Thinking of doing a City Watch comic

[coldcut]

Just a thought and not really a fully formed one. Wanted to use my technique for producing those Furies comics (well, comic) for doing something with the City Watch. Seeing as no one's really around much, if no one objects to me using their characters, I'm just gonna use them. General thoughts and alterations listed below:

Randomus: Obviously leader. Not using the psychic powers stuff since that's KOS' realm. Gauntlet is linked to a strange dimension that interferes with our world, producing bizarre results (see Forest Ninjas, Canadian.) I don't know if that's a Rand original concept or not, but I want a Deus Ex Machina to explain the general weirdness. Might use an arch-villain I invented for Rand called the Orderly. (Come to think of it, we may have had similar thoughts on that one.)

Olympian: Much more emphasis on Lorash's original concept with the bow, using his scrapperesque stuff almost as an afterthought. Probably not going to use the time travel stuff. (Not retconning it out, just sort of ignoring it since I don't really know what was going on.) Used as the team consience. Using my villain Cupid and linking him to Oly's personal history as a close friend.

Electrical Burn: Going to attempt to use my graphic abilities to give EB some real special effects to his flight, fire and electrical powers to emphasize his stuntman origins. Not replacing anything, just making it more colorful. Think Jubilee except effective. Comic relief role. I may switch out the flak jacket to a smoother armor option. Toning down the invention stuff a bit. More simple engineering, less Mr. Fantastic.

King of Spades: Looking at using him as the Batman type, the sort of quiet threatening enforcer. More mild-mannered obviously, but capable of the iron glove in velvet treatment. I'm thinking an interesting interplay with Goldstar as a kind of bad cop/worse cop interaction like one of my favorite scenes from LA Confidential.

Lucianna: Adding her as the Femme Fatale and the strong(wo)man type. There are probably female characters who have stronger connections to the team real life(?!), but Lucianna was a chick I hung out with a lot back in the day, and her character fit the Watch so well I really wanted to use her instead of someone else.

Goldstar. Same as he ever was. Artist perogative. Making him a tad more hippie-ish to reflect his environmental connection with the earth. Real life analogue: Ricky Williams.

Thinking about adding my character the Mekanik as a support type to handle the science/invention stuff. One of my big qualms with comic books is the science as magic stuff, physicists genetically engineering things, medical doctors fixing spaceships, etc., so I just made a character who basically does treat science and engineering as magic and gave him a magical explanation for it.

If anyone else associated with the team really desperately wants to be included, drop me a line. I'm really only including the people that have been the core team for a long time, only adding Luci because she fills a desperately needed rule (See Gay, Not Making Us Look So) and fit in so well.

[Randomus]

Sounds like a good challenge! I never really solidified the gauntlet's origin (it's been an extradimensional alien consciousness, a mechanical accident forged out of an ancient katana hosting the samurai's mind, and a generic forcefield generator gauntlet that Randomus just THINKS has another mind inside it), so your take is as good as any. And probably better than most.

The Orderly would be interesting. Sort of like the guy in Doom Patrol who wanted to eliminate all abnormalities from the planet (and his knock-off Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E., of course).

Good luck. Let me know if you need a hand- I'm usually on YIM.

[coldcut]

The Orderly would be interesting. Sort of like the guy in Doom Patrol who wanted to eliminate all abnormalities from the planet (and his knock-off Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E., of course).

That's actually exactly what I was thinking about when I made him.

[TopHat]

Sounds like a cool idea. I'll be looking forward to reading it and seeing your touch on KoS...sounds about right to me ;)

[thebluecanary]

Well, if you need EB to pose for anything, you just let me know. =) I've always wanted to be in the comics.

[coldcut]

Well, if you need EB to pose for anything, you just let me know. =) I've always wanted to be in the comics.

I've actually got a clone on the Freedom server under the monkier "Electrical Burp."

edit: I was going to correct my misspelling of moniker there, but the other way is a lot funnier.

[Randomus]

The monkier Electrical Burp is EB's highly devolved clone-- a fire-spewing monkey.

[coldcut]

First off, Electrical Burn as a monkey:

http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/3883/burp0dg.jpg

Second off: character evolution.

Electrical Burn. I've had a hard time nailing down and stylizing EB's character. What I finally decided is that EB (the character) seems to be driven by a need to be accepted. Touches everything from his desire for publicity with a high profile team to his, uh, "way" with the ladies. So I wanted a backstory that would explain that. It would have been easy enough to say that he just picked on a lot as a kid, but I had an interesting alternative. The idea being that when EB was fairly small, his mother was stricken with early-onset Alzheimer's. As a result, his father sort of withdrew from the world, leaving young David pretty much alone with his toys and later on, his engineering projects. This early lack of emotional connection has driven EB to a sort of desperate extroversion. Of course, we won't reveal the past till a suitably late issue, but it helps me do dialogue and character relationships. Also, I see this whole thing taking place in Iowa for some reason.

