Today on SDU Weekend, I've decided I'm gonna write some insightful bits for each hero that appears in SDU Volume I! I'll be doing the villains from the first book tomorrow!
1. Jonathan Speyer, Golden Dynamo: I'll address it first because if it wasn't obvious, Golden Dynamo is HEAVILY inspired by Iron Man. But here's why. I've always had an infatuation with theoretical technology. I even liked Star Trek more than Star Wars as a kid because in SW the tech was never explained and in ST there are whole entire technical manuals. Having this feeling, once Tony Stark was thrust into the limelight and Iron Man came onto my radar...it sent the love of technology into overdrive. I wanted to make my own world-changing technology as Tony did. But sadly, this didn't happen. What did happen, is that I started writing superheroes and I could create a hero that did what I wanted to do and that hero became Jon Speyer. With him, I could talk about my ideas all day and put them into action!
2. Minerva: She is the character that saved Southpaw-Comics and SDU. The first story I ever wrote for SDU was "The Dangers of Innovation" and I originally used it for my college creative writing final before it was massively overhauled and used for the first SDU novel. With it, I was even able to convince my prof. that superhero stories are a type of literature, where she was not previously of that opinion. But I don't think Jon Speyer was the root of the praise, I think that honor goes to Minerva.
3. Josh Stone, Tiger-Man: Southpaw-Comic's first hero, these days I've tried to distance myself as far away from Tiger-Man as possible. Not in a negative way, but because when I was a little kid (I created him when I was 7), he was a self-insert character. He was me back then. I only kept his name because he'd been named Josh for so long that changing it felt wrong to me.
4. Davis "Hyper" Sayer: Davis went through the most iterations of any character. Going from originally being the son of Tiger-Man to a science experiment, and he was even a dragon-alien-thing at one point...that last one thankfully didn't last long. Hyper's current state came in 2015 when my urge to write SDU could no longer be held back. I basically instructed Jared to come up with a final version ASAP because I was getting tired of talkin' instead of walkin'.
5. Elio "Nerio" Aquarone: Elio was decided to be Italian because Venice, in my opinion, is one of the most beautiful places in the world and I wanted a hero from there. The Italian "Nerio" is also derived from Greek "Nereus" meaning "Wet One".
6. Gina "Seisma" Brown: I didn't realize that I accidentally made a pun when I created her until another friend pointed it out. Yeah, our Earth-powered hero is from Boulder, Colorado and no, I didn't catch that at all until way later. I just thought Boulder was an interesting city, it was seriously that innocent.
7. Hailie "Cross-Wind" Halstone: Originally called "Cyclone" I had to change the name because a 2016 Avengers comic had revealed a D-List villain named "Cyclone" that I had never heard of before. This also happened with Gina, who's original superhero name was "Quake" until Quake, another character I never knew existed, became the main character in Marvel's Agents of SHIELD.
8. Ralf "Blitzray" Machol: Ralf was originally planned to be a villain who was part of a villain group called "The Lightning 5" who he ended up killing to steal their powers. But when Jared and I came up with the Elemental Holders idea, Blitz was brought over to the hero side.
9. Master Sergeant, Wayne Vaster: The idea for Master Sergeant came in my old paintballing days. When I went to the Army Surplus store to get a cool outfit together, I was looking at rank patches to see which was the coolest looking to put on my uniform, and that ended up being the USMC Master Sergeant insignia. Master Sergeant was just a Master Chief inspired persona I made up for fun when I went paintballing, but when I began writing, he became our super-soldier-type character who oddly ended up being more like Wolverine than Chief after all was put to paper.
10. Milena Halstone: One of the reasons we created Milena is because comics now have an abundance of scientist characters. But none of these characters actually do any kind of science. Only professing their love of science, the only "science" they do is as simple as picking up a beaker of colored liquid and pouring it into something else, creating another thing without explanation. This has been made fun of by the comics community at large, mocking the characters for not being convincing scientists. Milena is our attempt to fix that glaring problem.
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