What Super-Heroine Did You Create?

[PatrickG]

Well, the contest at Shadowline is over...

And lacking the cash to make an independent go of things, I've decided to end this dreary Monday by sharing the first of these pitches.

I may yet find a way to reincorporate these ideas (some of which are a bit long) but I have twelve ideas like these before breakfast... and with the first anniversary of my roommate's murder looming in around eleven days, a karmic purge is in order.

I'll be dropping these out at about one a day until then. Feedback is appreciated. And since confession is good for the soul, as they say, feel free to share your own as well.

Without further adieu, say soyonara (for now) to... The Preserver!

Preserver

Not just an ordinary college student, Fionna is secretly a young, idealistic super-heroine called The Preserver, a hybrid of super-hero retro and futuristic paladin. Though she is easily a media darling, equal parts bubblegum and badass, some question her allegiances and some are wary of the strange sword which she never uses. However, the public turns against her when, on the cusp of reclaiming New Port City from the super-villain Bomb Queen, she abruptly abandons her task after receiving a message from outer space. What no one knows is that Fionna Pendragon is the Lost Princess of Camelot. She was raised in the Otherworld of An'oon, a crystalline space fortress where time passes slowly, guarded by the ghosthounds of Arwan and containing her cryogenically frozen father, Arthur Pendragon. We learn that Arthur forged a pact with an advanced alien race known as the Shining Ones and was guided as their agent to bring about peace and unity in exchange for which he gave the Shining Ones his only child. Fionna was given great powers by the aliens and made a knight of their order. She was issued a sword said to possess greater power, a sword that was never to be unsheathed as a test of supreme discipline. She has been dispatched from An'oon to gather pieces of human culture in the years preceding earth's prophesied demise. Today, on the cusp of liberating New Port City, she learns that An'oon has fallen to the evil Shrouded Ones. Her allies are dead. Her father is dead. The Shrouded Ones seek to extinguish the growing threat of humanity. She finds her way again with the support of an alcoholic priest and his dog even as the public begins to question her and the alien armada begins its attack. In the end, she makes a stand against the Shrouded Ones, without falling to the temptation of unsheathing her sword against the aliens who have taken everything from her.

[Red Jack]

Here's one of mine:

Cache is a dimension hopping "retrieval specialist" currently stranded on Earth and working for a secret government agency while she figures a way off this rock. Though she is, apparently, indestructible and possesses limited super strength, her primary weapon is her "bag of tricks"- a tesseract belt that holds every exotic object she's ever retrieved, large or small.

Cache came to Earth to retrieve a dangerous extra-dimensional artifact. A piece of that object has turned up in Bomb Queen's city and the Queen herself is beginning to get an idea of how to use some of its reality bending properties. The Agency sends Cache in to get the object and, if she ends up putting the smack down on the Queen in the process, so much the better. Unfortunately, by the time she gets there, Bomb Queen is jacked up on the artifact's power, transforming into some sort of enormous dragon-like monster and gearing up to reshape all reality to suit her whim. Since Cache refuses to kill an opponent under any circumstances, she's forced to destroy the artifact, saving the world and the Queen at once.

[PatrickG]

I LOVE that characte concept, Jack. I kinda wish a group of us could get together and do a team book or an anthology or something.

The story doesn't grab me quite as much. Maybe if it was a character you owned and could tie in more directly than Bomb Queen though...

[Red Jack]

Well. Cache can get around anywhere. She's a party girl.

[Dazzler]

Well, even though i didn't get mine in on time....this is what I came up with.

Mind you, this is the 150 work treatment thingiemabob I sent.

Zoom! Girl is on the top of her game, despite being old enough now to call herself Zoom! Woman. She’s sort of in denial. She’s super-fast, spunky, and moderately handy with Kung Fu, but don’t let that fool you: the general public is ambivalent about her adventurous exploits. When the new menace of the P.E.P. Squad rolls into town, with no other motive than creating havoc at every turn, Zoom! Girl realizes that she’s Cleveland’s best hope to stop them. Worse still, Cleveland seems to be more than mildly entertained by the P.E.P. Squad’s brand of mischief! All that changes when a live televised fight between Zoom! Girl and the P.E.P. Squad shows the latter as heartless punks with no regard for public safety and the former as the true-blue heroine she really is. Not only does Zoom! Girl bring the P.E.P. Squad to justice, she wins the public devotion (FINALLY!) and a key to the city.

--Dazz

[PatrickG]

Hm. Stock story... But a lot of personality there.

Would have fun reading that character!

[Dazzler]

Hm. Stock story... But a lot of personality there.

Would have fun reading that character!

Thanks! The stock story thing was kinda planned to go along with the classic goody-girl super-heroine theme they were looking for. The personality of my chick is where the true oomph would be and where you'd get the meat of it.

--Dazz

[PatrickG]

Awww, heck! I still have twelve more to go.

I'll toss another one out.

