All-Time Champ

In the late thirty-third century there is a man born with incredible power. He’s stronger, faster, more agile than anyone else, and he proves it by challenging the toughest fighters of his age. He defeats them all. But the Champ has another power, he can travel back in time. Using this ability, he decides, he can prove himself the greatest fighter ever: the All-Time Champ. Projecting himself into history, the Champ challenges the best and brightest warriors. Travelling chronologically, the Champ trounces the Stone-Ager, a caveman made from living rock. The Champ wears down ancient Africa’s Lightning Lioness after two solid days of combat. The Champ knocks out the Sumerian Boar King with a single punch. The mysterious Kung Fu Supergenius, the Viking Wizard King, the Knight of the Lamp, and so many more. All the greatest heroes are beaten by the Champ. But his world comes crashing down when he reaches the twenty-first century. The Noblewoman is the first opponent to defeat the Champ. Now, nursing his bruises and his bleeding lip, the Champ swears: He will have his revenge. He will defeat her, even if he has to kill her to do it.

The All-Time Champ is one that’s been in my head for a long while. I mentioned in my post about Noblewoman that I had ideas for stories, the All-Time Champ is an important element to a few of those stories. One aspect of his time-travel powers is that he can not go back in time further than a time period he has already been in (with the obvious exception of his present), so after his first encounter with Noblewoman he can’t just go back and beat her up as a kid or anything. Rematches, but no prematches.

Cicada

Mary Branston was a disgruntled employee at a weapons design company. Overlooked for promotions after a decade of service, she decided she could do better on her own. Designing a suit of armor that enhanced her strength, allowed her to fly, and fired powerful sonic bursts, Mary became the Cicada. With that, it was easy to start robbing armored trucks, banks, and jewelry stores. As tends to happen, this brought Cicada to the attention of heroes like Stegosauress, Vanquisher, and Justifier.

There’s no denying that this character is inspired by the old Spider-Man villain, the Beetle. But more specifically, it is my reaction to the new female Beetle who has taken up the role since original Beetle has become a good guy with a different identity. If you follow that link, you’ll see a woman wearing sleek feminine armor that makes sure to show off her curves. Ain’t no reason for it, but it is actually quite typical for armored women in comics to have armor that accentuates their sexiness in ways that male characters’ wouldn’t. Adding breasts to a suit of power armor is not necessary, but it is ubiquitous. I should note that out of the, I think, five replacement Beetles since the original quit, three have been women and this is the only one who wasn’t just wearing old Beetle armor, so this is one armored super-identity where the sexism already has been mildly avoided, but its still the example that led to this character’s creation. Still, Cicada, unlike the replacement Beetles, is given the distinction of creating her own armor rather than taking someone else’s.

Todays comics are coming to you later than usual thanks to a power outage.

First up, just one page of SecGov Robots:

Then there’s this Phone Guys thing:

And then there’s another thing:

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of this last one:
PDR: Hey, Patrick, can you draw a lion?
PDR: Not really…
PDR: Would you try for a joke that was good enough?
PDR: Sure would!
PDR: Okay, well what if the joke isn’t good?
PDR: Eh. Fine.

I have long been prepared for myself to travel back from the future to visit present-me and offer me advice or even supertechnology. I even had a code-phrase in place that I would be able to tell myself to prove that I was really future me! But I still haven’t had a visit from Future-Me. I was wondering why this was…

Somebody recently helped me realize what’s going on. It’s like this: At some point between now and the Future, my code phrase must become compromised. The bad guys (be they humans, robots, aliens, or commies) have somehow learned my secret code and Future-Me had to pick a new secret code and I don’t know it yet. So that means that Future-Me can’t visit me because I’m out of the loop. Curse my many enemies. Curse them all for ruining my time-travel fun times.

Haiku!

From the far future
come a man and a robot.
They are my new friends.

Speaking of time-travel, I do believe that the new season of Doctor Who has just started, so I am going to watch that in the considerably not-distant future.

I’m not bothering to update you on my groceries this week. There’s still some left, but I’ve lost interest enough that it is too much work to take it out of its various places and put it on my counter to take a picture. You’ll all get over it, I am sure.

But this month, I have brought you a random comic strip I wrote at work one night that would have been forgotten if I’d not bothered to put it online, as well as one of the very first comedical stories I ever wrote for the Internet. That one predates Contains2 by a bit. I think I first did it up as an email to Marq when I was bored one time.

It got me thinking about other stories I’ve made over the years that aren’t as lucky to have made it online. I don’t mean what’s left of the Contains2 stories that I’ve just not got around to bringing here yet, I mean the stuff that is well and truly gone and I don’t even have notes to salvage it. Granted most of these stories I, obviously, can’t remember, but there are a few that I do have faint traces of in my brain and I figure I should note them before I lose even that.

