A man of character.

I recently posted the second of our two January vlogs.  I talked about (hopefully) amusing facts regarding the characters of STAR POWER; their origins, their development, and working with Garth to bring them to life.  I mentioned that I’m one of those people who has a cast of characters banging around in his head, just waiting for a stage to be showcased.

With every story I tell, my head-cast gets smaller.  With every experience outside of making comics, such as playing video games or tabletop roleplaying games with my trusted friends, new ideas for new characters are born and my head-cast gets a new member or two.  It’s been a revolving door lately, with equal parts additions and “debuts.”  But there are some characters in my head who haven’t had their opportunity yet, and for better or worse, they may never see the light of day… or the internet, at least.

When I was very young, I wrote “novels” with my best friend, David.  We crafted our own high-fantasy epic adventures, aspiring to be the next Raymond E. Feist and J.R.R. Tolkien (our respective favorite authors when we were twelve).  Over the course of Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire, some of those characters were reworked into established cast members, like Rilian, Laurie Mondane (a.k.a. Stunt), and King David Johann.  Many, many of those other characters were rightfully forgotten, as a pair of twelve-year-old fantasy nerds can only be so original (we won’t speak much of David’s half-dragon immortal ranger or my kickass magical cyborg).  But as silly as many of those characters were, the main character holds a very special place in my heart.  So special, in fact, that I don’t think I’ll ever be willing to put him up for public scrutiny.  That character belongs in the spotlight of the silly stories of my youth, carrying a tale crafted by two young boys trying to find their creative voices.

Video games have become a surprising source of inspiration as well, with character customization and open-world settings allowing for vast amounts of creativity.  Many of those characters I’ve created will never see the light of day, as befitting characters made up in the context of a game, but as I mentioned in the second January vlog, STAR POWER’S earliest origins were to be found there.  Danica Maris is a character made wholly by Garth and myself, but the seed of STAR POWER was planted by playing a superhero-themed video game.  Watch the vlog for the complete story.

Characters come and go for someone like me.  Some of them are placed into stories.  Some of them remain tucked away in my mind as private, pleasant memories.  Some of them are so tied-in to games that it’s impossible to translate them elsewhere.  The stage is only meant for some of them, but many others play a backstage role that’s equally important.