It's a bit darker:

Gasp

By Patrick Gerard

Rebecca Morganstern decided that black leather, capes and masks weren't enough to instill fear into criminals after her lifelong best friend was killed by a rival of his father's mob empire. Spending much of her fortune, Rebecca hunts down the world's vampires, demons, werewolves, lagoon creatures ghouls and goblins and arranges for a team of scientists and occultists to give her the powers of these legendary beasts. She becomes the costumed crimefighter known as Gasp. As she tracks down the crime family responsible for her friend's death, she comes to understand that she will never have a normal life again after the transformation that she's undergone and that she may be the greater monster, at least in the eyes of her own friends and family.

The idea, which apparently wasn't clear enough in the pitch, was to give her a Super Skrull-like "Composite Monster" look, while retaining some sex appeal. Werewold hands, gills, demon wings, etc.

[Dazzler]

Coolio. A super-heroine who's got all those monster parts is a good idea. :)

--Dazz

[PatrickG]

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=145597

I doubt I'll be posting on the (similar) Newsarama thread but it's worth a peak.

One of the "woman empowered by alien fetus" stories turned up there.

...

Knockup. Who has an enemy named The Abortion. And ends up fighting her own infant. !!!

I'm... taken aback. It might be darkly brilliant on the part of the writer but I can't imagine many companies would touch it. And those that would don't do super-heroes.

[PatrickG]

One more from me...

The Moon Marshall

By Patrick Gerard


In a world where the library of Alexandria never burned, society has grown more sophisticated, at least technologically. The year is 1885. Eve Rogers is the Moon Marshall, law enforcement officer for the Lunar Rangers in the Sea of Tranquility territories. Along with her sidekick, affectionately dubbed Lycanthropy Lad, orphan of Chinese rocket builders who was subjected to lupine genome experimentation, she discovers that a crew of British colonists whose Warp Dirigible crashed have descended into cannibalism courtesy of a strange zombie plague. In order to protect her outpost in Tranquility, she must put a stop to the cannibals' reign of terror while ferreting out their connection to Jack the Ripper on a secret mission for Star Centurion Ulysses S. Grant.

[dragonbat]

The Ephemere

Sixteen-year-old Tabitha Aaronson has always been the “baby” of the team. In fact, she’s been more of a mascot than a member. But playing by her sister’s rules has kept her alive and in costume for over a decade. When a teammate falls, Tabitha’s worldview is shaken. Forced to reexamine her core beliefs, she strikes out solo, and learns a few lessons about good and evil in a world that is at times both and neither.

(I know. It's a solicit, not a pitch. I'll fix it for next time...)

P.S. As some of you might know, I've been writing fanfiction for awhile. I started by inserting my own team, including Tabitha into the Bat-verse. While I tried my darndest not to write "Batman meets the Mary Sue Brigade," I will say that I wrote the bulk of these while I was still getting comfortable with the Bat-characters. If anyone's interested in "seeing" her in action, check these out:

http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?t=171824
http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?t=172068

Note: I call her "Umbra" in these fics, but I've since found out that the name's been taken. So now she's Ephemere.

[DungeonmasterJim]

This character originally started out as male complete with sketch designs. I changed the character to female for teh contest.

Rain McMurray synopsis

Rain McMurray is a former soldier honorably discharged after sustaining massive injuries during a top secret mission in a worn torn third world country. Now she is following in the footsteps of her CIA father and FBI older brothers… sort of. Posing as a freelance writer, Rain hunts down everything from terrorists to super villains for the CIA receiving special equipment, training and help from her father and brothers. Her current assignment is to stop a homicidal maniac gothboy that converses on how to live life and kill people with his best friend which is a human skull. It’s not an easy task since gothboy can cloud and control the minds of others. Rain dons her ever-present sunglasses and is constantly reminded to try harder because of the long scar running along the side of her face. As the killer’s body count grows, Rain has to manage her own body count of mesmerized innocents as she brings him down. The decisions add to her growing collection of insomnia inducing nightmares.


DM Jim

[Linkara]

Here's one of the ones I posted:

Scarlet is the story of Erin Raines, a former national fencing champion who was trapped in New Port City after the government closed it off to everyone but criminals. Trapped by evil all around her and after helping rescue a group of people from some thugs, Abigail is inspired by the story of the Scarlet Pimpernel to get people safely out of New Port while assuming the masked identity of Scarlet. After one attempt to save people goes wrong and some are killed, she takes it upon herself to take the fight to Bomb Queen herself. While she fails to topple Bomb Queen’s regime, she does manage to distract her long enough for more people to leave the city, leaving Scarlet to continue her work.

[Indigo Al]

You know, Project CBRunway is coming up. Maybe we could convince Mattbib to turn this into a design contest somehow?

