So great that I have 2 “likes” on this post but only one of you clicked the link. Someone knows EXACTLY what clip from Inside Out I posted without watching.
Don’t blame me. I’ve done neither, because I don’t follow blind, unexplained links in forum posts. Entirely likely your second like is the result of someone copying the url, running it through their own security to make sure it doesn’t have some kind of redirection hack hidden in it, and then followed it from there, which wouldn’t show up as a click-through here.
Great name.
Count me as the link-clicker; I had a hunch, but I wanted to be sure!
Update this afternoon, morning has been a thing.
You too? It’s barely 3PM here and I’m ready to go to bed for the night.
Yep! Spent the morning being called for jury duty. Long, hot, and boring. But I’m back now!
And there’s an update every day this week, because we’re running through the revised Champions of Tomorrow. I’m not going to bother with the stats for Stormrider or Gutterpunk, since they haven’t changed, but we’ll open with the expanded history of…
Stormrider
The next status-shaking grand event of the Plutonium Era was one that was meant to be talked about for years to come, and it sure was. In 2005, Fiona Terrace had stepped down as Editor-In-Chief, and was replaced by Zack Murphy. Murphy had no real comics background, but he was a hotshot executive with his eye on boosting Venture’s brand recognition, and he made moves to ‘update’ what he saw as outdated heroes in need of a touch-up. One of his plans was the ill-fated 2007 event, “Shock and Awe”, which would serve as the creation of a new title to temporarily replace the Champions of Truth, Kid Liberty and the Champions of Tomorrow.
In Covert Tactics #50, Avarice once again escaped from jail, determined to bring down the Champions and demonstrate his mastery over energies of all sorts. This time, however, he made use of experimental technology acquired by remnants of AEGIS; Covert Tactics pursued him to the pages of Champions of Truth #447, but arrived just as Avarice successfully stole the powers of the entire Champions of Truth team! A last-ditch effort from Big Brain disrupted the power transfer, causing the powers of the Champions to go wild, abandoning the original heroes and passing into an entirely new collection of people.
This was the start of the massive “Shock and Awe” crossover event. In the pages of Covert Tactics #51-53 and Earthwatch #84-87, the two teams fought against the dramatically-empowered Avarice as he laid siege to the world, with advice from a depowered Hyperstar. Cryptic Trails #60-62 and Spectacular Skybreaker #251-252 saw Greenheart and Skybreaker wrestle with the loss of their powers, and what it meant to be a hero without abilities, while Company Town #226-227 saw the Rogue Agents gather to protect a comatose Flatfoot and weakened Fly Boy from the Outfit, and Dark Rivers #15 bore witness to the Wonderer seeking refuge from his old nemesis in Lostwood.
Meanwhile, Kid Liberty followed the trails of energy in the hopes of recovering the lost powers of the Champions. His first stop was Dublin, where he found Donnie Gates. Donnie was a smart-mouthed eighteen-year-old with a penchant for getting into trouble. Donnie knew what was right, but he didn’t know how to fight back, so he did whatever he could. He looked after his family and his friends, but had a rap sheet as long as his arm; a long list of vandalism against bullying authorities, brawls against gangs who hurt his friends, and minor thefts committed to get back at local business owners who foreclosed on the homes of elderly locals.
Until one day, when a group of local toughs ganged up on him, and threw him into traffic. It should have killed him, but in midair a bolt of lightning hit his skateboard and imbued it with the power of the Spear of Assal, letting him skim the surface of the cars, wrestle control of the winds, and turn them back on his attackers. With his board and his newfound strength, Donnie became Stormrider, the first of Kid Liberty’s new recruits.
Stormrider was clearly intended as a foil to Kid Liberty, an angry, uncertain young man with a magic skateboard who evoked a lot of the feelings that Abe himself had felt when he was younger. He was also clearly intended to be the Cool One, showing off his tricks and using what the writers fondly imagined to be up-to-date teen lingo. Fans hated him. He was trying too hard, he was too frequently written as right when he should have been wrong, and he was no Skybreaker. But Editorial was certain that, with a bit of time, he would become a fan favourite on par with Protean or Kid Liberty himself.
Behind the Scenes
Stormrider’s background now includes the setup for Shock and Awe and a bit of Metaverse knowledge; the late 2000s are home to another change in editors, which leads to a lot of the problems that we see as the period progresses. Since Kid Liberty has been revised to have been in Covert Tactics for a few years, they have to get roped into this crossover, and the rest mostly writes itself!
God, do I love a how-do-you-do-fellow-kids, too-cool-for-school tryhard character defined solely by their awesomeness XD
Sadly, they always seem to go back to their own home planet eventually.
