Task: Bigg City Heroes

I like crossing items off my to-do list.

Technology was a big influence on this one as well. The first screenplay I wrote was in Word. I had tried Screenwriter, and all the automated things it was doing were driving me nuts. So I finished Jade Mask, and then I went through and applied the formatting. That was such a pain that when I tried Final Draft, the automatic stuff did not bother me. I can’t say that the two programs are significantly different—I just had a better understanding when I tried the second one.

The point of that is, when I was told, “You need to write this!” and I knew that there was no way I was ready to take on the art side of a comic, I realized that I could do it as a screenplay, and it would work.

That original conversation happened at the workplace one night when I was talking with a coworker, and we deemed one person’s annoying trait as what would be their superpower if they were super. Then we started coming up with the others, and pretty soon it was “You have to write this!”

Now, my only concern in doing so was that so many powers were based on annoying traits, not good qualities. Surely that would end up being very offensive. He assured me that they would not see it that way. He was right. Here was our crew, with no real names included:

Heroes

Null Boy: Able to harness his extreme apathy to suck the force out of evil efforts.
Gun Girl: Bulletproof
The Vampire: self-explanatory
Zen Master Bacon Boy: Able to heat things with his mind. Part of becoming a hero is learning to apply this to things that are not bacon.
BoxMan: Able to fold things into boxes
The Genius: No actual powers, but uses her advanced mental abilities to research, strategize, and invent things for the team.

They were financially supported by the Big B, and politically supported by Bigg City’s Anglophile Mayor.

Villains

The Queen: Able to prevent cameras from recording (and she later discovers she can cause other visual aids like glasses to shatter), she is also a natural leader and quite the metal smith.
The Siren: Able to talk endlessly, causing extreme mental anguish to the listener.
Amber Alert: Looking like she’s pregnant, rubbing her stomach causes a mental fog in those nearby, leaving them unable to think at the time or remember what happened later.
The Sylph: Her hugs render others unconscious.

The first story, “Bigg City Heroes” was about heroes fighting villains led by the Queen in Bigg City. She actually turns to good by then end, having bonded with Gun Girl during a smoking break that they agree to while battling, but her minions escape, and are co-opted by other villains in “Back and Bigg”, “Bigger and Better”, and “Bigg Trouble in Bigg City”.

As we got closer to my trip to Australia, I had to hurry and wrap up some storylines, but I sent out a goodbye email with things that might happen, including possible explanations for the Genius’s disappearance.

Well, I got back, and the world economy collapsed, and I was unemployed, but I would still talk to friends from work, and boy, crazy things started happening there. I thought about doing a new installment, and I started to write one, but there kept being more people to kill off. New characters were introduced, and as soon as that happened, they needed to be killed off. It just wasn’t stable.

Still, I had put it on my list of things to finish, and I had been revisiting my superhero past, and it was just time to wrap things up. If I waited a little bit longer, there would probably be another death, but all I could do was foreshadow it. I have to say though, killing people off was fun.

Obviously, this is another project with no commercial value. First of all, it is based on real people, many of whom would eventually figure out that their depictions are not flattering. Also, I was remembering it as all inside jokes.

It was fun to see that was not completely true. Yes, a lot of things were put in there specifically because of things that actually happened, and so knowing the source increases the humor, but they also stand on their own. Also, to keep anyone from feeling bad, and to incorporate more of Null Boy’s issues, I made the Genius (who was me) take the fall on a lot of the jokes. For example, I had completely forgotten about when her kickboxing classes were turning her into a rageaholic.

Anyway, it is done. I have sent the completed pdf to Gun Girl and the Queen, and they can share with whom they wish, after having read it.

There is some residual sadness, because there are things I wanted to do that will never happen. For example, that time when Gun Girl and the Queen were going to quit smoking, and the frustration caused them to battle in the air, even though neither of them had previously demonstrated flying ability, and the others set a tobacco field ablaze to calm them down? I think I could have had a lot of fun writing that.

Initially I thought it was okay that we will not get to when the Mayor uses redcoats in tunnels to try and restore Bigg City to British rule, because while it would be easy to redeem him emotionally, getting him out of the legal and political trouble such an undertaking entails would be hard, but then I think I figured out a way to do it.

Also, we never got to explore Cryo-Man’s back-story, so it has become his story moving forward instead. At least I didn’t have to kill him.