[JKCarrier]

I'll probably do these up as minicomics, just to get 'em out of my system, but here's the pitches:

Paragon

Megan Hamilton has the power to transform into Paragon, a statuesque powerhouse with superhuman strength and the power of flight. Though they are linked, Paragon has a mind of her own, and is stuck in a very 1950s black-and-white mentality; she just wants to beat up supervillains and rescue cats from trees. Megan, a feminist and political activist, has other ideas, and the two often clash over the appropriate use of power. Things get even more awkward when Megan's boyfriend finds out about her dual identity, and drops unsubtle hints that he's more interested in Paragon than her. When a mysterious scientist tells Megan that he can separate Paragon from her, she is more than ready to go along. But Paragon resists, and her instincts turn out to be correct: the scientist is really Professor Sin, a supervillain who fought Paragon in the 1950s, and he plans to steal the Paragon power for himself. Paragon has to fight an army of robots and a battery of high-tech weaponry in order to escape Sin's clutches. After all this, Megan and Paragon realize that they are stuck with each other, and resolve to try and make their partnership work.

Steel Angel

Stricken by a rare disease, Dr. Angela Stevens survives by having her brain transplanted into a robot body of her own design. With gleaming metal wings and built-in weaponry, she fights crime as the Steel Angel. When surveyors discover an alien spacecraft buried in the Nevada desert, Steel Angel is sent to investigate. The derelict ship is bristling with futuristic weaponry and other technology, which has also attracted the attention of Bomb Queen. The two clash, but their fight is interrupted when the monstrous alien guarding the ship attacks them both. When Bomb Queen is in danger of being overwhelmed, Steel Angel rescues her, but when the situation is reversed, BQ just laughs and flees with some of the ship's technology. Steel Angel is able to interface with the alien ship's computer and trigger a self-destruct sequence that disintegrates both the ship and components stolen by Bomb Queen.

[Typo Lad]

Hnh. Small world. I also named one of my concepts "Paragon".

I'm going to be a jackass and not post mine, since I've decided to try developing them myself.

Red: Love chache's powerset.

[Red Jack]

I LOVE that characte concept, Jack. I kinda wish a group of us could get together and do a team book or an anthology or something.

The story doesn't grab me quite as much. Maybe if it was a character you owned and could tie in more directly than Bomb Queen though...

I don't know if you guys ever read the THIEVES WORLD anthologies but it's a good model. Shared world, individual creators own their characters, large meta story that allows each to tell a short story within it.

OR

It could be one big story like MUTANT MASSACRE where a single event effects the various characters.

OR

I could do a framing sequence with Cache tracking a bunch of dangerous objects and each character interacts with their object differently.

The last bit seems easiest. We could create a single webcomic site or make it a handoff situation where each segment points you to another site if you want to finish the story.

I'm game. I'm already doing Dreamnasium and I wrote a segment of the upcoming HONOR BRIGADE tpb (which looks AWESOME btw, yay Scott Story!). Thoughts?

[Linkara]

I'd love contribute to something like that, Jack, as long as I didn't have to draw any of it. ^_~

[Karen El]

Given a magic whip by a dying dominatrix, our heroine fights crime, grinding wrongdoers beneath her nine inch, adamantium-heeled stilettos until they beg for forgiveness.

I nearly went for "bitten by a radioactive fetish queen", but this seemed to work better.

[Indigo Al]

I had a weaker third idea that I never submitted and I never fully fleshed out - about a more virtous "gee whiz" goody-two shoes superheroine whose mom is an aging 90's Image type Bad Girl. Kind of like Saffi on Absolutely Fabulous. The mom and Bomb Queen were enemies, but they secretly liked each other's style.

[PatrickG]

Time for another:

Atomic Maid

By Patrick Gerard

Young Barbara Neville's husband is an assistant to Dr. Einstein on the Manhattan project while she found herself and her friends contributing to the home front effort in the closing days of World War II. She drops out of college for the sake of her country, her husband and her ailing father. However, when she gets radioactive powers, she gets the chance to shine as a super-heroine and a scientific mind in her own right at the behest of her government. However, as her marriage with her patriarchal husband is deteriorating, she is sent on a desperate mission. An accident propels her forward many decades and she must come to grips with the 21st century, confront her dying husband and adjust to a world where her choices and her life are her own but where evil is a much more gray affair...

[Typo Lad]

Time for another:
That sounds great. You totally have to write that.

[Charles RB]

WATCHMIND

The Enemy – a hostile alien intelligence – is at work on Earth, covertly running everything from crime gangs to corporations: it can be anyone, anywhere, anytime and it wants Earth dead. The European Union’s paranormal defence group ENTENTE can’t stop it. What can is young waitress Debra Jacobi AKA Watchmind, granted powerful psychic powers by alien intervention. She can detect The Enemy’s influence and she battle its schemes – but if she can’t keep hold of her optimism & religious faith, the pressures of facing such a threat will shatter her. The first issue sets up the status quo for the character & her world; the second has The Enemy instigating widespread violence across London, with both ENTENTE and Watchmind trying to stop it before she realises it’s just a distraction; and the final issue has her fighting alone against a primordial monster unleashed upon Cardiff, a battle that means she has to confirm her faith and confidence in herself to save the lives of millions.

