Man, I should probably start tagging Bringing Up Baddie stuff now that I have a name for it and the concepts I've done for it span, like, several different months of incredibly sporadic work.
Anyway, I've been thinking about the superhero side of this supervillain story, because you kinda need some of the former even if your tale is focusing on the later.
I already made Bullmark, whose character concept is "what is a real world style billionaire, ala Elon Musk or Stockton Rush, decided to be a superhero as his expensive vanity project?" You know, a character who acknowledges that a real life Batman/Iron Man would be an obnoxious dillweed. But who are the other heroes he'd pal around with? What brave enforcers of the status quo and protectors of shareholders' investments would stand beside him?
The big thing I wanted to avoid was just making Justice League expies, because that's what every superhero parody/pastiche seems to end up doing - "Oh, here's Aquaman but he's a dick, here's Wonder Woman but she's a dick, here's Green Lantern but he's a dick," et cetera. The only blatant expy of the bunch should be Bullmark, and that's because Batman tends to get off so light when people are lampooning superheroes - generally just a quick "The Batman Expy died immediately because he has no powers, lol1" and then they move on.
My first idea was, like, a pilgrim-themed sharpshooting "lethal protector" hero in the vein of the Punisher - Goodman Killshot, the Purity Pilgrim. He's a merciless murderer that targets criminals and claims to have a profound philosophical reason for what he does, but he's ultimately motivated by sadomasochistic desires that he refuses to explore in an ethical way. He loves killing the "impure" and also loves the feeling of having multiple belts tied slightly too tightly around his body. He's got very mid superpowers - mildly superhuman endurance, strength, and speed - that he compensates for with a big and ludicrously powerful musket. His archenemy is the Robber Gobbler, a turkey themed bank robber supervillain who, despite generally being pretty incompetent and nonthreatening, and nonetheless managed to survive every encounter with him despite his efforts to kill her.
Since these guys are basically designed to sway public opinion, I figured that one of them might as well explicitly double as a propagandist, and so we get Hot Goss, a reporter-turned-cyborg. Since his head is now a giant camera, he has a screen on his torso that serves as his face. He's also got robot arms that can turn into flamethrowers and come with built-in microphones, and extendable telescoping robot legs.
And, in a similar vein, these guys are all basically cops even if legally they're technically in the private sector, so yeah, let's just make one of them literally a superhero cop. Marshall Lawman (I just wrote "Marshall Law" on the sketches even though I was pretty sure that pun was too obvious for someone else not to have used it already - Marshall Lawman is just bad enough to be both distinct and within the bounds of this project's tone) is a former police officer who has the ability to stretch his arms to obscene lengths (the long arm of the law). He also has access to a bunch of military grade weapons and technology, and though he only half-understands how to use any of it, that doesn't stop him from whipping out his many toys and using them with reckless abandon in every fight anyway.
The team needs a token girl (no more than one, though, that'd be DEI), and my first thought was "she has to be a trad wife somehow." I ultimately skewed from that concept, but I like to think it's still there in spirit with Influensa. She's got mind control powers, being able to grab and hold people's attention, issue them hypnotic commands they must obey, and, if given enough time to work uninterrupted, can completely destroy their memories and personality traits and replace them with new ones that better suit society at large. She uses that second power to "reform" villains she's captured, effectively destroying the person they were to build a new, "better" one! I grave her a purposely basic swimsuit-style lady superhero costume, and I think her official position among this superhero team is "secretary," just like Wonder Woman used to be for the Justice League!
I feel like every big superhero team needs to have at least one Guy from Space to bring in some explicitly non-terrestrial drama into things, and since one of the established big villains in this setting is an intergalactic tyrant/scourge named Nebulord, we could do a two-for and make the Guy from Space his nemesis - someone who fills roughly similar niches as Silver Surfer, Martian Manhunter, and Green Lantern. A space cop. Astrocop, if you will. I tried to make him feel like a 1960's scifi character - just a little psychedelic, with a very streamlined look and a big laser arm. He's part of an intergalactic law enforcement agency, and Earth happens to be in his jurisdiction (and also a frequent haven for intergalactic outlaws), so he strong-armed his way onto the superhero team with the promise that if they worked with him he'd keep the intergalactic government off their backs. He fights by shooting rays of cosmic radiation and miniature black holes at people, which is as needlessly lethal and destructive as it sounds.
The final team-mate is Matter Master, who, in a horrible experiment gone awry, was given the ability to turn his body into either a purely solid, liquid, or gaseous state at will, at the cost of not being able to turn into a normal human form again. Though capable of movement, he is incapable of speech, and more or less works as a superhero because there's nothing else in his life to do anymore.
Together, these seven assholes are The GSVA, aka the Government Sanctioned Vigilantes of America, the only legally operating superheroes in the setting.
What about other superheroes, though?
Well, they're illegal, obviously - tolerated at best so long as they stick to fighting other illegal super-powered individuals, but treated with just as much vilification by the government if they ever, say, try to expose the corruption of good, law-abiding corporations like Konglomerate Inc. Such is the case of Poison Dart Princess, a woman who was an unfortunate test subject of one of Konglomerate's many gene splicing superpower experiments, and ended up becoming an illegal vigilante when she tried to expose their unethical practices. Being given the enhanced traits of poison dart frogs, her body constantly secrets toxic mucus, and also features suction-cup toes on her frog-like feet. This means that most people can't touch her skin without being poisoned, a fact that brings her no small amount of loneliness. But she can at least put it to good use, using her toxic mucus to incapacitate bad guys non-lethally (provided she has time to dilute it before putting it into her poison dart daggers).
Despite being a heroic (if illegal) vigilante, Poison Dart Princess has a friendship with the pointedly non-heroic supervillain Scarlet Sidewinder, on account of them both escaping Konglomerate's laboratories together. They often try to convince each other to switch sides of the hero/villain divide, with little success.
