The Walters Files - King Hrölf

The Walters Files: Doorway

I'm still on hiatus, but I was reorganizing the site yesterday (I separated the students and the staff Walters Files into their own sections), I remembered that I still had one more to do.  Doorway is a minor character, but I still think she's pretty cool.  In a different sort of comic, I feel like she could really hold her own as a character.

But that's it, though!  There's a character bio for every student now, except Bobby Rocket, but (SPOILERS) he was meant to be a thug in the employ of Rex Ruthless from the beginning, and he's already in supervillain jail, so I don't even think it'd be appropriate to do one for him at this point.  All the staff's done, too.  Well, except for King Hrölf, but I haven't even used him yet!

As for a hiatus update, I'm thinking it's going to be over pretty soon.  I've gotten some things down on paper and I've found a bit of inspiration to continue on.  At the very least, I'd like to complete Chapter 4, so I can compile Chapters 3 and 4 into a book.

Thanks for your patience, and for your support.  And do me a solid and leave comments!  It reminds me that people are reading my stuff, and I could use the ego boost / constructive criticism.

The Walters Files: LazerFace

You might think LazerFace is a parody of Cyclops, and you'd be right, but personality-wise I get my inspiration for him from one of my highschool gym teachers.  Dude looked just like Ric Flair.  In tiny shorts.

I've been putting LazerFace's file off because Jason (who I let run wild with the backgrounds of the faculty members in the Saturday Super Stories) and I had some conflicts of interest, particularly concerning the school before it was Super U.  But I think I've managed to stay vague enough in this file where I'm not stepping on too many of his toes.

Regardless, if you're following the comic and you're reading the SSS, you'll probably see things conflict now and then.  This is totally alright.  I don't want to limit Jason, and I don't want him to limit me.  Just pretend one is, like, a fanfic of the other.

But with that, I'm damn near out of Walters Files!  There's one more student, and one more teacher (whom I haven't even used in the comic yet), and that's it!  Once I rearrange the site, I may make a new section for Walters Files of miscellanous characters and villains, like Technosyde and King Carp and stuff.

As for what happens when I'm all out of characters?  I haven't figured that out, yet.  Ideally, I'd like to go to doing three comics a week.  But until this comic gets off the ground, that just might not be reasonable.

The Walters Files: The Red Ring

I used a Green Lantern character in the RPG, but I drastically changed him for this comic.  First of all, he originally looked too much like how I currently draw Daemon, with a dark suit, short black hair and a goatee.  And since this is a parody comic, I wanted a gimmick.  The "Red Ring" motif, in case you couldn't tell, comes from the "red rings of death" phenomenon many X-Box users experienced when their systems died.  Being a Playstation fan, I couldn't pass the opportunity to poke a little fun at Microsoft.  I mean, Red Ring's symbol is actually the red ring of death.

Red Ring is a pretty minor character in the grand scheme of things.  Recently I hooked him up with Hydro.  I promise, though, that the "red ring" idea initially had no allusion toward sphincters, though now I am finding the whole thing ironic and humorous.

The Walters Files: El Pequeño

Hey, I finally figured out how to type an "ñ!"  

El Pequeño is one of those "background characters."  I don't really have any plans for him; I just liked the idea of a guy who looks kind of like Robin, only with his outfit the colors of the Mexican flag.

Someday I'll have to tackle the issue of whether he actual has magical shrinking powers, or if he's just completely delusional.

El Pequeño comes from the RPG I ran that began all of this.  If I remember correctly, in that game he actually became one of the PC's sidekicks, and together after graduation they ended up being a part of the new Fantastic Four (or maybe it was Five, I don't recall).

The Walters Files: William Tell

He's only been a sight gag thus far, but I'm sure I'll find some clever things to do with him eventually.  Or I won't.

There are two electives available to the freshman (and only) class of Super U., and Tell teaches one of them.  There aren't many students interested in learning archery,so Tell's nearly useless as a faculty member.

Obviously he's the Green Arrow of the Super U-niverse, but he's the Hawkeye, too, so I tried to have his outfit reflect both of them.

Jason racked his brain to come up with original origins for the faculty, and it was he who decided that, "Hey, why can't William Tell actually just be William Tell?"  I was fine with that, and hence we have the Archery and Marksmanship teacher.

The Walters Files: Kahuna

Kahuna is an obscure character that came from the RPG that I ran that inspired Super U.  I wish that I could claim to have some grand ideas for him... but I really don't.  Super U. is a school, and therefore it needs students.  They're not all equally important to the story.  Kahuna's just one of those guys who is part of the atmosphere.  He isn't even a parody of anyone.

But who knows?  He's a fun character.  I like to keep my options open.