And no, I couldn't think of a good title. How the crap did you manage it on so many occasions, Patrick?!

[WOLVERINE25TH]

Ya know, I'm kinda glad my entries didn't make it (not that I thought they would). Now I get to pitch a personal one elsewhere AND maintain 100% ownership! Anyways, these are the only two of the four I entered:

ZIP: THE LIGHTNING WOMAN

Layne Pena had come from an abusive home which led her to enter into an even more abusive relationship for far too long. The only thing that got her through those times were a few of her closest friends and her love of running. One day, after a particularly bad day with her fiancé, she went on a run and discovered she had the ability of super speed, having traversed the entire length of the state of Illinois! Taking this as a sign from God to get her life back together, she left her fiancé, got herself into therapy, and decided to become a youth counselor to help prevent anything she went through from happening to any other child. But, she had decided to take it a step further by designing a costume and becoming Zip: The Lightning Woman. Good thing too, as a new gang, The Urban Lords, has started to move into the neighborhood and they like to recruit young. Zip does her best to dissuade their staying, but they have their own super powered member: Slick, a man seemingly made out of pure crude oil. Although Zip is able to take on the regular bangers and their guns, Slick proves a bit of a challenge for someone who relies on traction to use their powers. After a near fatal defeat by Slick, Zip does some research and lures the Lords for a final confrontation at a fertilizer plant. There, the Lords watch as Slick seemingly overcomes her once again, but Zip was only biding her time to get Slick into position and release some nitrate fertilizer on him, used to break down crude oil. With their chief enforcer gone, the Lords stand no chance against Zip and temporarily leave, keeping her neighborhood and her children safe once again.

THE BROOKLYN GUARDIAN

She came from nowhere and has become something of an urban legend. The Brooklyn Guardian appears from the night and stops crimes single handedly. What no one knows is that she’s really Brooklyn Sanders, high school student. Brooklyn had always been unnaturally athletic and quick, which made gymnastics and martial arts a natural thing for her to do, amongst others. She is also a very civic-minded individual, desiring to follow in her father’s footsteps by becoming a cop. However, she was too impatient to wait until she was 21. With only a couple of friends as confidants, she does what she can to keep her neighborhood safe. Unfortunately, she fails to realize that by doing so, she cuts into the business of Brooklyn’s kingpin of crime, Victor Castiglione. He orders a hit on her, and every mobster in Brooklyn is now looking for the Guardian. She learns this on a patrol when she’s shot at from multiple directions. Her neighborhood has become a war zone, and it’s all her fault. Determined to set things right, she uses her intimate knowledge of the area to take the goons down one by one, until Castiglione finds her himself and takes her down. Her friends see this, and, fearing for her safety, confess everything to her father. They track her down to a warehouse by the water where Brooklyn is held prisoner and launch a rescue attempt. Her father is almost killed, but Brooklyn uses her brain and environment to save him and stop Castiglione in time for the Calvary to arrive and cart him off. Brooklyn promises her father she’ll give up her heroic ways…but she never said for how long.

Ones that never solidified were:

An investigator for the NYPD who's in charge of maintaining the peace in a section of the city dubbed "Ghost Town" where supernatural entities who have crossed over through a rip in the space/time fabric between worlds.

A twist on Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, although not quite Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde.

[PatrickG]

Two more for the road:

Uber

by Patrick Gerard

Jenn Rosenbaum is a high school senior in a small town. She is uncertain of her future and in constant conflict with her father, who seems to believe that small town life has it all. However, on her 18th birthday, she discovers the magic lamp that gave her father amazing powers as the first of three wishes. Investigating his life, she decides to use one of the lamp's wishes to grant herself similar powers. However, she quickly discovers the cursed nature of the genie's wishes even as her powers and abilities alienate her from her friends and classmates and her powers attract perils to the small town. She seeks advice from her father and reconciles... but he is killed immediately afterwards, leaving her to come of age on her own and come to terms with amazing powers not just as a blessing but as a curse.

The Human Hope

Silver-Age idealism and real world problems collide head-on in this 3-issue miniseries which intentionally answers the question of "Who watches the Watchmen?" with a flippant and intentionally somewhat disturbing answer of "I'm seventeen; I don't need chaperones!" Meredith "Merri" Marcheselli is a teenage super-genius whose science fair project was designed to replicate the accident that gave a 1960s (Commander Neutron) super-hero his powers, enabling her to become the superheroine known as the Human Hope. She is perhaps naive but full of optimism, the yang to Bomb Queen's yin both in terms of disposition and in terms of the tone of her world. Our story begins as she is negotiating a mideast peace accord after installing harmonic generators to create the dimensionally separated Jerusalem-1 and Jerusalem-2. Certain of the progress she's made, she proceeds to rush through lessons with her private tutor, a meeting with the Joint Chiefs and a photo op with New Evergreen (the massive ecologically friendly city planned by her super-genius hippie parents). Before long, she's single-handedly reducing carbon emissions, resealing the hole in the ozone and beginning a PR campaign to retake New Port City from the villainous Bomb Queen. However, facing increasing frustration in dealing with set-in-their-ways leaders and upset at discovering that a family friend is addicted to cocaine, she tries to take things a step further, torching the operations of major drug cartels and single-handedly disarming the world of its nuclear weapons. Unfortunately for her, she is stretched to her limits as she races against new hostilities in the middle east, the assassins hired by an angry cocaine cartel, an alien invasion that earth is insufficiently armed against, the wrath of Bomb Queen and the most dreaded risk of all, getting a C in English. In the end, she ends up getting the help of both Commander Neutron and Bomb Queen (under the rationale that there's nothing to rule if the world ends) in averting the crisis and only scarcely survives a doublecross. This of course, is the point at which Merri should learn her lesson... However, she's quickly back to work on a machine designed to neutralize human aggressive impulses for trial use in Belfast.

