Comic Book Question 11

Oct25 by Revis Edgewater

If you could create one character to stick into any comic book world (it can be a hero, villain, or even just a supporting character), who would you create and which comic book world would you send them to?

I could go the cheap way and tell you all about the three mutant brothers I created for my X-Men fan fiction… again… but that’s three characters, not one. I thought about trying to come up with a new villain for Daredevil. He hasn’t had a good new villain in a while. Although Muse wasn’t too bad. I also thought about coming up with a new Nightwing villain, one not connected to any of the other Bat family or Titans, but then I remembered that’s what they’re trying to do with Heartless.

Ten or fifteen years ago, I had an idea for a new character in the Moon Knight mythos, but it’s eerily similar to Hunter’s Moon, who just debuted two or three years ago. I’m not sure how they did it, but I’m convinced that Marvel stole the idea from me and tweaked it just enough to be different. Also around ten to fifteen years ago, I had an idea for a DC character who would basically be a foul-mouthed Looney Toons character come to life, but the more I thought about it, the more it sounded like The Mask.

No, it’s time to come up with something new… think… think… think…

I got nothing. So, instead, I’m going to take the easy way out and just pick one of the brothers from my X-Men story. I’m not going to pick the most powerful of the three. In fact, you could make the argument that he’s the weakest. Still, I’d choose him over the other two because I think his mutant power would make his interactions with the X-Men more interesting.

His name is Antonio Rodriguez, an Army veteran, and his mutant power is that he’s immune to mutant powers.

That may not seem like much, but think about it. There’d be someone who couldn’t be influenced or have their mind read by Jean Grey, Emma Frost, or Professor X. Cyclops could hit him with his optic blast, and it wouldn’t affect at all. Colossus couldn’t use his super strength to lift him up or punch him across a room. It was a plot point in the story I wrote because one of the characters I used in it was Chamber, and the only way he can talk is through his mutant powers. Their inability to communicate caused problems.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think that’s interesting.

What about you? Do you have an original character you’d like to drop into a comic book world?

Comic Book Question 1

Jan12 by Revis Edgewater

A couple of guys at work are into comic books, like I am, and one of the things we do to pass the time is ask each other questions about them. Sometimes it’s picking two characters and debating who would win in a fight between them. Sometimes it’s picking characters we’d like to form a superteam with. Other times, it’s random off-the-wall stuff. I think I’ll save that last category for next week and start with something a little more normal for this first question.

IF YOU COULD BE GIVEN COMPLETE CREATIVE CONTROL OF ANY MARVEL CHARACTER, WHICH ONE WOULD IT BE?

It would be very easy to answer this with my favorite Marvel character, Daredevil, but that’s not who I would choose. There are other characters that I’ve read a lot of over the years that would be easy to answer with: Wolverine (the original), Deadpool, and Gambit, to name a few. I wouldn’t choose them either.

The character I would pick is Chamber.

I know a lot of you out there probably aren’t familiar with him. Jonothan Starsmore is a mutant who first appeared in Generation X, later joined the X-Men, Weapon X, and the New Warriors at various times. He had his own miniseries at one point, as well.

When he was first introduced, and at other times throughout his publication history, it was hinted that Chamber would eventually become one of the most powerful mutants on the planet. Over the years, however, that never happened. In fact, he’s been used less and less as time has gone on. The last I saw of him, he did a storyline with the New Mutants around 4 or 5 years ago that lasted probably 6 issues.

If I was ever given the opportunity to do so, I would love to do a story where Chamber finally reaches his potential. A story where he becomes one of the heavy hitters in the X-Men universe.

Although, at this point, I’d just be happy if they started using him more.

My First Fan Fiction

Apr16 by Revis Edgewater

The very first thing I ever wrote in story form was a novelized version of the first solo campaign I ever ran in D & D. At the time, I thought it was great. Reading it now, it’s horrible. It is easily the worst thing I’ve ever written. The dialogue is boring. The characters are basic and/or carbon copies of other characters that I had read before. For example, one character was a half-elf named Roderigo (named after a Seven Mary Three song) who was nothing more than a mixture of the characters Tanis Half-Elven and Raistlin Majere from the DragonLance novels.

