Move Made

January 8th, 2017 by

What happens next? Now that Moves has ended, the comic takes a break of sorts. Smoke Break to be exact. With Lefty and his crew returning to their home dimension with Scurvy Dog as hostage, the next chapter introduces you to the main superhero of Lefty’s home dimension, and for whom I named the dimension after, CIGAR MAN.

Cigar Man was born from a conversation with a co-worker, years ago, about odd superheroes. The co-worker knew about the Great Lakes Avengers, but did not know about the whole CapWolf story line from the same time frame. Yeah, the late 1980s and early 1990s were not the greatest time for comics. Comic books were becoming the next great investment, companies were trying all kinds of gimmicks and crap to sell the comics, including really stupid stories, but at the time it was awesome.

The conversation went on, and I elaborated about some of the odd superheroes DC created to audition for the Legion of Superheroes. Arm Fall Off Boy was one of my favorites. A guy, who could pop one of his arms off, and used it to hit you. There was also the Legion of Substitute Heroes which was formed from the rejected candidates. The substitutes were written with comic relief in mind, but if handled well were a powerful fighting force.

Eventually the conversation moved into how a guy smoking a cigar would gaining various superpowers came about. It was just silliness at the time, but being a writer always keen for even odd ideas to expand upon, I did what I normally do. Open a text editing program, type out the idea, save it as a file, and then either email it to myself or copy it to a thumb drive.

From that idea, and description, I built a world around Cigar Man. If he had a side kick, what would the side kick mainly do? Carry lots of cigars for the hero, like a walking humidor of sorts. So I created the sidekick, HUMIDOR. Humidor was based on a matador and spoke comic book Spanish. Basically English with a few Spanish words to indicate he was from Spain. Somehow a pet chimp called STUB was involved. I pictured all three on a motorcycle with sidecar.

Then I worked on the villains, the odder the better. I already had a villainess called Calamari in the Mighty League of Justice Universe, which you, the reader were introduced to. But, I liked the character idea, and I did not feel like having two Calamari characters in two different universes, and Cigar Man may have dove tailed well into the MLJ Universe, but it still did not work well in my mind. Even if Cigar Man and the MLJ were in the same universe and lived in different parts of the country or world. Then I came up with the whole dimensional travel and cross over concept for my universe, Calamari being in two universes could be easily explained.

Now Cigar Man, and his universe will fully be featured in a short story arc of Gorilla Fish, while I work out some kinks for the next major story arc. The Smoke Break storyline up next actually solves a transition problem for me as well. Sometimes this stuff writes itself.

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