[Red Jack]

Well. Until everybody works out what, if anything, they want to do, I'm going to go ahead and say that the next story in my webcomic will feature one or more of my failed Shadowline heroines. I had another story lined up but this is too much fun to ignore.

[WOLVERINE25TH]

Go for it.

[Jack Zodiac]

That sounds great. You totally have to write that.

I fuckin' love the Moon Marshall one myself. :D And I like Geoffrey's character, Cache. She's got a fuckin' Hammerspace belt, how cool is that!?

[TomStillwell]

This was the favorite of my two entries. I feel like she could be a pretty fun character. I'll probably do something with her down the road if I could find an artist.

Herculea

Zeus and the Greek Gods of old have retired to Mount Olympus, their legendary tales of myth long behind them.

Herculea, half sister of Hercules, longs for the days when gods battled monsters and did mighty deeds. Vexed by Herculea's never-ending pining, Zeus tasks her to complete seven difficult trials, mostly so she'll let him get back to his soaps.

Herculea relishes the chance to finally flex her godly muscles but she's totally unprepared for the final trial: Clean up New Port City and defeat Bomb Queen.

[Pink Bat Maxine]

I have a character I've been creating for the last..... heck, over ten years.

Didn't submit her, though. Perhaps I'll put details soon.

Basic concept..... what if Billy Batson said 'Shazam' and was magically transformed into Mary Marvel?

Mix the concept up with Adam Strangeque retro sci-fi, and you're on track.

[Typo Lad]

Okay, I'll give one...

Nadia Stephens has always felt weak. Stuck in an abusive relationship
and a dead-end job, her only freedom is vivid dreams of night-time
costumed capers that get her through the day. Only they're not
dreams, they're memories: asleep, she is host for Neshama, a restless
soul forever seeking to right wrongs. Shadow-dancing across the city,
Neshama spreads justice, drawing the attention of the sadistic
Professor, a self-styled modern Moriarty, obsessed with the nature of
souls. She defeats him without much hassle but dawn cuts the battle
short and Neshama accidentally leads him to Nadia. Awake, Nadia has
no powers, but as flight becomes fight she discovers her own inner
strength, tricking the over-confident Professor into a
radio-meets-bathtub electric end. Filled with confidence, she quits
her job and leaves her boyfriend -- still afraid, but willing to take
a chance. And no longer needed, Neshama moves on to her next
host...

[PatrickG]

I think I got on an interesting roll with these two. They're a bit long and I don't think the names are as snappy though...


Renaissance

By Patrick Gerard

Valerie Steinbeck is a children's book author who just quit smoking (mostly). Purple haired and petite, she carves out a lively but fairly low key bohemian existence in the city with her friends Matish (the underweight prize fighter), Jack (the photographer) and Suzy (the bartender). However, the secret she has kept from her friends is that since age twelve, she has developed strange telekinetic, pyrokinetic and empathic powers. A package in the mail causes the mystery of her abilities to deepen as she begins to unearth a vast and ancient conspiracy to suppress people with special powers and abilities. A trip to Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland confirms that the conspiracy goes much deeper as she discovers that ancient humans, commonly believed to be Neanderthals and immortalized in legend as the people of Atlantis, were costumed super-beings. Images of men and women in capes constructing the pyramids takes her to Egypt. Meanwhile, back home, her friends are stalked by the hive agents of Baradesh the Living Corporation even as she faces attempts on her life abroad. Her bond with her ancient calling deepens as she unearths the enigmas of the strange Super-Testament and discovers an ancient costume. Deciding that the world must learn of its super-heroic heritage, which had been confined to comic books and dime novels and the ravings of madmen, she dons the costume (becoming the superheroine known as Renaissance) and takes the fight to Baradesh's masters in the patriarchal Knights of Hegemony. However, this victory is simply the first step in re-awakening mankind's metahuman lineage as she learns that even with some of the oppressors vanquished, humanity has trouble accepting the power that has been dormant inside them for centuries.

