I will, but for now I’ve got a lot of room I could work with these characters. You’ll never know where to expect them to show up.

In Los Angeles there is a private investigator who is willing to take on any case, no matter how strange it may sound. If nobody believes about the ghost that has been following you, or the UFO that kidnapped your parents, and the police won’t listen as to your claim that fish-men stole your car, there is a detective who will listen to any case. The Panda Detective knows that the world is full of strange and dangerous things. After all, he is one.

Panda Detective is a character who, until this sketch, was just that name scrawled on a page of notes. I know the sort of things I like in superhero comics, and this sort of weird thing is exactly it. I’ve never read a comic with DC’s Detective Chimp, but the fact that character even exists makes me feel better inside.

I would also say that, in my head at least, there is a strong connection between the type of adventures a private eye and a superhero should be having. You’ve got plenty of superheroes who solve mysteries (Batman, notably, is supposed to be the world’s greatest detective who, for whatever reason, dresses in a bat costume), and you’ve got heroes that work for the government or law enforcement agencies (usually the “big time” heroes like the Avengers). But, for some reason, most superheroes are just guys who wander around looking for things to fight. The flaws with these Patrolling Superheroes is that it means that most of the adventures they find like this are crimes in progress. If these guys maybe got a license and opened an office where civilians could reach them, suddenly you have a wider variety of potential starting points for superhero fun.

I think a part of this problem, though, is the way superhero adventures (and action adventures in general) have been scaled up so much over the last few decades. Saving a family is not as important as saving a city, or a world, or multiple universes. With adventures having to have such high stakes, the stories tend to start with something smaller blowing up or dozens of people being killed. Or, for a solo hero, like most of those who do the patrols, the stakes have to involve some “this time it is personal” level, so you can just have villains come right out and attack the hero. Superheroes who just solve the problems of people are not as common, and that bugs me. So… Panda Detective.

Isabel Langdon’s mother worked for the military, designing rockets and such. Specifically, she was designing a thought-controlled missile guidance system that would have allowed soldiers in the battlefield to call in a rocket salvo and “think” the rockets toward their targets, as well as being able to use the projectiles to bring in supplies or get wounded to hospital. But this experiment was brought to an end when spies working for an enemy group attacked the laboratory, and they had teenaged Isabel as a hostage. They tried to force Isabel’s mother to make them some weapons, but the scientist tricked the terrorists by, at the last moment, turning the thought control machine on herself. She used the mind controlled rockets to stop the terrorist’s plot, but was herself shot in the process. Isabel, seeing what he mother had done, replicated the process on herself and used her powers, and the remaining missiles to capture those who had killed her mother. Though Isabel has no interest in going to war, her mother’s military friends arrange for her to get a job with the police using her new powers to fight crime. So now she’s got a big rocket without a warhead to use as transportation and she’s always tinkering with potential other devices like spy camera rockets, glue rockets, and so on.

The inspiration for this character, and still my favorite thing, is the terrible, terrible pun of the name “Ms. I. L.” Once I had that, it was just a matter of doing a sketch and being done with it. I think the most thought that went into it was “It’s cold up there, so: mittens” which is fine with me because then I didn’t have to draw hands. I think that if I were to do anything further with Isabel, it would have to be in animation. A rocket-riding superhero is something that, I figure, is going to work best when you can see the speed in action. Lots of flying chases and whipping around the cityscape. Also, I’d probably rework the missile itself so that it had a flat bit on top, kinda skateboard-style, to stand on instead of the awkward-balancing-act conical style that I’ve drawn here. As I write that I noted the similarities to a Marvel character I like, the Rocket Racer, who actually does ride a rocket-powered skateboard. I have to wonder why there aren’t more superheroes like this.

Pedro was born into a family of established superheroes who all took animal-themed costumed identities. The Family Animalia was founded by Pedro’s grandparents and was quite successful back in the day. Pedro’s parents, aunts and uncles were the high point of this team, saving the world a handful of times, but Pedro’s generation has mostly abandoned their noble traditional vocation. Pedro’s cousins are mostly content to live off their celebrity, his sister has opted out of a dangerous action-filled life to serve as the tech support to the Team of Superheroes. Pedro alone remains an active participant in the fight against crime as the grim vigilante called: The Volcano Rabbit. Some call him obsessed, but none can deny that his fast feet and fiery fists have brought down more than their share of criminal scum.

I first conceived of this guy when I was thinking of the background of Rosita from the Hover Head stories (It is worth noting that even a character like Rosita, who has appeared in roughly two pages to date, I have put a lot of thought into. I’m obsessed with this stuff, but very slow with the output). She was once Techtudinidae, a superhero in turtle-shaped high-tech armor, and from there I got to the idea about the family of animal-themed heroes. After that it was a natural progression to make one of them based around one of my favorite species of animal. Naturally, since the universe with Hover Head is my most overtly comical superhero universe, I had to make the guy based around the cute and harmless critter a badass Batman-style guy.