The Walters Files: Jack Rabbit

I haven't used Jack Rabbit much yet, but I recognize the comedy inherent in the idea of a couple of super-powered hall monitors (the other one being King Hrolf, who I haven't used at all).  Plus a guy in a rabbit suit serving out helpings of Salisbury steaks and instant mashed potatoes is pretty funny, too.  Jack Rabbit and Hrolf coordinate with Dean Clobber to keep the students in line.

Jack is my Flash parody, of course.  The Flash is one of the few characters in DC I really like, , at least when it comes to Wally West, although I like him because of his personality, not because of his poor, convoluted backstories.  Then, of course, there's the fact that Flash is just another DC all-powerful god-like beng.  Jack Rabbit is far, far from that.  No vibrating in and out of reality.  No time-jumping.  No ridiculous "Speed Force."  I mean, really.  I like Jason's take on it much better, where there's simply a "kinetic dimension."  Of course, Jack Rabbit can't tap into any of that power.  He's just got a dumb looking suit that he stole off a corpse.

Jason and I couldn't come to an agreement on the origin of the character, so he came up with the idea that Jack Rabbit is actually the second Jack Rabbit, which is quite fitting.  Although, come to think of it, I think he recently killed his version in the Saturday Super Stories. so there's that.

Jack Rabbit is the second-worst dressed superhero in the Super U-niverse, after King Carp.

The Walters Files: Kid Arachnid

Kid Arachnid was a pretty significant part of the original RPG I ran that eventually turned into this comic strip.  But in the comic, at least thus far, he's been seldom-used, which is really too bad, because he's a blast to draw.  So far, he's just been one of the many random faces among the students.  I don't have any plans for him as of now, but I'd like to.  Spiderman is one of my favorite comic book characters; it's a title I wishe I read a lot more of growing up.  So having a character that's the fictional son of the parody of Spiderman has a lot of appeal (wow, that was a mouthful).

You may have noticed that I sometimes recycle artwork for the Walters Files.  I'm hitting the point now, though, where I'm getting into the more obscure characters, and I find myself more and more having to create new artwork for them... which isn't a bad thing.  This pic was a lot of fun to make.

The Walters Files: Conjuressa

I needed somebody who was magical for the strip, and since my focus relies pretty heavily on JLA and Avengers parodies, I decided on a Scarlet Witch / Zatanna.  I don't have many plans for Conjuressa beyond a few funny gags in mind, but outfit aside, I like the look I came up with for her.  I imagine her looking perpetually nervous and bewildered most of the time, like her grasp of what's real is slowly melting away.  I think I was also ever-so-slightly influenced by Paul Kidby's take on the Discworld character Magrat.

The name Conjuressa I took from a minor villain character I used in the original RPG. 

Conjuressa looks a bit too much like Scarlet Witch, I think.  I added some nylon aspects to her outfit as an homage to Zatanna.  I would have done fishnet, but that's a bitch to draw in Illustrator. 

It's my understanding that Batman and Zatanna have / had a bit of thing.  I think it might be ridiculously funny to pursue something alone those lines with Walters and Conjuressa, or more likely, to reveal that there was "something going on" between them in the past.

Kudos to Jason for coming up with an interesting origin for her, and for coming up with Sham'bala and the other mystic cities.  Have you read his description of Carcass on the SSS?  It's good stuff.

The Walters Files: Breakdown

Breakdown as he is now comes from a combination of characters.  I'll let you guess who (Jason, you don't get to guess), but, at least for now, I'm keeping him mysterious.  In the RPG I ran that spawned many of the characters that I use in the comic, there were two NPC's I combined to make the current incarnation of Breakdown.  One of them was the parody character, and the other was an interesting minor character inspired by DMX's character from the end of Belly.  The final result is a strange mix of things, but I think he works well.  In the game, Breakdown ended up being a major anti-hero / villain.  We'll just have to see how things play out this time around.

The Walters Files: CatGirl

I suppose it wouldn't be a proper group of superheroes without an animal hybrid.  Usually it ends up being some scantily-clad chick that happens to be covered in fur, and has a tail and pointy ears.  I thought it would be funny for CatGirl to actually have the face of a cat.  

She's a pretty minor character, at least for now.  I've exhausted my "main characters" as far as the Walters Files are concerned.  Still, maybe she'll become a little more prominent as Richie / Speed Demon pursues a highly-comical romantic interest with her.

The Walters Files: Mr. Smith / Warmonger

Here's a weird thing: I started the Walter's Files at number 69 (Aiden's) just as a dumb joke, but it just so happens that now I've hit number 92 directly following the publishing of the strip of the same number.

I haven't used Mr. Smith too much.  He's a lot of fun.  I used aspects of the original Iron Man, and a dash of Robert Downey Jr., and a helping of what Jason cooked up, mixed it in a bowl and sprinkled generously with a helping of some kind of aging Latin Casanova character archetype, which seemed appropriate for Warmonger for some reason.

