While designing “Crooks!,” Kyle, Sean, and I developed a great deal of “context” to give the character write-ups more life and to make them fit within an internally consistent world. Since I am not an artist and cannot draw incredibly cool costumes, my contribution to this effort consisted of filling a notebook with hand-written notes in my trademark 4-point red pen scrawl. Periodically, the three of us got together to discuss the ideas of the week or to work out which of our ideas fit within our collaborative world, and which were more or less precious ideas aimed solely at our own interests. For something to make it into the book, all three of us had to agree that it was a worthy idea–and this was well before any “finished” writing had been done.

In this way the world lost the Crusaders, a pretty brazenly offensive team of religious superheroes (Rapture, Sliver, Babel, Prester John, the Truth, and White Devil). Just because I’d thought of it in the middle of the night didn’t make it a good idea. But some of the ideas work, and work well.

Making up a comic universe is an essentially endless endeavor. Here’s an example of what I mean. While tomb-robbing a Native American burial mound, the crooked archeologist who would become Dr. Dungeon discovered the powered costume of an alien protector who fell to Earth in ancient times. Crooks! suggests that the suit once belonged to a member of a 999-person interstellar peacekeeping force called the Gatesmen, whose costumes control a gateway to a nightmarish prison planet.

Our notebooks are filled with notes on the Gatesmen, simply because they needed to exist for Dr. Dungeon’s origin, even though they don’t appear elsewhere in Crooks!. (The Gatesmen are mentioned in Moonquake’s back story too. The Infinity Moon crystal that powers Moonquake’s gravity gauntlets was created by the Gatesmen.) We have extensive notes on a character named Gatesman 439, who is torn between his duty to his order and his love of a woman of Earth. All of this will probably end up going nowhere, but I thought it would be fun to let you guys know that there really is a plan, here, and we really put a ton of thought and work into Crooks! that never made it beyond our notebooks and conversations.

I knew I wanted Dr. Dungeon to be an over-the-top Silver Age villain, but I felt uncomfortable going that direction in a modern era with a straight face. It’s comics, so I figured, why not have the suit keep him young forever, so that I can have my cake and eat it too? Dr. Dungeon really is from the Silver Age, so I don’t have to feel self conscious about making him so one-dimensional and obvious.

When I was fleshing out his background, I needed a team of 1960s heroes, and Kyle just happened to have just such a team in his notebooks (only his often also include finished drawings, costume roughs, and color tests). Thus I put the Happening into Dr. Dungeon’s write-up. Kyle has information on every member of the Happening in his head or in his notebooks, and Sean has the same for other characters in his. The META-4 world contains hundreds of fleshed-out concepts and characters. If we dropped a character’s name in Crooks!, chances are one of us has at least a few paragraphs about that character scribbled down somewhere.

Forward | Courage Unlimited | A Note on Notes | Thematic Influence | The Luciferian | Roll Call | Knock-Off | Gimmick | Twist | Cyclone | The Pugilist | Minotaur, ANTAG and Bestiary | Iraq Discoveries | The Reserve | The Front

All content within the “Super Unicorn Unbridled” is owned by the respective authors. All the content was granted generously by members of Super Unicorn: Sean Glenn, Erik Mona, or Kyle Hunter on the Mutants and Masterminds Atomic Think Tank messageboard. ECORE and XEI do not claim ownership of any content. This series was put together to organize information about the META-4 setting and its characters.

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