The earliest I recall was, I believe, in grade 2. We were assigned to make little illustrated books with a story in them and I can remember that my story combined Egyptian elements with cat people. Basically, what I am saying is that it was a Thundercats ripoff. Apart from that I can’t remember anything. I do know that my report card that year made an oblique reference to it saying that I didn’t adequately explain things in my stories, that I took for granted that people would know what I was talking about if I knew it. Stupid little me. Similarly I wrote a prose story in grade 5 that borrowed liberally from the plot of King’s Quest V. Plagiarism. It’s the easiest way for kids to write stories.

Also during my elementary years I remember a desire to make a Christmas movie and that I wanted a sort of Advent Calendar motif to open and close scenes. I was apparently deep. It was meant to end with a snowball fight, I think, and I remember getting in trouble when we started throwing snowballs to “practice”. Stupid little me. We also wrote a skit about bullying once and performed it at a school assembly. I’d love to find out someone got that on film, but I doubt it.

Around grade five and six, I guess, was about when I started getting into comics as well and it is no surprise that that is when I started making comics as well. I did a lot of the old fold-a-bunch-of-sheets-in-half-and-you-have-a-book style comics, including one about a superhero called Zappo which I don’t still have, but I do remember enough about the character that someday I hope to give him a home. Perhaps my other biggest comic effort was a couple sheets full of different comic strips with different themes, as if I were trying to create a whole Comics Page in a newspaper. I remember only two of the strips and one of them, I think, I will recreate for this site sometime. The other was a two panel bit with a Native American man sitting crosslegged on the floor/ground. The first panel he said “How” and in the second panel he said “ya doing?”

Sometime in either late elementary or early junior high I wrote just a couple of pages, pure description no story, about a family living in a house that was so empty people kept assuming nobody lived there and putting up for sale signs. I never did finish it, I don’t think, but I remember it impressing the parents and teacher types who read it.

In grade 7, I think, for an art class project I created a comic strip about a superhero called Dog-Thing. I got an excellent grade on that thing, the teacher wasn’t even willing to write my grade on the thing because he didn’t want to ruin it. Naturally I lost it at some point. Stupid little me. For years I assumed I would never see Dog-Thing again, but while the strip is indubitably gone I did eventually find a sketch of the main character. That means I can use him again! I haven’t got around to revealing it yet, but Dog-Thing is a retired founding member of the Team of Superheroes.

Around the junior high years I also created Little Choy. Now I can hardly call these “stories” but innumerable images of Little Choy insulting anyone willing to speak near him have been drawn on school desks and in text books over the years that I will never see again. Luckily every one of them is pretty much exactly the same.

For a grade 11 English class we had to write something and as I recall I did. I wrote something about an office being shot up by criminals or terrorists or something. Nowadays that might raise some alarm bells or something, but this was at least a year before the Columbine thing, so all I got was a comment from the teacher about how I use way more paragraph breaks than necessary and the teacher mused that usually he had to tell people the opposite. I’ve always bucked trends, I guess. I still tend to like smaller paragraphs better. And I guess part of the reason that writing that story didn’t make me look insane was because, as I recall, it was about a guy who encounters one of the criminal terrorists and while they can hear shooting coming from other parts of the building he actually talked the criminal terrorist into stopping.

Grade 12, I don’t even remember for sure which class it was, but this was after the point where I’d stopped actively trying in school, so on some exam I was taking I did what I could and then turned it over and wrote a story about a squirrel detective on the back. As I recall it involved some sort of mystery in a casino tree. I think there was a rabbit bouncer possibly? I really wish I still had this one. It sounds messed up.

Anyway, as I said, that’s just the stories I remember enough to know I don’t remember or have notes about. Who knows how many stories I’ve written that have faded into nothingness? I guess we’ll never know.

Unless Time Travel!

So there is the only strip I’ve got to give you this week.

It is actually Sunday morning instead of Monday morning as I write this. I am using the little function to pre-date a post so that it will go up automatically when its time comes. I’ve never tried it before and I figure that if I’m going to be successful at making sure I get a post up every Monday I need to learn how to use it. It seems… pretty much as simple as changing one number, but I’ll not know for sure until I see this post come up on its own.

Update: And this is Monday PDR. Neat. My time-travel post seems to have gone on without a hitch, so now that is among the tricks up my sleeve. Level Up! So… The time I might have spent doing that post this day was instead spent watching television in the form of the Walking Dead and the Venture Brothers. For the Walking Dead I have to rescind my comments made after I’d seen the first episode that came to the fact that it was good but that since I’ve read the comics I knew the story. As the episodes have gone on I see that they are either doing things differently or I don’t actually remember the early issues of the book at all. For the Venture Brothers it was the season finale and it was good. I am going to miss that show while it is away, but I guess the guys who make it need a break. So I might as well let them have one. The episode also mentioned a Secret President, which amused me considering how recently I started doing this strip.