Greensleeves
Alias: Lena Kumar
First Appearance: Champions of Truth #448, October 2007
Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d10
Relation: Romantic, Approach: Raw Power
Traits:
Grasping Vines: When you Hinder, you may reduce the penalty created by 1 to apply it to multiple targets close to each other.
Allies of Nature: When you Boost, you may affect all nearby heroes. If you do, that bonus must be used before your next turn.
Having acquired his first ally, Kid Liberty brought Stormrider with him to India in search of Greenheart’s lost abilities. There, they encountered a shy, reserved nineteen-year-old girl named Lena Kumal. Lena was a gardener who lived on her family’s farm, and who had never questioned the arc of her life – she would take care of her family, meet a boy, get married, and then take care of their family together. It was what was expected of her.
But Lena’s village was facing a drought that was withering the plants and threatening famine; one day, while tending to her flowers and trying to coax a little bit more life out of them, Lena linked to the Green, using her abilities to heal and empower the plants directly. Her abilities quickly spread, bringing all of the village’s crops back to health and saving her friends and family from ruin or starvation. But rather than being grateful, Lena’s village responded with suspicion and fear. They had seen stories of these super-powered people, and believed that it was only a matter of time until some deadly enemy descended on them in search of Lena and her powers.
While the village was debating what to do, their fears were proven right with the arrival of Kid Liberty and Stormrider, only minutes ahead of some of Avarice’s forces. Rather than hiding as her family demanded, Lena ran out from her home to help the two heroes, luring the mercenaries away from the village and fighting them on the roads nearby. Afterwards, she told her family that she could not stay – these powers meant that there was a new arc to her life. She wished them well, and left to join the Champions of Tomorrow. There, she would begin a romance with Stormrider, supporting him and the rest of her new friends.
If Venture’s fans had been disdainful of Stormrider, they were downright blistering about Greensleeves. Greenheart had been the Champions’ powerhouse, and the most straightforwardly powerful woman in Venture’s lineup. By contrast, Greensleeves was practically a damsel in distress, using her powers to help allies and hinder her foes but almost never to attack. The writers had planned for her to slowly come out of her shell, but the backlash was sufficient that instead they just pushed her into the background while they tried to focus on other characters.
One of Greensleeves’ few major stories during her team’s run involved the re-appearance of Caliban. In Kid Liberty and the Champions of Tomorrow #14, Caliban came out of nowhere, determined to kill Greensleeves in order to force the powers within her to return to Greenheart. He scornfully told the Champions of Tomorrow that they were failures, and would never be as important or powerful as the Champions of Truth; to restore one of the world’s greatest heroes, he was willing to have their blood on his hands. In the end, he was defeated and fled, but his words would prove to be darkly prophetic…
Behind the Scenes
Greensleeves gets a lot of extra wordcount, since her backstory was basically just a paragraph before. I think that, while she’s doomed to be an uninteresting character, I liked flipping the idea of her village being afraid not because of her powers, but because of what those powers mean in a broader context, and that they weren’t entirely wrong. The shunning still hurts and feels unfair, but it feels less absurd than everyone turning on her for saving them.
Greensleeves is definitely a character that might have been a success in a different context. Unlike Stormrider, who was a disaster waiting to happen, there’s some meat to her story and some potential to her character. But she’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, replacing the wrong character, so she doesn’t get saved from the dustbin of history (unless someone resurrects her for their home game title!)
Hate to let reality intrude here, but that is a seriously Americanized POV that (while possibly appropriate for ill-researched/optimistic comic writing) does not reflect IRL India, particularly in a small agrarian village circa 2007. Arranged marriages (often to older men, frequently widowers) were still extremely common, and Lena’s opinions on the matter would have been a fairly minor concern for her family and potential spouse. Things have changed dramatically there in the last ~15 years, with fewer arranged marriages and many of the ones that happen giving a lot more thought about the bride’s concerns and trying to find compatible pairings. It’s really been a cultural revolution and is still ongoing with significant pushback.
But in 2007? Not so much. She might have avoided an arranged marriage or gotten lucky with the matchmaker, but expecting to just “meet a boy” would have been awfully optimistic.
All very fair; as a throwaway line, I mostly meant for it to register as “she isn’t currently being courted or preparing for marriage”. I may just revise the line to remove the ‘meet a boy’ piece entirely.
edit Double-checked, and nineteen was roughly the average age of marriage for women in rural India at the time, so it wouldn’t be a significant outlier for her not to be married yet, although it was probably on her mind.
