Brainstorming ideas
When I was growing up, I watched a lot of different cartoon shows, such as GIJoe and Transformers. A lot of the media I read/watched was very immersive and you could really feel like a part of the story sometimes. That's of course why Transformers had Spike -- not because (in the story itself) the Autobots would have really needed Spike (he was useless and only got into the way), but rather that this character was the (then mostly young) audience's link with these fantastic, otherworldly robots. What you saw Spike doing was what a morongenuine young person might experience if Transformers were real.
First I suppose we should get the term "Universe" out in the open. For those not familiar, this would be the set of concepts, characters, and reality's rules for any given set of fiction. Marvel and DC Comics have their own Universes, and call them as such, even; many toy lines that sparked cartoon programs also had theirs. So there's a Transformers Universe. In various ways the Transformers and GIJoe have at times been shown to be in the same Universe. and so on and so on.
For most of the shows I watched, and for a lot of the comics I read, I'd come up with a character. This character was "who I'd want to be if I was a part of that Universe." So the character matched the Universe -- the GIJoe team entry didn't have super-powers, etc. Mostly though, I just created superheroes.
At one point I'd considered that if I ever started a comic book company, I might call it "Pron Komics" due to my last name (Pronko). Get it? Unfortunately, in today's slurred-typing world, "pron" has taken on a meaning of its own with which I wouldn't want to associate my comics. :)
Some of the concepts that will be detailed here are ones that have been around in my mind for a long time, but some are recent. At least one of them occurred to me in a dream. A surprising number of the characters are just based on words I liked, or combinations of words that I made up, and I eventually made an appearance to go along with the name.
Hope you enjoy the ride.
Posted on Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 11:26 PM