The other type of Super Sunday I have done is the expansion of some character’s supporting cast. This week, we’ll do it for a character from the first alien year.

Skeedoy is a private investigator on the planet Dellwell. He’d be happy sticking to small cases, but they don’t pay enough. Instead, he gets stuck dealing with things that are quite over his head. These are some of the people he has to put up with:

Halch

Halch is Graats’s sidekick. Though not a supersoldier like him, Halch is highly trained in combat and has been very useful on his mission to stop evil criminal organizations. But now Graats has gone missing, apparently captured, and Halch has hired Skeedoy to help find him. Though the super soldier has many criminal enemies, Halch thinks that the kidnappers could be the government, trying to Graats to create more supersoldiers. Skeedoy wants to investigate the case, but is not used to having a kid that insists on tagging along.

Mave

Mave is a government-sponsored supehero and is also the law enforcement officer who Skeedoy deals with a lot. As far as Mave is concerned, it is ridiculous to think that the government would capture Graats, considering that he is just a supersoldier, and since his creation they have invented real superheroes, with powers beyond being good at fighting. Mave, for example, is living rubber and capable of bouncing around like a ball (and Skeedoy notes that some of the others have good powers instead). But deep down, Mave is nervous, because his superiors have been hiding something, and Mave doesn’t know what it is.

Egate

Egate is a criminal that has crossed paths with Skeedoy in the past, and who seems to know something about the case. Egate, who prides himself on only being a thief, nothing more evil than that, recently broke into the headquarters of one of Graats’s enemies, and found documents about his capture that he is willing to sell to Skeedoy. What he has not told Skeedoy is that he also found a serum that they had made from the supersoldier’s blood, that the documents claim is the first step in achieving immortality. That is something Egate wants more than all the stolen riches in the world.

Dsurey

Dsurey is an alien immigrant to planet Dellwell, and even though it gives a bad name to other immigrants, Dsurey hangs out with bad crowds. Working at a gathering hall for the criminal element, Dsurey cleans up after the scum of the world and socializes with them when possible. From time to time, he picks up tips that could be useful to Skeedoy, who pays Dsurey in fresh water, a hard resource to find on Dellwell. But when Dsurey stumbles across the biggest piece of information he’s ever heard of, will the water be worth the risk?

Back when I introduced Gus Comet, very early in this whole mass-character-creation experiment, I mentioned several members of his rocketship crew. Let’s give them a moment to shine:

Andrianna

When the robots colonized Saturn, they created a constitutional monarchy headed by a King and Queen. Their daughter, Andrianna, the Princess of the Robots, was the first robot built in that new kingdom. The thing is, though, robots don’t age and die like humans, so the King and Queen are still in power and it doesn’t look like they’re going anywhere any time soon. Andrianna quickly got bored with sitting around the castle knowing she’d never move on to ruling the land, so she left her home to join the Rocket Officer Corps. She is now the second-in-command on Gus Comet’s rocket, a life considerably more interesting than that of idle royalty.

Brains O’Brien

Raising himself on the streets of Brooklyn, Brains had to learn to fight. He had no family to protect him, so he had to provide for himself. One of a gang of similarly-destitute children, Brains was the Smart One. When authorities would occasionally try to force them into school, the others would wonder what use all those facts could possibly be in “real life”, but Brains didn’t see it that way. Any scrap of knowledge he learned was something that could possibly be used to keep him alive one more day, like ammunition, so it was best to stock up. One day, on the run from the law, Brains was separated from his gang and used some of his knowledge to find a hiding spot on board a rocketship. But when the ship took off, Brains became an unintentional stowaway. Luckily, Gus was impressed with the kid’s nerve and his wits, so he gave him a place on board.

Hyram

In the far-flung future that is the twenty-first century, a lot of experimentation has been done on animals. Hyram is a result of that experimentation. An ordinary hyena genetically engineered to have excellent intelligence, and given cyborg limbs, Hyram joined the Rocket Officer Corps as an investigator. There is nothing Hyram enjoys more than gathering scraps of evidence and hunting down a criminal.

Space Plunderer

The Space Plunderer is the meanest, greediest criminal in the galaxy. Commanding a crew of alien criminals from dozens of species, the Plunderer, a Bessaji, travels from world to world to steal resources. Colonies everywhere live in constant fear of the Plunderer, but the Plunderer fears nobody. The Plunderer even laughs as Gus Comet and crew pursue him across the Cosmos. It seems like every day the Plunderer gets stronger and stronger. Can the good guys ever win?

The planet Szunkring is one full of intense class warfare. The rich weigh heavily on the poor, but the superhero Montoroloxi stands for the little guy. But who else is there?

(Montoroloxi was one of the ideas I spat out in Superhero Sunday year that least grabbed me, so I figured maybe if I threw some more details onto it I might find it more interesting. Let’s see if it works.)