After that, I started writing my Dead Set series. I wasn’t really worried about the writing on this one as I was originally intending it to be turned into a comic book. Therefore, none of my grammatical errors mattered because they wouldn’t exist in an image of the action my words were depicting. It was great. I just wrote whatever came to me. Then, when it became evident that they would never actually be turned into comic books, I stopped writing it.

That didn’t stop me from writing comic book stories, however.

I came up with some characters of my own and drew the books out in my horrible stick figure-ish style, where they were only viewed by my closest friends (Before you ask, none of them still exist, so don’t ask me to post them). There were a couple of others that I wrote out in the same style as Dead Set too. One was called Haunted Angel, which addressed what happened to Father Michaels after he left Dead Set (though he wasn’t the main character of the book).

Another one was the very first fan fiction I ever wrote. It was an X-Men story. Although, thinking back on it now, while it may have been a story that had the X-Men in it, it was mostly a way to introduce three original characters of my own.

The basic premise was that there was a standoff at an army base between the troops and mutants. Professor X uses Cerebro to determine that there are two mutants there and dispatches Cyclops, Storm, Gambit, Nightcrawler, Chamber, and Wolverine to diffuse the situation. When they get there, they find that the two mutants are brothers and that they’re joined by their other brother, who was a soldier at the base.

The soldier brother was discharged from the army after a blood test determined that he was also a mutant. He was trying to talk to his superior officers to ask for a new test, because he had never shown any mutant abilities, when things predictably got out of hand. His brothers, who were there to drive him home from the base, stepped in to defend him and it ended up in a standoff.

There was no big X-Men villain, like Magneto or Apocalypse, in the story. The main bad guy was an anti-mutant army officer who tried to kill them all instead of following his orders to de-escalate the situation.

As much as I would like to post this story for you all to read, I can’t. When I originally wrote the story, I started it in one notebook, but ended up finishing it in another when the original notebook (which also had other things I had written in it) became full. Over the course of the many, many moves I’ve been forced to endure since I wrote the story, I’ve lost the original notebook. All I can find is the notebook with the final two chapters in it.

And, I’d like to tell you all about the brothers from the story, but I might end up repurposing them for one of the dozen or so story ideas I have kicking around my head at the moment.

I guess you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that I think you’d like it.

Taking A Break

Jun3 by Revis Edgewater

I haven’t been able to post regularly in a while. Some of this is due to my work schedule. I get off work at 7 every night and by the time I get home, it doesn’t leave me a whole lot of time to spend with my wife. As much as I’d like to post more, I’m trying to spend as much time with my wife as I can before the baby is born. Once our daughter is here, we won’t have much alone time anymore. I also have been spending a lot of time getting our daughter’s stuff together. Today, I spent almost an hour-and-a-half putting together one of the worst designed rocking chairs ever made so we’d have someplace to sit with our little girl in her room. Any other free time I have (when I’m not going over to twindaddy’s house for Memorial Day) is spent trying to get in as much video game time as I can before her birth. Playing video games is another thing I won’t have too much time to do after she gets here.

I actually do have a little time to write. Unfortunately, it’s on my breaks/lunch at work and I don’t have a phone that will allow me to post on this site. My phone’s internet is barely good enough to post onto Facebook. Instead, I’ve actually been working on a couple of new stories, which means I’m taking a break from my rewrite of Dead Set. As I said in my Terminator post, I’m working with a bunch of comic book nerds. I used to collect comic books myself. I didn’t stop because I didn’t like them anymore or anything like that. I stopped because I just couldn’t afford them anymore. The comic book nerds at work have been filling me in on some of the things that have happened in the comic book world since I stopped reading them. This, in turn, has given me a couple of ideas for stories.

The first is a Superman story. I was never a big Superman fan, but I came up with a story for him that I think is awesome. I’m sure that at the end of the story, most actual Superman fans will call my story sacrilege, but I don’t care. The other story is an X-Men story. This story will contain a member of the team that, I’ve been told, they killed off a few years ago named Chamber. I started liking Chamber when he first appeared in Generation X and it kind of upsets me that they had him die, so I’m going to use him anyway. I’m also introducing some characters that I’ve come up with and the story will be as much about them as it will be about the X-Men.

The Superman story shouldn’t take me too much longer to finish and I’ll put it up as soon as I’m done. Hopefully, you guys like them.