Also, my explanation for his hairstyle is that the magnetic field that he uses to fly produces a lot of static electricity.... Seriously.

Randomus. My take on the gauntlet. For every action in the universe, there's a sort of bell curve for the most probable result. Sure, if you bounce a ball against a surface, that ball will rebound at an equilateral(?) angle to it's approach. But the energy released from the collision disperses in a bell curve from the point of impact. Randomus has the power to reduce that curve to zero on all points, producing a result that is equally probable in all directions, aka randomized. This ability is linked to his gauntlet, an artifact from another dimension in which the balance between order and chaos is significantly slanted towards the latter.

This dimension is ruled over by The Orderly, a being from this dimension who escaped into our world, and was immediately committed to a mental institution. Escaping to his home dimension, he successfully uses the knowledge gained in our world to imprison every being in this chaos dimension in an immense asylum. Note at this point that the beings in this world are not generally innocent or nice critters. Morality being a thing that requires some orderly framework, it could be argued that the Orderly isn't technically in the wrong here. The problem is that he keeps trying to capture Randomus' gauntlet and return it to his dimension, appalled at the prospect that Randomus is daily introducing tiny tiny amounts of chaos into the world that inspired the Orderly's "redemption." I'm undecided whether the guantlet itself is a sort of living being from the Chaos dimension. If this seems a little detailed, it's because it plays heavily into this initial story arc.

Egon McFlynt winds up with gauntlet because in the entire world, his mind is best equipped to deal with the weirdness. So it's basically bizarro Green Lantern.

The Olympian: Built on the urban myth of the lebensborn, a supposed eugenics project put in motion by Hitler. The premise here, which doesn't really diverge much from the actual origin, is that Oly is the third or fourth generation of lebensborn in the United States, the peak of Nazi evolution. I'v e actually written out a fairly lengthy storyline detailing the life of Will Sullivan, and it's amazing to write. I always thought that Lorash's character was one of the best I'd ever come across in COH, and it appears now that I even underestimated it. In any case, Will becomes ostracized at a fairly early age, as his physical superiority earns him rights and priveliges that his peers don't get. (Most specifically, "breeding rights," which are just as creepy as they sound, and will play a big part in informing Oly's future relationships.) Seeing this, a very intelligent, but physically inferior boy befriends Will, in the process showing him that Will's immense physical capabilities aren't always means in themselves. However, the lebensborn overseers are not as open-minded, and to prove a point, they "cull" the other boy and force to Will to run an obstacle course dragging his body, in order to prove to him that the other child is nothing but "dead weight." This backfires rather spectacularly, as Will grows more and more disillusioned with the Nazi philosophy, to the point that despite his physicallity, the overseers attempt to cull him. Of course, being the hero, Will wipes out the entire male half of the camp in a dramatic showdown. Having escaped Nazi control for a time, Will proceeds to Denver, CO and the Olympic tryouts. As a lebensborn, he was to have become a world renowned athelete, proving to the world "the superiority of the Aryan race." As a vagabond, he has no better options, so he does the same. (Resulting in a pretty funny scene [in my mind] where a peppy group from a PR firm asks him to tell them everything about his life so that they can get to marketing him. So he does. The government takes over from there.) Anyways, everyone knows the story from there. I don't know if Lorash is even around anymore, but I figured I'd put this up here in case he dropped by.

King of Spades. Nothing new here. I've got such a good grasp of the character in my mind that I don't feel like I need to add much else. Basically extremely pragmatic to the point of heartlessness. There's an aspect of the Shadow here. Being a mind reader, he knows the evil in the hearts of men, and there's a lot of it, but he knows the good as well, and he'll go to extremes to protect the latter and fight the former.

[thebluecanary]

I must set you on fire for that monkey bit. And his 'HAIR' was always ment to be actually on fire. Wild was the closest I could ever get.

[coldcut]

Super-cool-flame-in-hand-effect-in-my-sig aside, it's real tough to PSedit COH flames. It'll be tough enough with just the powers, especially if I'm going to be adding effects. Also tough to get screenies, as I'd have to completely reconfigure Code 4's third costume slot. I knew that you wanted a big flame head, but it was just beyond my capabilities. If you'd like a different kind of hair, this is the time to be making suggestions.

[Randomus]

Haha. You went to town on the Randomus idea. I love it.

[Lucianna]

Somehow I missed your PM for weeks Coldcut O_o Sounds good to me. If you need any info on Luci just let me know. I still have you on my friends list as Goldstar, but I don't ever see you online.

[coldcut]

Hey, Lucianna! Truth be told, I don't play COH that much anymore. I actually keep it on the HD for the costume creator and this screenshot comic stuff as much as anything. Probably a waste of cash, but I've never been the most frugal person.

[Randomus]

Has anyone heard from Oly? At all?