Buffy made her first appearance in The Highly Unlikely Adventures of Moe and Detritus #2 minicomic. She captured Detritus’s heart and moved into my brain and they’ve been fighting and getting back together up there ever since. And before you ask, that other Buffy didn’t appear in her movie until 1992.
I have a tendency to invent characters just intending to use them for a specific purpose in one, maybe two stories, and then they move into my head and never leave. I don’t remember having any special plans for Cherice. I’d already written the first issue of Misspent Youths when I started putting together the proposal. Cherice was featured in an important scene so I included her in the character list but I really didn’t know what I’d do with her after that. But, like the adventurous chick she is, she just kept showing up.
I didn’t get a lot of fan mail for Misspent Youths but the character of K.Z. O’Neil was the subject of one of my favorite letters. The letter’s writer basically said that he thought K.Z. was hot. I felt pretty flattered that my crude art had that much impact on a reader.
Lab creates bio-engineered horrors to use as weapons. SEAL team assigned to train them. Training effective. Time for a mission.
How many stories have been written about some secret government experiment or Evil Corporation that creates a monster with intention of using it as a weapon? I’m fairly certain that in every one of those stories the monster turns on its creator(s) and must be destroyed. So, been there, done that.
Are scientists really as careless as that? If you’re going to build a monster (and make a profit in the process) aren’t you going to build in enough safeguards that the thing won’t kill you in the test phase?
Sallie Browne appeared briefly in the first issue of Misspent Youths. If I had a specific plan for her character I’ve forgotten it now. But look at her! Can you imagine she would have just stayed on the sidelines?
Helen Vaughn, Wilber Whateley and the Frankenstein Monster protect a defector from Soviet werewolves in 1947 East Berlin
Sequels are often inevitable. I’d first considered teaming up this trio a couple of months ago and mentioned it then in a Facebook post. The post actually said, essentially, “Helen Vaughn, Wilbur Whateley and the Frankenstein Monster team up to solve crimes or plot to destroy the world. I’m not sure which.”
Neither of this story suggestion nor the previous one need the characters to be acting altruistically. I tend to imagine they are because I like good hearted heroes. Or at least protagonists who are attempting to achieve positive results. But the trio could be acting villainously. It’s all a matter of who writes the story.
Poor Glickman. I’d planned the character to have a more significant part in Misspent Youths but I don’t know what I would have done with him after #2. I’m sure I would have used him again, just ’cause, but his story in that issue seems so complete to me now that I don’t know where I could have used him next.
Helen Vaughn, Wilbur Whateley and the Frankenstein Monster hunt a team of Nazi vampires during the Blitz in WW2
There’s a sub-genre of fiction that involves throwing various public domain characters (and/or historic figures) together and sending them on an adventure. If you’ve read my sketchblog much you’re probably aware of my fondness for Frankenstein’s Monster. He’ll definitely show up in few more story seeds.
Helen Vaughn was the unfortunate child resulting from an encounter with The Great God Pan in the story by Arthur Machen. Wilbur Whately is another unfortunate result of a mating between a human and Something From Beyond. He’s from HP Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror.
All three characters were the spawn of experiments by men who were messing the realms of Things Men Were Not Meant to Know. (Yeah, whatever.) They seem like they’d make a good team of grumpy misanthropes.
“Madman” Handel and Jay Coldfoot were both vaguely inspired by a couple of high school friends of mine. That is, they only vaguely resembled the original people at the time I did the comic and, now that they’ve lived in my head for 20 years, they’re more or less independent entities.
A family of cannibals roams the freeways in an 18 wheel truck and trailer. They hunt their victims at rest stops and motels all across America.
For some reason the cannibal families in horror movies live on the outskirts of society. Physically as well as socially. They live off in the woods or the desert and wait for their food to come to them.
They must not be committed to their life style. If you want a steady supply of human meat you’re more likely to find it where there’s a lot of it. In cities. There are an unfortunate number of real life examples of people who managed to live in the city and eat a few fellow citizens before their neighbors finally noticed.
A better way to keep up the life style would be to stay on the move. Harvest your victims and sell their stuff in the next town down the road. Or, for greater anonymity, sell it on ebay.
