Melancholic Musings on Comics Creations
I've watched the last couple episodes of that Heroes show. The last episode was better than any of the previous, because it wasn't horrible in every single aspect like the pilot was, but it still sucks. I guess I'll give up on it. One thing I am grateful to this show for is that it has triggered some good memories for me. The fact that a show this terrible can be made makes me want to revisit some aborted superhero novels from my pre-med past.
When I was in 8th to 11th grade I must have created around 50 superheroes and villains. Most of them were banal rip-offs of Marvel or Image comics characters (the latter being worse since those were all rip-offs of Marvel archetypes). There were a couple, however, that I was pretty proud of. One was a guy named Manslaughter, which I liked because the name implied this tension between violent acts and the intent behind the acts. I've always wondered why this name hasn't been exploited in comics yet. The concept certainly has in the better Wolverine stories and early Spawn issues. Anyway, my guy was this cheesy geneticallyengineered mercenary. His parents were scientists
who collaborated and donated their own genetic material in the experiments that gave rise to him. The rub is that his mom was somewhat in awe of his father, who was older and more renowned in the scientific community, and pretty much went along with the experiments just to impress him. Then she died giving birth to Manslaughter. So this guy grows up alternating between hating himself for killing his mother by his very birth and hating his father for killing his mother. In both scenarios the death was unintended -- manslaughter. I've always wished I was disciplined enough to write more than ten or so pages of this story.
The other character I created that I still think of as worth remembering was a guy named Mute. From the time he was born his body instantaneously produced interference waves that completely negated any soundwaves in a given radius. So he never learned how to talk because soundwaves couldn't reach his ears. He was a ninja/monk type character who moved in absolute silence. I never developed the story for Mute as much as for Manslaughter, but his power was much more inventive. The story, as much as I can remember it, was that Mute wanted simply to read and study and contemplate in some Laotian monastery but he was constantly being drawn into affairs that required him to steal information or kill an ambassador or something to save the life of his sensei (which I'm pretty sure is not what monks call their mentors, unless their Asian, because all Asians use the term sensei at every opportunity).
A common thread to both these stories, if I remember correctly, was a secret society that controlled world affairs from the shadows. I've always been fascinated by that notion, a sort of global conspiracy theory fetish. There were differences between the secret societies involved with Manslaughter and Mute, but I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. Manslaughter's shadowy antagonists where more along the lines of the technorati. Their mantra was something like "Only science can save Man from himself." This provided another source of tension that I liked about that story which never made it out of my head: Manslaughter would be struggling against the people responsible for his creation and
with whom he might actually agree in principle. Mute's antagonists were more along the lines of religious fanatics and in 10th grade I actually tried to read some of the Gnostic gospels as research for this group.
Anyway, maybe I'll get off my ass and write these damn things one of these days. But not bloody likely. Rest assured, though, if I made them into a TV show starring Corey Haswell and Melissa Alstrom using a handheld Sony video camera from 1987 and editing on a Commodore 64, it could not be worse than Heroes.
When I was in 8th to 11th grade I must have created around 50 superheroes and villains. Most of them were banal rip-offs of Marvel or Image comics characters (the latter being worse since those were all rip-offs of Marvel archetypes). There were a couple, however, that I was pretty proud of. One was a guy named Manslaughter, which I liked because the name implied this tension between violent acts and the intent behind the acts. I've always wondered why this name hasn't been exploited in comics yet. The concept certainly has in the better Wolverine stories and early Spawn issues. Anyway, my guy was this cheesy geneticallyengineered mercenary. His parents were scientists
who collaborated and donated their own genetic material in the experiments that gave rise to him. The rub is that his mom was somewhat in awe of his father, who was older and more renowned in the scientific community, and pretty much went along with the experiments just to impress him. Then she died giving birth to Manslaughter. So this guy grows up alternating between hating himself for killing his mother by his very birth and hating his father for killing his mother. In both scenarios the death was unintended -- manslaughter. I've always wished I was disciplined enough to write more than ten or so pages of this story.
The other character I created that I still think of as worth remembering was a guy named Mute. From the time he was born his body instantaneously produced interference waves that completely negated any soundwaves in a given radius. So he never learned how to talk because soundwaves couldn't reach his ears. He was a ninja/monk type character who moved in absolute silence. I never developed the story for Mute as much as for Manslaughter, but his power was much more inventive. The story, as much as I can remember it, was that Mute wanted simply to read and study and contemplate in some Laotian monastery but he was constantly being drawn into affairs that required him to steal information or kill an ambassador or something to save the life of his sensei (which I'm pretty sure is not what monks call their mentors, unless their Asian, because all Asians use the term sensei at every opportunity).
A common thread to both these stories, if I remember correctly, was a secret society that controlled world affairs from the shadows. I've always been fascinated by that notion, a sort of global conspiracy theory fetish. There were differences between the secret societies involved with Manslaughter and Mute, but I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. Manslaughter's shadowy antagonists where more along the lines of the technorati. Their mantra was something like "Only science can save Man from himself." This provided another source of tension that I liked about that story which never made it out of my head: Manslaughter would be struggling against the people responsible for his creation and
with whom he might actually agree in principle. Mute's antagonists were more along the lines of religious fanatics and in 10th grade I actually tried to read some of the Gnostic gospels as research for this group.
Anyway, maybe I'll get off my ass and write these damn things one of these days. But not bloody likely. Rest assured, though, if I made them into a TV show starring Corey Haswell and Melissa Alstrom using a handheld Sony video camera from 1987 and editing on a Commodore 64, it could not be worse than Heroes.