Elimpador

Elimpador was born to a low-class family in one of the slum areas of a major Szunkrun city. She tried to do things the honest way, she got a job working as a powertube cleaner, but when a new technology was developed that made that job obsolete, she was fired. Before she could find work elsewhere, she was beaten up by an angry mob who hated her for being a lazy unemployed drain on society. While she was recovering from those wounds, she was unable to pay for her home. And when she found that nobody was willing to hire a homeless wretch, she had to resort to stealing to stay alive. A week later, she was in prison, and considered it a blessing, because at least she was being fed. When Montoroloxi broke her out, she was at first reluctant to go, but she has since found new worth by organizing operations for Montoroloxi’s underground allies.

Lacalafta

Lacalafta was also born to a poor family, but found a way out. Being a naturally tough individual, Lacalafta sold her services as a bodyguard or as a soldier. The well-off Szunkruns have no desire to do their own dirty work, but sometimes they need someone to be beaten up. In such cases, they can hire Lacalafta, who has no qualms about beating up the sick or the needy as long as it makes her own life better. Since Montoroloxi began his crusade of protecting the weak and the poor, however, Lacalafta’s job has gotten much harder.

Mux

The Szunkruns are not the only intelligent species on Szunkring. Mux is a member of a small lizard-like people also native to the world. Mux’s people, though, did not develop currency or technology, or even an interest in it. They are content to dwell in the planet’s jungles with their simple lives foraging for berries and lazing around on hot days. But those jungles are shrinking because of the actions of Szunkruns who crave what resources the jungles can give them. To protect his home, Mux has joined Montoroloxi’s battle against the rich jerks. Mux has all kinds of neat powers like sticking to walls, regenerating limbs, and being able to freeze and thaw out unharmed.

Boyon the Robot

Planet Szunkring is a very high tech sort of place. All over the planet there are intelligent robots designed to make things easier for the Szunkruns (the ones who can afford it anyway). One of those robots is called Boyon the Robot, and it has come to the conclusion that Szunkrun society could be better. Though it continues on with its regular robotic duties, Boyon the Robot has also decided to help Montoroloxi who seems to be working toward the kind of society that Boyon the Robot would prefer. As such, Boyon the Robot is Montoroloxi’s undercover agent, able to get into all of the places no regular Szunkrun could.

In a world where evil is winning, superheroes need to be rougher and meaner if they want to make a difference. That is exactly why Lex Techno, had to create Raid Force Zero, a team of supersoldiers intent on destroying evil once and for all. We’ve already met Captain Fire and Earth-Red’s local Beam, but who else makes up the worlds violent saviors?

With Lex Techno, I tried to make the point that 90s Comics were underrated and that their elements undeservingly shunned. With that premise in mind, I am fleshing out this team with some characters that feel to me like they’d fit into those team books that were so common back then (even though I admit I haven’t read them and my artistic skills are even worse than those maligned artists of that decade). Here goes:

Kalpa

Kalpa is an elite alien soldier who originally came to Earth as an invader. Hundreds of such soldiers, modified by alien science to appear human, were sent to Earth, but when they arrived, they found a world torn asunder by supervillains, vampires, and many other threats much worse than mere alien soldiers. Many of his ilk were killed, and Kalpa learned to hate the violence he had been trained to revel in. So now he plans to bring peace to his new home the only way he knows how: through violence.

There were an awful lot of characters in the 90s who had names that were just single words that didn’t really have anything to do with them. Thanks to the Internet, I found the term from Hindu and Buddhist cosmology Kalpa which means a very long time. It works because his human form is meant to appear Indian. Otherwise, it has nothing to do with him, since his powers are all about guns and forcefields.

Bladestrike

Trained to kill by the deadliest assassins in the world, and possessing vaguely defined energy powers, Bladestrike is a perfect killing machine. She was part of a squad formed by a shadowy government cabal to take out threats from other nations. On one mission, the threat was too much and Bladestrike and her teammates were killed. Bladestrike, though, didn’t stay killed. Revived by her employers, she was told they would patch her up and get her back into the field as the new leader of the squad. But as soon as she was strong enough, Bladestrike went AWOL. During the time when she was declared dead, she had seen something that she had not told her bosses. She realized she had to change her life around, and Raid Force Zero took her in and are giving her the chance to make those changes.

Scantily clad ninja ladies are, perhaps, the most childish way comics tried to prove they were for adults. But as I think I’ve said before, scantily-clad women aren’t a bad thing in themselves, as long as it isn’t a requirement of all women in the stories, and also that there is more to the characters than just their scant claddedness. Hopefully, I could succeed at meeting my own standards here.

