The Brandon Show

Non-Spoiler Avengers Review

This is our first look at Gamma Ray, as drawn by Peter Czaplarski. I’m really happy with how he came out, as is my friend Jackie, who the character looks like and shares a name with.

With Liberty, if I wind up self-publishing this thing, there would be six issues. Each one would be her going after a different villain while trying to maintain her cover as a new member of their group, “The Vault”.

The 8 page preview comic we’re currently putting together shows you how Liberty got into the group.

Lady Claw (who is in the preview comic), Gamma Ray, and Quiet are the three Vault members I have drawings finished for. The other three members are still TBA.

Where’d I get the name?

Admittedly, I’m a big fan of the German Power Metal band, Gamma Ray. If you’re a prowrestling fan, you’ll know them as the band Chris Jericho had an incident with in one of his books, and his move “The Walls of Jericho” was named for Helloween’s first album, which featured the current lead singer of Gamma Ray as the singer of the group at that time. (Helloween would go on to have a huge hit in the ’80s with a different singer before more or less dropping off the American music map, but some of their later albums are pretty great if you’re into that kind of music like I am.)

If you noticed a theme, a lot of the characters in Liberty are characters you may have seen before in other comics with a slight twist to them. Basically I don’t know what the future holds or if I’ll ever wind up writing comics professionally, so in case I don’t, there’s some stuff I always wanted to do with certain characters or takes on certain characters that I always wanted to see that I can do within Liberty.

Gamma Ray is a different take on Magneto. They both have magnetic-themed powers, but unlike Magneto, Gamma Ray is a straight-up villain. There’s no grey area about her. 

In fact, that’s what made this character interesting in the first place. The Liberty characters are all very self-aware. The villains aren’t necessarily “evil”, but they do have different motivations for doing what they do. Gamma Ray is meant to be a throwback to characters that were evil for the sake of being evil. She loves the big entrances and the stupidly long villain monologues, and commits crimes because she’s totally bought into who she is and what she wants to do with her life. It’s a nice contrast to someone like Lady Claw, who could easily just be described as an “evil Batman” but Lady Claw steals and then gives that money to people she finds who need it. She’s not going around and killing people arbitrarily, which is something Gamma Ray does. 

Every character has to have a specific motivation and purpose for me. I don’t want them just sort of hanging out and taking up space if they don’t move the story forward, and I liked having a big “main” villain leading the group of six. Gamma Ray’s main motivation is to be evil and to show the other supervillains what (she) thinks they should be doing.

Like real gamma rays, she’s also biologically hazardous. That’s not revealed in this picture, but her henchman all have black and purple hazmat suits, and she usually can only be around the other characters if she’s in a place where their powers are deactivated. (The police precincts in Chicago is one of those places, which is how they’re taking a mug shot of her in the first place.) Pretty much nobody wants to be anywhere near her for that reason unless they have some kind of immunity to her abilities. 

Just For Fun …

There are two cover mockups being made for the “50 Shades of Grey with superheroines” novel I’m writing. There’s one where La Amazona is chained up and the villain (the reader) is approaching her. And the other involves Gamma Ray putting a ball gag into La Amazona’s mouth.

It’s possible that Gamma Ray appears as the bad guy in the “romance” novel and I just put in another villain to lead The Vault. I don’t really know just yet since there’s still a lot of time before the next step with Liberty can happen. (I have to have all 9 pages done to share with publishers) and in that time I’ll be mapping out the novel itself.

This is a throwback. 

I’m sure I still have the notes somewhere, but the really short version is that I wasn’t a huge fan of George W. Bush at the time (2007), and I thought it’d be really funny if it turned out the president kept taking so many vacation days (which is something W did a lot) because he was actually the Hulk.

Like he would randomly turn into a Hulk-like creature and it’d be up to a group of overachieving college students to track him down and bring him back to the Oval Office because the Secret Service agents were too busy partying with Columbian prostitutes. (Which is a thing that actually happened. The prostitutes … not the president turning into the Hulk. At least, as far as we know anyway.)

