Spotlight on Owlgirl

When Alpha Danger Squad: Karno's Perfect game gets released later this year, I am hopeful you will like "get" what I'm trying to do. And while I'm a big believer in show-don't-tell, I think you might want to wet your appetite on a bit more of the creative process behind each character. Or whatever.

Bella Wayne was the girlfriend of  the hero The Owl. She started assisting him, without any gimmick, but one day she up and moved  into costume superheroing.

And so she remained.  When  I started the story ideas for Alpha Danger Squad one of my key goals is that this was not the beginning of the story by any means.  Therefor, the idea of legacy characters is important to that, and Owlgirl fits nicely along that line.

Bella Wayans was a normal teenager girl, by all appearances. But secretly she assisted her teacher Nicholas Terry pursue vengeance on crimedom as The Owl, as his operator: she sought any information he might need, and guided him via voice commands.

Unfortunately  Nicholas died. Beset that her friend  was gone, she swore to carry on for him.

In terms of powers, Golden Age Owlgirl had gadgets, and so will mine. She's got the ability to glide in the air, and she's got flashbangs at her disposal.

Spotlight on The Red Rube

When Alpha Danger Squad: Karno's Perfect game gets released later this year, I am hopeful you will like "get" what I'm trying to do. And while I'm a big believer in show-don't-tell, I think you might want to wet your appetite on a bit more of the creative process behind each character. Or whatever.

Today's subject is The Red Rube. Young Reuben Reuben was an orphan, in the worst orphanage in the world. Rather than face the whip one more time, he runs away.

NO CHILD LEFT ALIIIVE HAHAHAHAHA!

Lucky for him he finds  a would be adopter with a castle. Unlucky for him he dies.

Get a load of Quaker-guy, over there.

By chance, he finds an portrait gallery in the castle, and by chance all the subjects are named just like him.

What do you figure the skinhead in the wifebeater's gonna give him?

Eventually he is faced with the ghostly aparitions of his ancestors. Turns out he's the last in a line of great men. The ghosts agree that they oughta help him get back at the orphanage, so they, after squabling about it, decide to give him all their talents.

My  version's probably just gonna yell "Mira, cabron!"

 He can channel them into an adult avatar all by yelling "Hey Rube!" It's a carney thing. No, I did not know about it before running into him.

So most people will agree that Red Ruben is probably not coincidentally similar to  Captain Marvel, albeit without the more metahuman abilities  and shirt. I kind of agree.

See, at first I wanted to make add Captain Marvel. But I kinda feared DC's indomitable wrath. I've heard Archie's wrath is pretty domitable.

So looking at this character I aproached it from a what if mindset.  The Reuben's are a line of great men who  can, from the afterlife, channel their power into their last descendant. But what if that last descendant was a girl?  Since Red Rube is "all of them, wrapped up into one, wouldn't she become a man?

In my version, Rubina Reubens is the last of a long line descending from the tribe of Reuben. The great men of her family where hunted down by Mysery, who cannot die until all of them are dead.  The ancestors only give Rubina the powers because otherwise Mysery is going to kill her pretty dead, ending the family line.

I'm also adding to him  tornado based powers. I wouldn't want anyone confusing him with Captain Marvel...  would I?

Spotlight on Spider Widow

When Alpha Danger Squad: Karno's Perfect game gets released later this year, I am hopeful you will like "get" what I'm trying to do. And while I'm a big believer in show-don't-tell, I think you might want to wet your appetite on a bit more of the creative process behind each character. Or whatever.

Let me know if you've hear this: Dianne Grayton  was a bored socialite and athlete. So one day she slipped on  a halloween witch costume, and went off to fight crime. Well, that's the story of the Spider Widow, anyway.

Also, this book had some great Fourth Wall breaking.

The idea of a woman adopting an uglyfying persona in order to fight crime was probably as weird then as it is now, with fellow Quality heroine Phantom Lady as an example of  how publisher's fall to the allure of the cheesecake (and modern  DC teta-happy revivals of one and  complete oblivion of the other as further proof.) Not that I'm not into chessecake. But I've always been of a mind that if you can flip a table on expectations you probably should.We're not lacking in that factor, anyway.

But her scary looks were not enough to make her an outcast, and she soon inspired  fellow hero The Raven, and teamed up with him and the previously named phantom lady. No, not that one.

So, I'm more or less taking most of that into play. The key differences are as follows:

Dianne Grayton is a basketball star and a pretty succesfull one too. However, there's some trouble in her past. As a kid she witnessed a crime, which she never told anyone because it was so horrible. She carried with her the secret into adulthood. Unable to reconcile her guilt, she tried jumping off a tall building. But then she was saved by a spider-themed hero(no, not that one), who told her to more or less make something better out of her life with this new, second chance.

And so she adopted the identity of the Spider Widow as  a homage to her hero, and using remote controlled spiders to scare villians. The uniqueness of the spiders as an attack is that they follow along walls and cielings.