More characters! Warp and Eyesore! The Blue Bolt and the Walking Christmas Tree! (I just came up with those now, we'll see if they stick.)

I had a dream a bit ago where there was this sad girl and I gave her a hug. It's notable because I could feel her body temperature. I don't often dream in "temperature".

Been a few days, but here's another installment of 'looking at some of my personally created super heroes'

Starring: Warp and Eyesore!



I wouldn't ordinarily place these two together, they both often serve as a more rational voice in a story, because Warp is genre savy, and Eyesore is cynical. Well, okay, maybe that's a reason to talk about them together for the purposes of a post. Which I'm doing now.

Try to keep up!

Warp is a kind of Atticus-lite, more representative of a regular guy trying to be a hero. It's therefore THIS character that gets to make mistakes when he's trying to do good, and can feel anxious about whether or not he's doing the right thing. I tend to think of him as a lot like Cyclops (leader of the X-Men), even though that really isn't all that accurate. For one thing, Cyclops can fall into "drill sergeant" mode, making him come off as unlikable- Warp doesn't do this, because theoretically Atticus is the groups leader.

Except for the very basics of their personalities, each of my main characters is a bit of a blank slate to start off with. This is done intentionally as I strive to find some middle ground between the (for lack of a better term) evolutionary worlds of the DC or Marvel variety (a story setting that gets built brick by brick, issue by issue, over the entire period of it's publishing history) and the more thematically unified creationist world (most characters and history arrive fully formed, and any adventure they go on is old hat to them) you get in your Astro City, or even your Watchmen. Having my characters relatively blank, but the world around them (mostly) fully formed, allows the readers to better project themselves onto one of my leads, as they grow brick by brick, issue by issue.

Obviously this leads to a difficulty in getting the characters different voices across... chiefly between Atticus and Warp. In my third issue Warp (as "Warren Harper") goes exploring a bit and finds a comic book store, where the shop owner lets him read a ton of stuff. I really love the enthusiasm Warp has about the super hero stories... okay, I made him into a little nerd, but that was ALWAYS going to happen, especially with his powers.

See, when I first made the guy, he just had super-speed. I tend to love the super-speed guys, when my brother and I were deciding on whether to buy a Sega Genesis or a Super Nintendo, we chose the speedy hedgehog over the plumber. Many a notebook had Sonic doodles inside. Of course the number I've done pales in comparison to my brothers. But anyway.

So Warp had super-speed, but as I got older and read a few other comics I ran into some difficulties- the Flash goes around defying physics because of an 'aura' that protects him and things close enough to him from friction- when a bad guy or something has gotten rid of that aura, the Flash will always catch on fire. This 'aura' was eventually expanded on to be the "Speed Force", an extra dimensional energy source that would let Flash move faster than light, because otherwise Flash had to stop every hundred miles or so at a hot dog stand to fuel up.

So what was my character doing for energy?

The way I remember it going is a little skewed, because I feel like I had the idea before grade twelve and then refined it then, but lets say for arguments sake that I came up with the whole of the answer in grade twelve. Actually, my grade eleven physics teacher was electrifying with the subject matter, I MUST have come up with the basics then.

The idea for me was that speed is relative to your reference points- if you have only a thing moving and a single point of reference, it is impossible to know which is the thing moving away.

Not only that! But if you take smaller and smaller slices of time (this part definitely came to me in grade 12 calculus, and is the reason I'm grateful for having taken the course even though I bombed it so bad. My first test I got like 30% and said "well, I'm failing this class!") then the speed seems to be less and less... until you get to that infintesimal fraction where absolutely nothing is moving, and the one reference point IS just as good as another!

So what Warp does (and I've been keeping my eyes open for years, dreading the day when I find someone else has hit on this concept... so far I think I'm clear) is he "acceleports"- making a minor teleport (I have his upper limit range at about 2 meters... enough so that he can appear on the other side of walls- another Flash trick that I wanted to mimic but with a different reasoning behind it than "vibrating ones molucules through the wall") and when Warp comes out of the teleport he's going whatever speed he wants.

Zero to lightspeed in nothing flat.

Now Warp wouldn't actually go at lightspeed- friction would tear him apart! Not only that, but even going, say, a modest 200 km/hr would make it pretty hard to breathe. This is a good thing as far as I'm concerned... I have the most fun with the Flash when he isn't a boring invincible hero that's way too powerful, but since that rarely happens, well, I have my own guy for that.

