AT THE HELM
thoughts on superheroes, writing and the world
Obscure Heroes: Shadowdragon
I like the weird and the wild of superhero characters. Sometimes certain figures never quite get the due I think they deserve. Obscure Heroes is all about celebrating those characters and maybe even what could have been with them.
Bringing Airboy into the future
He certainly isn’t a character that went without a revival in the 1980s. Chuck Dixon and Tim Truman created a rather amazing series at Eclipse (now being collected by IDW) with art by the likes of Stan Woch, Ben Dunn, Ron Randall and Tom Lyle. But that series didn’t tell the story of the original Airboy.
Best Character Ever: Static
I’ve talked about some of my influences for Lightweight in the past, but one easily stands above the rest. And that character is Static.
Animated Heroes!
I often marvel at the number of aging comic fans (much like yours truly) that want to blame the loss of comic readers on the advent of characters in other media forms, whether it be TV, movies or video games. They act like some great generational divide exists where people read comics before it to get superheroes and after it, they just stopped.
I'm proof that such a divide isn't real.
Influential: Starman
Setting has become a vastly important part of my work as I write. There’s a grand tradition in super powered fiction to introduce cities that are like the real world but that are pulled away so that the insanity of super-action doesn’t bleed too close to reality. But for decades, those cities were just pale imitations of real-life towns. Gotham and Metropolis were both somehow New York City. Central City was Chicago. Coast City was San Francisco. You know the routine.