Tocksmith

by Patrick Gerard

Sarah Corbett runs the small automotive repair shop that her father started in the Southern Alabama town of Crossplains with her grease monkey kid brother Kyle. It's an industry town, full of factories and immigrants, however what very few people know is that the city's industry formed around a strange artifact that fell from the sky in 1962. Her father was one of the soldiers who recovered the artifact known as the Technoforge, a semi-intelligent extraterrestrial artifact capable of interfacing and improving upon machines. The Corbett family kept a Technoforge fragment and have been using it to quietly help out people who are down on their luck in their family garage. However, when Sarah encounters the town crackpot Jason Payne and uses the device to repair his cracked engine block, she discovers that the harebrained attempt at building a time machine in the trunk has been upgraded to a real working time machine. A rogue black-ops agency traces the Technoforge signature to Payne's car and quietly assassinates him, believing that he has the missing forge fragment. Piecing together these events and realizing the danger that she and Kyle are in, Sarah seizes the miraculously working time machine and escapes with her brother. Donning masks, they travel back and attempt to save Payne but attract the unwanted attention of the aliens who created the Technoforge, forcing them to retreat further back in time. Realizing that they might be vulnerable if their true identities are known, they form more elaborate costumed identities as the Tocksmith and her sidekick Clockout, spiraling deeper and deeper into history as they fight enemies ranging from Hitler to Elizabeth Bathory to Hannibal. Back in their own time, Payne rises from the dead in the town's morgue and unmasks to reveal that he is an alien. Reporting to his masters, he reveals that his mission to place time travel technology in the hands of conscientious do-gooders has succeeded and that he anticipates that their actions will begin to have an impact on earth's history soon. The chronoforming of human history has comenced... and the masked heroes who are the agents of cosmic change have no clue that they have been manipulated into their new roles.

[Charles RB]

Renaissance

By Patrick Gerard

Bloody hell.

I have no idea if a comic could ever live up to that pitch, but it'd be a lot of fun finding out!

[Typo Lad]

A lot of these ideas are neat, and I just can't imagine the artist for Shadowline doing them.

[stamen]

I'll post the only idea that actually have rights to, maybe if I ever get around to regsistering the rest of my scripts with the WG, I will post more:

Res Extensa

Renee Theano is an eighteen year old, Greek brunette who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She is also a mathematics prodigy, able to do six-digit division as well as complex statistics and calculus in her head. Her OCD has led her to the point of breaking into homes and doing people’s taxes against their will, often with victims held at gunpoint. Dubbed “The Drive-By Accountant” by a mocking local police force, Renee chooses the name Res Extensa, which she begins to scrawl in lipstick across the doors of the homes she hits. When Renee breaks into Eleven Sciences Industries to prepare their annual IRS report, she gets much more than she bargained for: she finds a friend and mentor. In a flash of numbers her life is changed as she learns to channel her mathematical abilities through a temporal wave which deconstructs and reassembles objects using complex quantum mechanics. As Renee struggles to keep her OCD in check, she inadvertently draws the attention of a retired serial killer with a love for creating chaos in lives defined by stringent order.

[stamen]

As you can see, I didn't give enough plot points. No real conflict, but there are two distinct plot points in the script. It was my first submission, so I had to tweak the way I framed my other two.

[Red Jack]

Tocksmith is AWESOME.

Find an artist and get to work.

That story has legs.

[PatrickG]

Now for the one I went WAAAAAAY over length on.

Black Valentine

by Patrick Gerard

Black Valentine is a psychological tale of a dead super-hero's girlfriend who dons a cape and is left to deal with an imperfect world that rejects her old love's idealism and optimism. We learn about high school senior Liz Curtis. She and her first love Mallory Roberts had been accepted to all the same Ivy League schools and even though he never told her until very near the end, she always knew that he was the teenage super-hero known as the Advocate, the Lost Scion of the Ancient Ones -- preserved as an infant in an electromagnetic vessel of infinite temporal dilation since before the twilight of the Utopian protohumans. However, he wasn't just any teenage super-hero; he was Greenville Heights' own native hero. The Advocate and his dragon-hound Bronco may have attracted their share of megalomaniac assailants but they rejuvenated the dying coal mining town with their legend. Mallory even sheepishly confided in Liz that he had been to the future and seen his future self with her, happily married and running half a dozen charitable organizations. The sweet saccharine of their scenario turned bitter when a small time costumed criminal known as the Thaumaturgue came into possession of a philosopher's stone, the implement from which he forged the bomb used to murder young Mallory Roberts and two dozen town officials. Having trouble coping with the loss, Liz begins seeking out any means she can find of resurrecting Mallory. The devices in Mallory's "Gallery of the Beyond" (a collection of trophies in the attic of the Roberts' family home) prove useless. Liz begins honing her skills as a researcher and amateur detective in attempting to locate mystics who might help but the answer is always no. She turns to her mother, an accomplished doctor, only to be told once again that she must learn to accept death. Unable to find the answer she wants to hear, Liz manages to (quite resourcefully) book travel into New Port City, taking the now masterless Bronco the dragon-hound along for protection. There, she finds an unsavory scientist/occultist who is willing to help for a very steep price but Bomb Queen intervenes, killing the man and declaring that there are too many super-heroes as-is. Liz manages to escape with Bronco's aid and, defiant, decides that if her first love cannot come back, she will carry on his work. Using an array of devices from the "Gallery of Beyond", she gives herself a unique array of powers and becomes Black Valentine. However, her final test comes when the Thamaturgue, having become a celebrity as a life sentence inmate in prison, leads a jail break. Liz is conflicted between her desire for revenge and Mallory's principled stance against killing when facing the Thaumaturgue but in the end decides to let the bastard fry for what he's done, killing him. The town is wounded from the tragedy that it's experienced and any attempts to bring Black Valentine to justice are half-hearted at best or hindered by people who sympathize. One cold February morning several weeks later, a time traveling Advocate and Bronco pass through and are horrified by the events that have come to pass. Liz exchanges her final words with her once and future boyfriend, "When you go back? Lie to me. Tell me the future is perfect and bright and limitless. You take care of the past and I'll see what I can do... for the future."

