The Devil Queen from Outer Space

Descending to Earth in a UFO that looks like a ball of flame, the Devil Queen from Outer Space is Queen Malefactra, an archmonarch of evil with a desire to conquer the human race and set up a hell on Earth. With an army of sci-fi devilry (robots made of skeletons, laser pitchforks, etc.), she has the means to do it!

When she’s not actively trying to conquer the world, Malefactra is a temptress looking to make deals. At the cost of your immortal soul, she can use her nano-magic to make your dreams come true, though it always seems to find some way to make sure it also furthers her own cause.

This was just an attempt at designing a character with that sense of fun that I think superhero comics need to embrace. The theatrics of hell symbolism and the grandeur of outer space invaders seem like a perfect fit for superheroes.

Flood

Alphonse Gordon was one of the founding members of the Strange Squad. In the 1960s the group was assembled from a group of scientists who had been mutated from experiments. Flood had accidentally transferred his consciousness into a body of water, which he soon learned to control and animate. Though he did the heroism thing with the Strange Squad, it was only for the money, so when someone else offered more money, he happily accepted and left the team. Though, deep down, he admits he seems to have lost out considering that the team has gone on to be an internationally successful organization and he is just a criminal for hire, he takes it in stride and continues working for whoever is willing to pay.

Another very easily drawn character. I would assume that being a living puddle would suck.

Mummylord

Thousands of years ago in Egypt a cult of magicians raided the country as part of their worship of heretical beings of darkness and evil. Though they were eventually driven from the land by the Egyptian armies (and kept from heading south by the Lightning Lioness). The cult retreated to their temple and committed mass suicide. Their story did not end there.

When archaeologists uncovered the temple, they accidentally reawakened the leader of the cult, the Mummylord. Alive once more in the modern age, the Mummylord is now trying to perfom mystic rituals to revive his followers as an army of mummies bent on world domination.

My extensive scientific research has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that mummies and the superhero genre are a good fit for one another. Probably there should be at least one mummy character in every superhero title.

Strike

Jenessa Jefferson is, by day, a fairly ordinary young woman. She works at a coffee shop and pays rent and phone bills and all that sort of thing. But she has another identity. When approached by someone willing to pay the right price, Jenessa Jefferson becomes Strike. After being caught in a strange beam from space as a teenager, Jenessa found herself able to convert her body into a living burst of yellow lightning for about an hour at a time. The ability to travel through electrical devices, damaging them if that is the desire, makes Strike an ideal industrial saboteur. She can also pack a devastating punch to any do-gooders who want to challenge her.

This here… this here was a really, really easy character to draw. If I ever have to draw a superhero story I actually want to be decent, a character like Strike is a necessity to make sure I can get through it. Probably I’m not going to do that, though. I can put up with my drawing for sketches, but I do feel like my drawing abilities are lacking for stories I want to tell.

Anyway, why is cartoon electricity almost always yellow? It seems to always be blue in the real world.

The Empress

On the distant planet of Owds the people are unhappy. For centuries, as humans measure time, the people of Owds have been ruled by a single tyrannical regime, a powerful dynastic family who use cruelty and terror to remain in power. And the latest is the worst of the lot! Empress Gorfythe Huzz the Seventh is unsatisfied with ruling a single planet. She wants to rule it all.

While a resistance force struggles against her rule, the Empress has her army scientists working on a device that allows the user to alter the physical laws of the universe within a limited space, but that is enough to cause permanent damage to the fabric of space-time. Can the Empress be stopped before it is too late for reality?

Not a lot to say about this one. I was looking through the old heroes and I thought I should give on to Astrona. I suppose it does touch on the same thoughts on female aliens that I expressed back during the Astro-Hero post. So that’s something.

Sagface

Armando “Sagface” Achilli is the head honcho of a viscous mob with their fingers in every criminal enterprise within reach. Theft, loan-sharking, narcotics, murder-for-hire, and more, Sagface and his goons are involved. Over the years, many of Sagface’s foes have tried to mock the deformed features of the mob boss, and it bothered him for a while. But now, he embraces his looks and the reputation it has given him. That doesn’t stop him from hurting those who try to mock him on general principles though.