So pictured above is Amaya and Travis, the two college students charged with finding and rounding up the hulked-up president using an assortment of gadgets, and also the hulked-up George W. Bush himself.

I kind of want to have this going on in the Liberty Universe for a couple of reasons. First because I don’t want to use the current president (or whoever the next president is) because then it ages the comic. If you go back and watch the animated Dark Knight Returns (or read the comic) when you see Reagan as the president it does really date things. At least it does for me, even if it’s later revealed there is no president and it’s actually Brainiac and Luthor running things and oh God the Dark Knight Returns sequel is so bad I still get angry thinking about it. DO NOT READ THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN!

The other reason I want this going on is that the Liberty Universe is meant to be a little goofy. Not completely goofy to the point where you can’t take it seriously, but goofy to the point where even if they’re dealing with serious stuff, there’s always something funny that I can use to break things up so it doesn’t get too dark or serious, which is a major problem I have with a lot of modern superhero comics. If I never see the words “grim” and “gritty” again to describe a superhero comic I could die happy. I know there’s a place for that, and those comics have their fans, but it’s just not for me.

Characters In Development

Anyway, that’s not why I wanted to get this post online. I’m still dealing with some crappy stuff and I wanted to post an official update on some of the characters you can expect to see here on this blog soon while I work through that. In February you can expect to see on this blog:

1. Red 5 - Our transgendered superheroine who is also the defender of NYC.

2. Sunrise

3. A currently unnamed super villain

4. Eclipse (who has nothing to do with the Sunrise character)

5. And the big one: La Amazona, the star of the “50 Shades of Grey with superheroines” romance novel I keep talking about.

I didn’t even realize this until I just typed out the list, but Sunrise, Eclipse, and La Amazona fall more on the “sexed up superheroines” side of the costume spectrum. 

La Amazona and Sunrise because I was trying to match what they look like to what you’d see on a typical romance novel. (In a bookstore, that’s where you’ll find this book filed.) The guy super villain for that book will also look that same way.

Remember: Anything having to do with the 50 Shades of Grey with superheroines thing is not part of the Liberty Universe, so I’m not holding them to the same standards costume wise that I would the Liberty characters. Liberty is a PG-13ish comic. The 50 Shades of Grey with superheroines thing is a big honking R. Maybe even an NC-17. I don’t know. That’s up to the agent, editors, and publisher.

Eclipse, who is a Liberty character, is dressed the way she is because she’s a super villain. I really wanted to use the comic itself to talk about the expectations everyone has for heroes and villains in comics. The characters are all very self-aware, and so I liked one of the villains just sort of having this attitude of, “I’m going to do whatever the hell I want and wear whatever I want, fuck you.” It’s really similar to Liberty’s attitude, except one of them doesn’t play by the rules, and over the course of the story where you see Liberty thinks more and more about becoming a supervillain, she looks at Eclipse in this costume and doing whatever she wants and it’s just really appealing to her. “Why can’t that be me?”

That’s a long way of saying, everything with this comic has a reason for the way it is. I don’t want anyone to look at Eclipse and go, “Oh well they just wanted to write and draw hot women.” That’s really not the case. Anything that exists within Liberty has a purpose, and so Eclipse looking the way she does has a specific purpose behind it in terms of the story.

As far as Red 5 goes, I don’t have too much I want to say about her simply because I don’t want to make it a big deal that she’s transgendered. Liberty is a lesbian, and I honestly don’t waste any time talking about that. It’s 2015. Who gives a shit? 

Red 5 doesn’t play a huge role in this specific Liberty story, but she is a major character within their universe and she does make a few appearances. The issue is that I’m sticking very much to “If it doesn’t make sense to the story, don’t include it” rule, and since Red 5 is the protector of New York City, and Liberty is based in Chicago where most of the story is set, there aren’t a lot of reasons for them to interact with each other. You will see her though in the comic and I’m excited to get her drawn soon.

This is Comic Con in a nutshell.