[PatrickG]

And the next one is where the names really start getting simple again:

Bootleg

By Patrick Gerard

Miniseries Entitled: "End User License Agreement"

Jackie Hennessey is the super-heroine known as Bootleg, who has the power to permanently duplicate the powers and memories of any metahuman she comes into contact with -- however to access this power she must dredge up the personal traumas of the person whose powers she absorbed. She received these powers as a teenager along with her friends Maxine, Steve, Alan, Bobby, Jason and Shaun -- however
none of them have any idea what triggered these powers. Maxine -- who has taken up the super-heroic identity of Freeloader (with the power to possess people) -- has become addicted to a metahuman enhancing drug known somewhat absurdly as "Marco Polo's Rampage Formula" (there's an inside joke there that becomes apparent). Jackie is concerned for her friend, slowly realizing the nature of his problem, but is busy dealing with the transdimensional threat of G'Val the Corruptor of Worlds. As Freeloader's addiction grows, Jackie discovers the link between the drug and G'Val -- the drug is laced with nanites that slowly convert the user into one of G'Val's Elite Umbral Guard; the otherworldly tyrant's army is composed of corrupted super-heroes and super-villains from a thousand universes, revealed when Jackie does an autopsy on one and discovers it was once a parallel universe Bomb Queen! In the end, Jackie combines her powers with Freeloader's to save a "backup" of her friend in her own brain as Maxine succumbs to the corruption. Together, the now literally inseparable friends struggle against Freeloader's now-corrupted body and make a stand against G'Val.

BTW: Can you spot the industry reference in this pitch?

[Jack Zodiac]

Tocksmith is AWESOME.

Find an artist and get to work.

That story has legs.

That story's got fuckin' wings, man. Time travel and technomorphic alien weapons? That's badass as hell.

[Typo Lad]

It made my head hurt in a good way.

[Linkara]

All of my pitches were fairly short in their description, but here's another one I enjoyed writing:

Blacksmith
Blacksmith is the tale of Helen Barta, an electrician and technology wiz who moonlights as a gadget inventor for superheroes. When a group of supervillains learn of Helen’s activities, they decide to go after her and kill her. After a lengthy chase where she manages to dispatch each villain pursuing her, she’s cornered. However, at that moment she reveals it was all a trap! Various heroes and police are waiting for the villains and Helen reveals that she was the one who revealed her activities to the villains, setting the whole thing up from the start. It was a test for herself, since she’s finally ready to become a fully-fledged superhero.

[PatrickG]

Into the final three:

Steel Belle

By Patrick Gerard

The small southern town of Echo Valley, population two thousand, saw a flash of light in the sky six years ago. Several dozen became ill and died. The survivors were gifted with remarkable powers.
Jenn Jenkins, a child psychologist, is one of those survivors. She began masquerading as a super-hero for the good of the town's children but grew into the role. Remarkably, to this day, out of the two thousand super-powered inhabitants, she is the only super-hero. While the government has restricted the residents from moving for fear of contamination as well as placing restrictions on other feats such as diamond production, the city is suddenly an economic powerhouse. In a town where she knows literally everyone, Jenn maintains a secret identity and tracks black market operations involving smuggled diamonds and hired muscle. Along the way, with the help of an autistic child she's counseling, she learns that a movement is growing within the town to violently succeed from the United States and form a new Confederacy. She attempts to repair the rift between Echo Valley and the government in both identities by words and by example but when she learns that a White Supremacist group from outside the town is fueling the discontent and taking metahuman recruits, the town bears witness to its first superhuman conflict and learns to see the horror that may be brought about by what they have become.