I just wanted to draw a Dick Tracy-style weird looking gangster. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, but here is the result. I don’t really have a Dick Tracy analogue among my heroes, but I guess he could be the villain for one of my old-school-inspired types. Halberd Man‘s origin involves a criminal empire, so I’d say that is a perfect fit.

Rampagor

John Hong is not a bad guy, but he has an unfortunate condition. When exposed to certain levels of pollution, John transforms into a hulking monster and proceeds to demolish anything in sight that he deems unnatural. When the monster’s temper wanes, John turns back to normal and has no memory of what happened. While the monster, Rampagor, obviously has to be stopped, the only way to do it seems to be to keep John in a pristine biodome.

Rampagor is a Hulk-style character, but without the idea that underneath it all he’s a hero. Rampagor is a beast that, without superhero intervention, can level cities, but is it right to kill, or even just to imprison John for its actions? That’s the sort of thing we would have to think about in a Rampagor story.

Ignoble Woman

When a being as powerful as Noblewoman shows up, that attracts attention. For scientist Amalia Tiglao, that attention came in the form of jealousy. Why should some superhuman freak get to enjoy the advantages of higher spatial dimensions while she, a scientific genius, was stuck in the limiting three dimensions? It took a lot of work, and some shady deals to acquire funding, but she eventually devised a process that would, in theory, replicate the hero’s powers. Unfortunately, those powers came at a cost, leaving her transformed into a strange and chaotic form. Now Amalia blames Noblewoman for her predicament and, of course, is now a supervillain intent on bringing down the world’s most powerful hero.

One of the things that bugs me most in superhero comics is how “personal” the stakes always have to be. It seems like every series gets to the point where the only thing the hero does is react to villains who are actively driven by their hatred of the hero. I like it when superheroes solve problems for people, not just to be dealing with their own dramas while crumbling cities around them. Anyway, Ignoble Woman is an example of the sort of thing I don’t like, so the stories about her would have to directly deal with all that.

Like the villain Hurtch, Ignoble Woman is a being that extends into higher space, so parts of her, the tentacle arm thing, appears unconnected in three dimensions.

Shapemaster

Herb Caesar was a young man when he gained the power to change into shapes. But he couldn’t turn into other people, or even animals or even, say, a car. He is limited to simple shapes. Squares, cubes, spheres, etc. Still, he was inventive, and found many ways to use these powers in creative ways. For several years Herb fought crime as the Shapemaster, but it never seemed to pay off for Herb. He couldn’t pay his bills, he couldn’t keep a job. A supervillain killed his best friend, and a girlfriend turned into another supervillain and blew up his house. Eventually he realized it wasn’t worth it. To get any satisfaction, he decided, he had to look out for Number One.

In real superhero comics, well mainstream real superhero comics anyway, nothing ever changes. No superhero will ever go bad for real. It might even last a few years, but the non-stop soap opera of it requires that every twist is eventually, shockingly twisted back. Anyway, with Shapemaster I can pretend it happened in my little superhero universe anyway.

The Witch

Three hundred years ago a woman was accused to consorting with demons to get mystical power. She totally had done exactly that. Those who accused her couldn’t do a damn thing because she was a magical killing machine. Any of her accusers that she hadn’t drowned or crushed or burned at the stake decided that it wasn’t worth the risk of even trying to stop her.

Now, in the present, the Witch still lives. She has used her mystical powers to found a worldwide criminal empire and only the emergence of these newfangled “super heroes” has ever posed any threat to her. She will have to deal with them.

Here I wanted to take the idea of a witch and do it differently. I wanted the opposite of every good witch idea, but also to avoid the standard look of a cartoon witch with green skin and black hat and all that. I planned on giving her a better name, but then I decided I liked the simplicity as an excuse to stop trying to think one up.

Color is back! And I don’t just mean for this post! Over the last week, and at the expense of working on SecGov, I have gone back through Super Sunday and colored them all. They are all now in color! I figure the Internet will care more if they’re flashier, right? If anyone cares to go back through the Super Sunday tag, they’ll find a whole colorful world of superheroes and villains. This will make any comments I made about colors in the posts obsolete, but that’s probably worth it.