David Winter

It has been foretold that there will be a boy who will make the world a better place. He will have the power to stand up against all the forces of evil and drive them away. That boy is David Winter. Could he be the most important person to ever exist? He certainly seems to think so, and is not ashamed to let you know that. With his posse of more colorful and interesting friends, David spends a lot of time talking himself up, and hasn’t yet taken a single step toward making the world better.

As a person who hates almost every aspect of everything I love, I must say that near the top of the list of things I hate in fiction is the Chosen One narrative or anything where a character is prophesied to do great things. I admit it can be done well (generally I can tolerate it a bit more if it causes problems for the character), but too often it is just a way of telling the reader that the character is important. I don’t want to see characters that are important because of outside influence. I prefer to see characters earn whatever importance they wind up with.

Killer Emote

Kids these days are all about the texting. There’s a lot to worry about with kids online, you’ve got cyber-bullying and sexting and, of course, the supernatural serial killer who slaughters any teens stupid enough to get his attention. The Killer Emote! His information can be found on the darker sides of the Internet, and when a teenager tries to contact him (usually on a dare), things end in a bloody mess.

I already did a slasher movie villain from the “makes jokes and has a personality” vein, so to balance things out, I knew I had to do one who comes from the “silent, slow-moving masked killer” mold. This type of slasher villain can get away with not being supernatural in nature, but this is Supernatural Sundays month, so the Emote is. The Killer Emote is the type of character who would have appeared in a low-budget slasher from the early 2000s written by people who know texting is the popular new thing and just need to find a way to turn it into horror flick.

Cosmic Chief

Hundreds of years ago, a strange otherworldly energy burst into a small village from some other dimension. A handful of people were exposed, and were mutated into cosmically powerful new forms. One of those individuals was particularly cruel and fought among the others, but was eventually driven away to outer space. There, he became known as the Cosmic Chief, making an alien army, and after a century finally returned to Earth to find it populated by all manner of superheroes and villains. He immediately resumed fighting.

This one is another design and story from when I was a kid. The idea was that the strange energy was the source of most of the powers in that universe (what I now call Universe Orange). After that original group was exposed, their powers spread. Anyone present when one of these beings was killed would gain be exposed to their energies, gaining some diluted form of their own powers. And any offspring of those people would inherit them. Furthermore, in the stories I plotted back then, the Cosmic Chief was killed and one of his hands, referred to as the Cosmic Fist, was detached and could be worn by others, giving them great power. Pretty much an Infinity Gauntlet ripoff, if on a lesser scale. Plus, it’s an actual guy’s fist.

Pain Guy

Like the Wine Taster, the Pain Guy is an Unsettling Oddity, which means it is his goal to just freak people out. While the Wine Taster preys on social situational anxiety, the Pain Guy takes a decidedly more visceral tack. Imagine being alone on a dark street, when a scantily clad man runs around a corner, sprints straight toward you, and starts hurting himself. He throws himself on the ground or against walls, drives nails into his flesh, or even stabs himself with a knife. His screams and moans are terrible, when he isn’t actively damaging his own voicebox. After a few moments of this, that would surely feel much longer, he would crawl or limp away.

I bet you’d find that pretty freaky and confusing, wouldn’t you? Well then you’re just the kind of sap the Pain Guy wants to visit.

For the record, that’s supposed to be barbed wire wrapped around Pain Guy’s limbs, not Frankenstein stitching.

Kwally

Kwally is a being of pure mystical energy that runs a club for wizards. Originally having been created by a wizard in a distant mystical realm, Kwally wandered the cosmos for untold years before deciding that wandering was exactly what it did not want. Kwally wanted stability, a permanent address. With that in mind, Kwally created a pocket universe that contains only the interior of its clubhouse. Kwally lives there now, and has not once left since.

Though sedentary, Kwally is not asocial. Any being capable of find their way to Kwally’s door will be met with a hearty welcome. In this way Kwally has met a lot of wizards, and become something of a hub for their social scene. Beings from all manner of strange places come to Kwally’s to hang out. But if any misbehave, Kwally is powerful enough to make them regret it.

Kwally is a character design (name included) that I found on a scrap of paper dating way way back, but I didn’t have a story for it. I don’t think I lost the story, I just think I never bothered to make one. Well, here you go, Kwally.

Gogo

Gogo is a gorilla ghost.