I think you could keep it, albeit maybe with a note about the reality of the situation. The glimmerings of change were present in 2007 so she wouldn’t have been that much of an outlier.
It also fits very well with the kind of casual cultural and even geographical cluelessness comic writers frequently demonstrate even today. Applying US norms with a thin veneer of national/ethnic stereotypes didn’t end with the Superfiends.
Mathcore and Netizen
Alias: Criss and T.J. Oakley
First Appearance: Champions of Truth #449, November 2007
Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d10
Relation: Close Friends, Approach: Technological
Traits:
- Brothers: When Mathcore and Netizen are reduced to below d8, they lose access to one of the traits below.
- Feel the Beat: When Mathcore Hinders, he can Attack any target using the penalty created.
- Tech-Prosthetics: When Netizen rolls the maximum result on his die, create a +2 bonus for any hero.
Having assembled the first two members of his team, Kid Liberty travelled to the United States, following the trails of Flatfoot and Fly Boy’s powers. He was surprised to discover that the two had incarnated very close together, but when he found them, he understood why.
Criss and TJ Oakley were brothers living in the poorest neighbourhood of Neulyon. Three years earlier, TJ and their parents had been in a car crash that killed both parents and left TJ parapalegic and with a missing left arm. Criss had dropped out of school to take care of his brother. With the support of a neighbour who checked in on them from time to time but was working two jobs herself and couldn’t do much more, he was able to convince child services that he could take care of TJ, and he devoted his life to his brother’s well-being. For his part, TJ retreated into the Internet, using chat rooms and video games to replace the world that he felt cut away from by bad luck.
Criss was always a brilliant young man, an aspiring techno musician who built his own rigs, but when Fly Boy’s powers entered him, his genius was dialed up to an impossible degree. Overnight, almost in a fever, he built a new sound rig, one that could amplify and focus his music to literally stop people in their tracks. At the same time, TJ was imbued with a digital brain and lightning calculation speeds, allowing him to mentally interface with machinery and command it; working together, the brothers built him new prosthetics that he could use in combat. Together, the pair had already begun to fight crime in their neighbourhood as Mathcore and Netizen when Kid Liberty arrived, and they eagerly joined up to stop Avarice.
Neither Mathcore nor Netizen were particularly popular characters, at least initially. Criss was one part “edgy musician”, drawing on musical tropes that the writer of Kid Liberty and the Champions of Tomorrow did not understand and misusing slang on a regular basis, and one part “overprotective brother” for the whole team, trying to keep them safe when they were out fighting crime. TJ was a spunky teen, eager to do things now that he had prosthetics that let him get out and fight, and was consistently written as younger than his theoretical age of sixteen. Both were supposed to be cool kids with witty banter and bright ideas, but they typically came off as corny and overblown instead, held up for years afterwards as a memorable example of how not to write teenagers.
Behind the Scenes
And here’s our revision to Mathcore and Netizen. Mathcore is the one character who I wrote a whole character sheet for and then dropped as revisions occured. As a result, Netizen’s original d8 lieutenant also goes away, and I merged the two into a single character to reflect how they were pretty much all about each other in their initial story. Mathcore is gone after this, of course. Netizen vanishes for the Plutonium Age, but we may see him again in the future…
What’s the mystery character there? d6? d8? Something else?
Oh dammit.
It’s a d8. When Mathcore and Netizen are d8 or d10, they’re brothers. When they drop to d6 or d4, one of them gets temporarily taken out.
Mathcore and Netizen, yessssss! 
reminds me of Wizard Magazine’s many jokes about first run Teen Titians. The writers were not hip or cool when they were teenagers 20+ years ago so their attempts were so bad. Of course they were working with characters with a solid foundation.
Gutterpunk
With the new team nearly assembled, Kid Liberty sent the four heroes he had found to join Covert Tactics and prepare for the fight against Avarice, while he went on to recover the final two lost heroes. His last two stops were Brazil and Nigeria, in search of the powers of Wonderer and Hyperstar. Brazil was where he met Gutterpunk.
If Stormrider was a raging fire, Gutterpunk was a cold blade. Born in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Beatriz was an orphan with no last name, no community to protect her, no family to look out for her. She grew up hard, scrounging to survive and moving from derelict building to abandoned storefront, one step ahead of anyone who might be looking for her. By the time she was nineteen, she was proud of her self-sufficiency, seeing her ability to make do as a badge of honour. She would take time to look out for the next generation of street kids, protecting them from abusers and sharing what she had, but she also kept apart from them, unwilling to get too close.