[PatrickG]

The final two are here:

Incognito

by Patrick Gerard

"The Mousetrap" - A Three Part Story

When the super-hero known as King Chromos is depowered and killed, his friends and allies go on a manhunt of his greatest enemies to find the killer. However, when his twin sister Corona Queen (aka Sarah Marston, a defense attorney by day) discovers a message indicating that her sibling might have been killed by one of his teammates (motivated by fear of King Chromos' tremendous powers), she goes undercover to ferret out the truth. Pretending to lose her own powers, Sarah continues crime fighting as the ostensibly non-powered mystery woman known as Incognito. Even as Sarah's personal life deteriorates into a bizarre comedy with the revelation that her pet dog Siegel the Beagle is a representative of a space-faring race intent on making contact with humanity, she covertly seeks the aid of Tesla Tervagaunte, her late brother's brilliant arch-enemy, to ferret out the identity of King Chromos' killer. They discover that the killer was Chromos' best friend, the non-powered champion known as The Human Potential, acting in cooperation with a paranoid government. Sarah barely manages to save the murderer (after a fashion) from Tesla's wrath by beaming him into an inter-dimensional limbo. However, in the process, Sarah's cover of being non-powered is blown, bringing down the weight of the United States military M.O.D. (Meta-Ops Division) of cybernetic gorillas. Caught between the Meta-Ops forces and an alien invasion by Siegel the Beagle's Galactic Canine Corps (who have decided that humanity is duplicitous and untrustworthy thanks to King Chromos' betrayal), Sarah must burn every erg of her vast power reserves to break up the fight between a xenophobic mutant military and canine aliens from beyond the stars. In the end, she assumes the identity of Incognito for real as she carries on the fight against crime without powers. Setting up a new life for herself with Meta-Ops hot on her heels, she finds that her new apartment doesn't allow pets; however, after what she's been through, she doesn't mind.


Miss Match
By Patrick Gerard

Juniper Rosenbaum (aka Miss Match) is a fiery-powered super-heroine cruising for a meltdown. Her wardrobe has a tendency to malfunction thanks to her unpredictable powers, her life as a photographer is complicated when she accidentally sets things on fire, her parents are embarrassingly hip sorcerors, her psychoanalyst (Doctor Mogo) is a reformed super-villain prone to monologuing in the third person and her boyfriend Marcus (who she would like to break up with but feels obligated towards) has been transformed into a water-breathing mer-man by her enemy Praetor Poseidon. At Mogo's suggestion, June decides to take a vacation at a secret Martian resort for stressed out metahumans. There, she encounters a strange host of guests who pass the time playing super-powered games of baseball and a particularly annoying would-be Romeo with Freudian issues named the Silver Spearsman (who uses unwieldy gimmick spears to fight crime). However, when she notices that the guests are increasingly tranquil after a special therapeutic treatment, she begins to suspect that the spa is a front for a brainwashing cult. Unable to get word back to earth and unable to fly back under her own powers (as there is no air in space), she reluctantly enlists the Spearsman's help, uncovering a plot by shapeshifting aliens. Of course, Mogo denies any involvement and June, needing a vacation after her vacation, learns to find solace in the small joys of life, like sipping on a soy mocha on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

[Typo Lad]

Miss Match sounds fun.

[Joe Rice]

After a lot of hemming and hawing, I must admit that I entered the contest, too. I'll see if I can find my pitches, losers that they were.

[Joe Rice]

"Nubian" Queen

In the late-seventies and early-eighties, Genesis Brown was an African-American icon superhero known as Nubian Queen. Though as a teenager she had used her powers in Harlem to do as much good as possible, the popularity of blaxploitation films in the 70s gave news media the impetus to start touting her as a headline superhero. She quickly rose to stardom with her intelligence, charm, and good looks, but in the late 80s she fell from grace due to an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Now, in the days where such a "scandal" would actually help a celebrity's career, the Queen (having dropped the embarrassing modifier) finds herself coming out of retirement in her well-preserved 40s, if only to show her rambunctious teenage grand-daughter what being a hero really means, before old enemies like King Mamba and the Chainsmen destroy them both. Eventually, Genesis' dignity, patient humor, and experience win out and her grand-daughter becomes the superheroine of the 21st century.

[Joe Rice]

And here's Hot Girl

Katie Cooper is well-known as both an actress and the LA-based Superhero, Hot Girl. The only problem is, she'd rather be well-known as, well, just about anything. As a superhero, she's annoyed by her publicist's insistence on fluff over substance; and similarly, as an actress she's frustrated by her inability to land anything other than b-movies capitalizing on her fire powers and unusual physical beauty. The method-taught actress decides to move to NY in an attempt to be taken more seriously in at least one of her lives. Improving either proves difficult, as she struggles to shed her vacuous studio-packaged image. As she fights of New York super-villains and bounty-hunters secretly hired by her public relations firm, Theresa finds a depth of pain that brings her to success in and independent film and in helping real people with real problems.

[Jack Zodiac]

Nubian Queen sounds unintentionally hilarious. Like the kind of character who could easily just become a bad joke if they weren't written well. A celebrity superheroine/actress like Hot Girl, though? It's an idea I've seen used passingly in other comics, but never focused on for a main character.

[Joe Rice]

Thanks, I think?