Thunder Thrower

When Carlton Curtis gained the power to create sonic explosions, he decided to use them to clean up the crime in his neighborhood. For years it seemed like he was doing well, but as time went on he gathered more and more enemies, supervillains who seemed to exist just to torment him. The job became too difficult for one man, so when the chance to join Raid Force One came along, it seemed like the best option.

I am picturing Thunder Thrower as a more classic superhero who was revamped into the 90s style. He started off as a symbol of hope and wonder, but then became a bitter and violent anti-hero because the former is too hard to maintain in a world like this. His loved ones were probably all killed off by villains to raise the stakes of his adventures. Note that he does not have electrical powers, he has sonic powers. But maybe he can also fly for no adequately explained reason.

The Crunch

The Crunch is actually a sentient magnetic field created by an evil mad scientist, whom the Crunch soon killed. To form a corporeal body, the Crunch gathers up hunks of scrap metal and compacts it into a super-dense form, including when necessary a magnetically-powered railgun. The Crunch considers humanity lesser beings, and was perfectly willing to kill indiscriminately until Lex Techno brought that to and end by beating the Crunch in a fight. Impressed with Lex’s skills, the Crunch is now willing to serve as a member of Raid Force One.

It may have been my imagination, but it seemed like all the terrible 90s hero teams had a Ben Grimm ripoff. Whether or not that’s true, I felt like I should get one. With his powers, he’d be able to get comically larger every time he showed up. He’d also fill the role of the Boisterous Warrior of the team, reveling in showing off and finding new challenges.

Last week I made a supporting cast for Valia, who is a character I sketched with little thought, but she then caught my imagination and grew. This week, though, I’m doing a cast for a character who came to me fully formed. I knew right from the beginning I wanted to tell the story that involves the Hateful King.

King Balus

The king of Thrakodacia, Balus is a very good guy. For his entire adult life Balus has ruled his country in politics, but also kept a secret from the rest of the world: his country has been at war with a demonic sorcerer called the Hateful King. Even now, in the Twenty-First Century, Thrakodacia is a scene of swordfights, monsters, flying carpets, and fantastic adventure. But this has been a drain on the good king. He’s getting tired of the battle and wants to end it once and for all, but will this cause a slip-up that could be his undoing?

Balus is unapologetically intended to basically be a Disney prince. He’s generically good and handsome, the perfect opponent for someone as bad as the Hateful King. He’s even got a cute pet bat that is unusually intelligent.

Lendela

Lendela is a sorceress ostensibly serving King Balus. She tends to come and go as she pleases and, of course, is absolutely cryptic about everything, but she has Thrakodacia’s best interests in mind, she assures everyone. It is largely through her efforts that the situation in Thrakodacia has not spread to the outside world, and it is true that she has long been training the country’s forces to fight the various supernatural entities. But still, she tends to come and go as she pleases and is absolutely cryptic about everything. But nobody knows where she goes and why she won’t just reveal whats he knows.

Lendela is the Merlin figure of this story. There’s a period in the evolution of the King Arthur legend during which Merlin was a sort of hybrid between Christianity and paganism that I would try to recreate with her. She’s strongly affiliated with the Orthodox Church of Thrakodacia, but she’s also into some other things that Balus and friends might find very unwholesome.

Prince Gravefiller

The Hateful King’s ultimate goal, naturally, is world domination. Obviously one person would have a rough time ruling the entire planet, so he wanted to start a family that would rule with him. He married another demon/human hybrid and, though the marriage did not last, it did lead to the birth of one child. Anticipating a great and violent future for his son, the King named him Gravefiller. Though he was not exactly pleased that the boy turned out so small, he never lost his hope that the Prince Gravefiller would be a fierce warrior and trained him endlessly in the ways of battle. As a teenager, the boy ran away from home.

After living in the wilderness for some time, the boy was found by King Balus’s men and brought to live with them. In this new home he found people who cared about him for things other than his potential as a fighter, and as a result, he was much more willing to fight. Joining the good guys in the fight against his father, Gravefiller is a fierce warrior after all.

I drew this guy and it wasn’t until I was coloring him that I realized he was basically a rip-off Etrigan. Oh well. Different skin color and background means it isn’t a ripoff, it’s an coincidental homage. Anyway, Gravefiller has a magic ring that can control fire.

The Bludgeon

Another red-skinned freak, the seven-foot-tall monster of a man has served the Hateful King for a long time, in a lot of battles, and has the scars to prove it. While the Hateful King is not a weakling by any means, it is right for a king to have soldiers, and the Bludgeon is the strongest and most loyal. The Bludgeon earned his title by surrendering himself fully to the King, becoming more a weapon and a tool than a person. He wants nothing more than to serve.

I have a great many more character ideas for this particular story and I hope to get them on here someday, but for now this will do and we’ll be back to the two characters a week after this, with the next approximate year’s theme.