When she suddenly developed the ability to reshape the world and the wish-granting powers of a genie, it was something of a shock.
When Kid Liberty found her, Gutterpunk made it clear that she intended to use her powers mainly to help make food and shelter for poor kids around the world - but given her teleportation powers, she was willing to also lend a hand to fighting threats as long as they were a big enough deal, and Avarice certainly seemed to qualify. She pledged her help when she was needed, and got ready to jump into battle.
After Avarice’s defeat, Gutterpunk was true to her word, rarely visiting the newly-rebuilt Champions Citadel outside of mission briefings and doing her best to avoid social occasions with a team that she initially viewed as much more well-off than herself. But having a chance to set her powers against criminal tycoons making the world worse seemed like a good deal to the grim young woman, and she was soon fighting alongside the other Champions, even if she kept them all at arms’ length outside of missions. Netizen made it a personal challenge to find a way to get Gutterpunk to smile even once. He never succeeded.
Gutterpunk was the most popular member of the Champions of Tomorrow, although that could be seen as damning the character with faint praise. There was an inherent tension between her attitude and her goals, a prickly girl with the power to make dreams come true, that resonated with a small subset of readers. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot more depth to her than that, and the fact that she was in fact on a team filled with other young people with tragic backstories that she refused to acknowledge left many readers feeling cold.
Behind the Scenes
As with Stormrider, this writeup is slightly expanded mainly to add a little bit of meta backstory and details for Gutterpunk, but her existing writeup was pretty solid so she’s not adjusted.
There is definitely a world in which Gutterpunk lived and Sunbeam died, and there’s certainly a possibility for someone to play with resurrecting her; of the four dead Champions, she was the one with the most popularity and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see someone try to add her to something down the road. There could even be a bit of ‘afterlife Gutterpunk’ in Stargazers as a story arc now that Sunbeam is there. I’m not totally sure.
Sunbeam
Sunbeam, the team’s final member, could not have been more different from her fellows. Born in Lagos, Adeya Talibi grew up poor, but loved, part of a massive family that looked out for each other and taught her to do the same. She was a cheerful girl, always looking to help and protect others, and when she woke up one morning with superhuman strength and speed and the ability to fly, she knew that she needed to do something good with it. She patterned her costume after her personal hero, Hyperstar, without knowing that was exactly whose powers she had inherited. When Kid Liberty arrived and explained the situation, it was a dream and nightmare wrapped up into one, and Adeya took on the name Sunbeam and swore that she would make her hero proud.
With the new Champions of Tomorrow assembled in the final panel of Champions of Truth #450, the comic officially ended, with the next issue rebranded as Kid Liberty and the Champions of Tomorrow #1. In that issue, with the help of Covert Tactics and Earthwatch, the new Champions defeated Avarice and returned his stolen powers to their original holders. However, to everyone’s surprise, the heroes discovered that the power they’d absorbed could not be fully returned; Avarice had absorbed so much power that the new Champions of Tomorrow were still fully-powered after the original Champions recovered some of their energies. The original Champions were still extremely weak and temporarily retired until they could recover, leaving the Champions of Tomorrow to take their place.
One of the few things that earned critical and reader praise in Kid Liberty and the Champions of Tomorrow, however, was the relationship between Gutterpunk and Sunbeam. The acerbic, cynical Gutterpunk often clashed with her bubby, outgoing teammate, ultimately leading to a heated argument in issue #18. Gutterpunk finally exploded on Sunbeam, demanding how she could be so sheltered, so naive in the face of the monsters they fought. Sunbeam’s response was simple. She said quietly that she knew what the world had thrown at them all. She knew exactly what was waiting in the dark. “And that,” she said, “is why I have to shine. If I don’t, who will?”
In the next few issues, Gutterpunk stopped ragging on Sunbeam, although she didn’t become any friendlier. Instead, she talked to Kid Liberty about his own experiences, living through decades of horrors and somehow staying strong, and she started to be a little bit less acerbic to the team as a whole. There were hints that she was working her way up to another conversation with Sunbeam, but the comic ended before she had the chance.
Behind the Scenes
Sunbeam’s writeup is slightly expanded, and includes the ending of the Shock and Awe arc so that it gets fully fleshed-out, but she’s mainly the same as before. Of course, she’s the one character who gets a lease on life out of this, appearing barely a year after the end of Champions of Tomorrow. I spent some time unsure about that - did I want anyone coming out of that cataclysmic mistake that soon, or should I hold off and put her in Brave New World instead? But Stargazers fits so well, especially with her literally replacing Hyperstar as one of its leads, so here we are!