One of the main things that separates Smith from Iron Man is Jason and I never made any plans to have him injured as part of his origin  the way Stark was.  Without a life-threatening shard of metal having to be perpetually kept away from his heart, I think Stark would be a lot less grounded as a character, and the result would be something like Smith.

Gadgets are an integral part of many characters' repertoires, enough so that I felt there needed to be a class just about gadget-making.  Who better to be the instructor than the ultimate gadget-maker?  Plus, there are so many scientist superheroes in comics, many of whom are represented as parodies in Super U., only one of them can be the straight-up Science teacher.  My Mr. Fantastic parody, Spectacular, is better-suited for that role.  Warmonger is one of those many scientists, but his areas of expertise boil down into a niche much more conveniently.  Mr. Walters, of course, would have made an ideal Gadgetry teacher as well, but he was equally suited to be the kick-assery teacher.

The Walters Files: Alien Ghost

I think Alien Ghost is a fan-favorite.  I know he's my dad's favorite, anyway.  He's my take on the Vision / Martian Manhunter character archetype.  He's really just a haphazardly-assembled collection of particles who keeps his form intact and his clothes on with low-level telekinetic abilities.  Ghost's personality is more machine than man; he's basically emotionless, and doesn't have much regard for human behavior.  That's not to say he's immoral; he more or less operates just fine in society, and he has good intentions.

Jason had a good concept for his origin, making him an accidental by-product of a villain's scheme... a villain that I may just end up using in the very near future... 

The Walters Files: Mr. Walters / The Dark Avenger

It is all kinds of fun writing for Mr. Walters.  Like I always say, I'm not a big fan of DC, but I love Batman as much as any fan of superheroes does.  I love that Batman is human, and yet is capable of defeating anybody ever, and usually does, solely because of his rigorous training, wit and level of dedication.  Mr. Walters is no different.  My version is reminiscent of Bruce Wayne from Batman Beyond, but his attitude is more closely that of Frank Miller's Batman (both the older, well-written Frank Miller Batmans and the terrible, terrible more recent versions Miller blasphemously concocted after he became a sad parody of himself and lost his credibility as a writer).

This is slightly off-topic, but fans of comics, often during an argument in a comic shop, love to ask, "Who would win in a fight between ___ and ___.  Whenever Batman is involved in this question, the answer is always pretty much Batman.  My theory is that Wolverine could beat Batman, but only if Wolvie got the jump on him, and Batman wasn't expecting to be jumped by Wolverine that day.  Or ever.  If Batman had more than five minutes to prepare... sorry Wolvie.

Anyway, in the Super U-niverse, some of the characters are amalgamations of heroes and villains from DC and Marvel.  Jason came up with the idea that Walters would also be the Punisher of the Super U-niverse, which works perfectly, and the military aspect of his background helps to justify that lack of information about his past.

My goal for Super U. is to constantly keep moving away from the parody aspect and focus more on the original stories and characters, but I'm not sure if I can see a Super U-niverse that doesn't involve Walters in some way.

The Walters Files: Ecstasy

The first character I created that I latched onto was Raine.  The second one I eventually ditched (Scumbag took his place), but the third one was Ecstasy.  Ecstasy's creation marked the change in my original comic from a story about Raine to a super-team story, no doubt due to my obsession with X-Men.  I created Ecstasy based off of a Jim Lee White Queen trading card (hence the skimpy outfit).  She was the leader of the team that eventually drafted Raine.  I never got very far with that incarnation of the comic, but I'd always intended for Ecstasy to eventually become the Hank McCoy of the team; At one point she was even going to construct a robotic teammate.

I had to re-imagine her look slightly for Super U., because I needed to make her younger to fit into the college setting.

It's easy to write her off as the eye candy of Super U., and it's even more difficult to flesh her out beyond that in a parody / comedy setting, but if I get to the point in Super U. where I can really show you all the sides of these characters, I hope you'll discover Maria's actually very complex.

The Walters File: Spectacular

Spectacular is a totally original character and not based on anyone at all.

Well, okay.  The truth is I wanted a science teacher, but I didn't want to use my Iron Man spin-off, Warmonger, because I wanted to have a gadget class separate from science class, which my Batman spin-off would have taught if not for the fact I wanted him for my Combat Ed. class.  A Mr. Fantastic spin-off was the obvious solution.  

I've never been much of a fan of the Fantastic Four.  I appreciate what they were when they emerged onto the comics scene (in my opinion they were the first great super-team; rather than a collection of established heroes, they came out on their own, together).  But now, like just about every character DC has, they just feel too dated to me.  I feel like it does some characters a real injustice to continue to use them and constantly reinvent them.