And what's great (as far as I'm concerned) is that if Warp were to wear a breathing apparatus, then BAM he can go that much faster. Similarly, if he were in a straight vacuum tube (with the appropriate environmental gear) even friction wouldn't be that much of a problem, and he actually COULD go sub lightspeed.

Making further reference to the... points of reference... thing... when Warp acceleports he essentially switches reference points with his destination. Say he were to accidentally make a jump into a tree... well fortunately the part of the tree that was in the space he's now occupying is currently sitting back where Warp made his last jump... no scrambled molecules for me thanks, I'm full! However, I wouldn't advise Warp to stick around in that spot, because if he just switched spots with part of a tree trunk, well the rest of that tree is going to come crashing down on top of him.

Hey, I gave him all the help I could, he's on his own now.

Of course there are a lot of applications for this outside of self propulsion, like moving around OTHER stuff... but I've made it so that this kind of thing is especially draining on Warp, to put a limit on that sort of thing. To be clear, it's the jumps themselves that require physical exertion from Warp, not the speed he may or may not choose to have. So if he made a jump to go super fast, but was too tired to make the corresponding leap to slow down... well, he'd have a real problem there, wouldn't he?

To force him to stay on the ground (even though that's really the more dangerous place for him to be) the first story arcs villain Dr. Jason Corvid (oh no, so villainous!) implanted in Warp a fear of heights. That's actually really been difficult to get across, and it's weird to put so much effort into a problem that I know he'll eventually get over... most of the time now when I imagine Warp it'll be of him rocketing on an arc through the air...

Interesting side note: while travelling along, what with the frequency of acceleport jumps necessary for keeping from smeering along the ground, Warp would almost always see things as if under a strobe light. Disorienting.

Ah, I spent forever talking about Warp, and still have Eyesore to go... this is why I wanted to do them each on their own... but I wanted to complete the year with these 5 guys talked about... I should have started earlier...

Eyesore is the character that whenever I get someone to read what I've done with my comic, people will like the most. Because he's cynical and sarcastic, and therefore funny. And then I always go "NOOO don't like Eyesore- he's easy to write! Appreciate someone else, someone I actually had to work on to get their feelings across!"

Don't get me wrong, I love Eyesore- I love all these guys- but Eyesore just happens on the page. It does me no credit to have people love him.

He's got pretty much all of the vision powers- heat vision, telescopic, x-ray (but that one... doesn't do what you think it'll do), eventually he'll get a sort of concussive blast like Cyclops has (man, I must really like old Cyclops to keep bringing him up).

Pretty much the first line out of Eyesore's mouth in my comic is him yelling at the lions share of the cast as they fly away "Not everyone can leap tall buildings you know!" I may not have decided on what I'd want my comic to be called, but if I were naming/titling the issue, that quote would have to be it. Eyesore is self conscious about his powers, not feeling they're flashy enough... and so he lashes out with a false bravado, and harsh words. Well, as harsh as I'm willing to give him, so still pretty tame.

In the picture above, I've drawn him looking up at the stars, and he's looking pretty happy. I imagine it'd be impossible for him to not be amazed by stargazing, but otherwise he's unimpressed with his power draw. Which is too bad, because he's actually got it made over the other guys. Just from sheer number of powers he's got them beat.

Here's a tip, when the Hypnocrook (man, I love that guys name) tries and fails to hypnotize Eyesore in issue #2, Eyesore can't figure out why he's immune. He suggests it's because he's "Awesome" but here's a hint: because of the kind of sensory information he takes in, in order to interpret it, he's got a super brain. I keep picturing the example of him looking at the reflections in a spoon and being able to make out everything around him just as well as if he were looking straight at it. Anyway, it makes him immune to mind control. Pretty awesome, right?

I imagine a lot of people who know me would think that Eyesore is my author avatar in the series- they think of me as sarcastic and whatnot. As a not so subtle meta joke Eyesore even takes the secret identity of "Isaac Harris" (to which someone loudly proclaims "What kinda dumb name is Isaac?") Well, that's not how I see myself. Even though it's true that ALL of the main characters have varying chunks of me in them, Warp has always been my author avatar, going all the way back to when these guys were created based on some guys in class in grade three. But my brother Jordan WAS the template for Eyesore... in fact, his awesome "Super Jordan" stories created a bunch of things that we still use today- like the Hypnocrook, for example, who hasn't really changed in name, appearance OR modus operandi since he first appeared.

And that is why I've featured Warp and Eyesore together on the same page.