Gogo was born in a zoo, but wound up as part of a research study with some other apes. The researchers tried to teach the apes to read, with varying degrees of success. Gogo, it seemed, was the least successful. Compared to her fellows, Gogo struggled to read English. But the other apes were so successful that the researchers gained notoriety, and the apes were given a number of books as donations from a charitable public.

Somehow, whether by mistake or by some sinister purpose, a book of occult knowledge came in among the gifts. With large sections of the book not in English, but in some apparent gibberish, the other apes cast the book aside. Gogo, however, had a natural knack for strange ritualistic language of the book and kept it to herself, learning secrets of the universe that even her human masters did not know. Before long, she rebelled against her captors, killing the other apes, as well as some of the researchers, before being shot dead. But with her knowledge, death was not the end for Gogo, it was merely a means of escape.

Once again I dip into my buffer of alien wizards because I didn’t have time to scan and color the Supernatural folk I drew this week:

Polpplplo

The Pllvm homeworld of Polpplplo’s universe was highly advanced, the capital planet of a federation that spanned a dozen star systems. Polpplplo was part of the crew of a comet-snaring ship, a ship that, as one might expect, captured comets and other sources of ice in space to use it in the process of colonizing worlds. When, on one occasion, this ship was damaged and it seemed like all was lost, Polpplplo instinctively used his magic potential to transport the whole shop through space and time to a pocket dimension. He and the crew were stranded there for years before the Wallfixer Dryon Veha discovered them. After returning the crew to their homeworld, he accepted Polpplplo as his newest trainee.

Dordidger

Many who are brought into the Order of the Wallfixers are discovered when they are adults, after some traumatic experience that brings their powers into notice, but Dordidger was only a few years old when a Wallfixer named Tacessa Medt noticed him. Dordidger’s species was not one with strong familial ties, the young were left to fend for themselves. So, with nothing tying him there, Dordidger happily signed on to train as a Wallfixer. Studious and helpful, Dordidger became the ideal Wallfixer. Often Wallfixers work in a solitary fashion, but Dordidger became part of a group that tend to work together dealing with issues like cross-universal wars.

The thing about Dordidger is that he first appeared in a book I once tried to write and then it was lost when my computer died. I didn’t mention it in that post, but the story of Paco McZap was the place where I first utilized the Wallfixers, well before I brought them to Secret Government Robots. In that story, Paco forced Dordidger to help him cheat on tests.

Team Spirit

The Phantoms were once a hockey team at the bottom of the ranks in their league. That all changed when the team got a new owner, wealthy energy magnate Maxwell K. Sumner. Sumner, who had picked up some knowledge of the occult sciences during his rise to power, summoned a spirit to help his team win. This spirit, which he naturally calls his Team Spirit, is a personification of athletic skill that possesses his players during games to guide them to victory, and it grows stronger with every win. With this bit of performance enhancing magic, what could possibly stand in the way of the Phantom’s winning the cup?

Whereas most characters I’ve put up for this exercise are such that I would want to use in stories like comics or cartoons or whatever, this one is specifically something else: I want this character in a video game. If sports games haven’t changed too much since I was young, the general mechanic allows you to switch between players on the team at will. This game would take that idea to the next level, and you’d be the Team Spirit possessing the players to help them win. Whichever player you are in would be granted special ghostly powers, you’d get to unlock more powers as you win more games. I figure that later on, as the other teams start to realize something is up, they’d start finding their own supernatural ways to buff themselves. Basically it would make it so that there could be an actual reason to play a sports game for once. And while this one would be a hockey game, it would definitely spawn a franchise that would incorporate basketball and baseball and so on. Definitely.

Derek Jones

Derek Jones is the Red Shark‘s sidekick. Having been exposed to a magical potion, young Derek gained mystical abilities such as super durability, super strength, super speed, and super senses. Though the Red Shark is always reluctant to let Derek tag along on adventures, the boy is more than capable of handling himself, and often even shows up the adult hero.

When I found myself having drawn a sketch of this young-looking lad here, I had no idea what he was supposed to be. I figured it would be plenty easy to just ascribe some supernatural elements to him and fold him into Supernatural Sundays, but even then I didn’t know quite what to do. Often during the Supervillain Sunday year, if I were stumped, I could just assign the villain in question to one of my heroes from the year before that. Why not do something similar now, I thought. Being so young-looking, I thought he could fly as a sidekick, so I attached him to one of my Golden Age-inspired heroes and the rest just fell into place. I figure he is probably a very annoying kid.