I can remember reading things with Mr. Fantastic from back in the day where he angrily lashed out at Sue Storm for interrupting his work, and so I wanted my version to be like that all the time.  To Spectacular, nothing's more important than whatever it is he is working on at the moment, damn everyone else and sucks to the consequences.  He's the smartest guy around and he knows it, so he acts like it.  It's hard to imagine someone being humble and wholesome who's as smart as that.  If anything, they'd at the very least find it difficult to relate to others in a social setting.  Spectacular (which sometimes, in my head, I pronounce as Spectacu-lahr) takes that to the next level.  He doesn't bother trying to relate with others, because they're just not as spectacular as he is, anyway.

The Walters Files: Trash

Trash was another one I made up way, way back in the day, probably around 7th grade.  Now, it seems he's a Hulk spin-off, but that's not essentially true.  I never read Hulk comics, and truth be told I knew very little about the Hulk.  He's green not because of the Hulk, but because I gave him a face like a Ninja Turtle (hence him not having a nose, and sometimes I draw his mouth in an almost rounded beak-like fashion).  I think when I created Trash I was reading WildC.A.T.S., which was a pretty shitty comic in retrospect,  but I ingested anything and everything Jim Lee had a hand in, so I guess it's fair to say I wanted my own "Maul" character.  Just about every super-group has the big muscle guy, and more often than not he's the dumbest one on the team (though Maul and Beast are exceptions).  I decided to make Trash so dumb, he basically had the brain of a child, as if the process that changed him into Trash inadvertently destroyed his mind.  Not a very original concept, I know.  Really, nothing about Trash is all that original, but that doesn't mean he's any less fun to draw and write for.

I'd sometimes draw him with two arms, and sometimes four.  I couldn't decide which look for him I liked better, so I gave him the ability to grow extra arms.

Trash does have a fairly scripted origin that I won't be changing much for Super U., but I can't tell you much about it, because that would ruin the surprise.

The Walters Files: Spaz

Sorry this one's getting posted so late in the evening!  Been outta town all day.

Spaz is my mom's favorite character of mine.  I conceived him long, long ago, probably on a paper restaurant menu.  He's the character I would draw on all the fogged-up car windows, homework assignments and grocery store freezer doors of the places I went.  I actually officially named him and decided what his abilities were shortly before the movie The Mask came out, and I remember the first time I saw the trailer for The Mask on television, I was like "...Shit."  But I think that happens to everybody who has been doing comics for a long time.  There's always one great name you conceived of entirely on your own, or one great character that you think is your most original, and then at some point you encounter that character in some other incarnation in some other comic or something, and you realize your idea wasn't as original as you thought it was.

Truth be told, I may have been inspired by the trading card of the short-lived Marvel character Slapstick; I can't remember if I saw that card before I created Spaz or not.  I never read or saw anything with Slapstick in it beyond that trading card (or, for that matter, anything with The Mask).  I'd already had the character's look down, but I can't say with 100% certainty that I wasn't inspired by that picture of Slapstick with a mallet in his hand.  Mallets aren't  actually Spaz's thing, anyway.  Spaz is really inspired by Bugs Bunny, which is pretty easy to see in that strip I did called the Bugs Bunny Effect, where he talks Chance into walking off a ledge.  I've always upheld that if I had three wishes, one of them would be to have the "Bugs Bunny Effect" on people.  I mean, I wouldn't talk people into walking off ledges, but still.... Well, probably I wouldn't, anyway.

Explaining Spaz in a way that would work in a world full of superheroes took some thinking.  I believe over the years I've concocted a pretty cool origin for him.  Even Walters only has it partially right.  In previous versions of my comic, Spaz and Trash were created by my main villain.  In the Super-U niverse, I guess we'll just have to wait and see who created them this time around (because even I can't say for sure).  Was it E.P.I.C. / Rex Ruthless?  Maybe, but probably not; that's not really his thing.  But Rex sure knew about them enough from the get-go to know he could exploit them, which suggests they still hail from nefarious beginnings.

The Walters Files: Time Lass

I often say that I would like to use a character more and just haven't gotten around to it, but in the case of Time Lass, you will be seeing a lot more or her, starting with Chapter 3, and up until now she hasn't been a prominent character on purpose.  As you've probably figured out by now, she's integral to the central storyline, being the sister of Aiden And Daemon.  It was imperative I made her Walters File before I began Chapter 3.
In the RPG I ran that spawned the ideas of Super U., Time Lass actually became the new Catwoman, hence the kleptomania.  I don't have any plans to do that this time around, but I decided to keep the thievery.
Daemon mentioned to Aiden that with their immortality came a curse; Aiden's is his recurring amnesia, Daemon's is his alcoholism, and Meghan's is her kleptomania.  To top it off, she's got a wicked hormone imbalance; I see her as being a little bipolar and slightly schizophrenic.
Part of the fun of Meghan is her "bag of holding;" her satchel made of darkness that operates just like Daemon's coat.  I like the idea of her whipping out some incredibly powerful magical artifact she stole to deal with a given situation.