S.T.A.R. Corps Retrospective

Prior to Graven, S.T.A.R. Corps is the single largest work that I've ever actually written. Started in 1997 and coming to a close by 2002, the series was my first successful attempt to do exactly the kind of superhero project I’d spent ten years half-assing with the Power Universe: a long-running episodic adventure series with an ensemble cast, set in a world that organically grew into a more complex setting, and actually sticking with one team long enough to let them develop as characters.

The series initially started as a one-shot story I wrote based on a dream, but from this humble beginning, an entire multi-season series of episodic shorts would emerge. Unfortunately, this project would collapse under the weight of multiple revisions, before I finally killed it outright for personal reasons.

Nonetheless, I did actually write close to twenty distinct short stories for this series, on top of rewriting a few of them for later versions. All told, the sheer page count of all the completed shorts adds up to at least one Graven. Add in the full-series outline and encyclopedia, and you’ve got another whole novel on top of that.

This is going to be a fairly massive article, so strap yourselves in.

Power Universe Retrospective: Mutant Force

The Mutant Force is ostensibly one of the most important teams in the Power Universe, but “ostensibly” is the operable word here. After the Fabulous Five, the Mutant Force stories probably informed the majority of the superhero and supervillain community that was to follow. However, in the end, the team itself wasn’t really all that important, as opposed to their greatest nemesis: the mysterious organization known only as “The Company.”

Power Universe Retrospective: The New Force

The New Force was my premier “teen superhero team”, and marked a new era of the Power Universe. Just as the Fabulous Five were the foundation of that setting, the New Force signified a change in direction of actually putting more thought and effort into the characters I was making. The Fabulous Five aside, many of the early Power Universe characters were just walking powersets I would draw in plotless comics.

The New Force came about when I was trying to be more original with my ideas, and actually develop the characters and plan the stories out more. I was nearing High School about this time, and the Power Universe underwent a large overhaul, kicking a lot of the more blatant rip-off characters, going back and revising the more original characters (the Fabulous Five got most of their actual development in this time period), and doing more complicated villain plots. This was also around the time the AEP Multiverse concept started officially coming together.

The New Force was another case of taking pre-existing characters and making a new team with them, something I hadn’t actually done since the Fabulous Five themselves. Several of the characters hence already had a history to bring to the table, and the team’s formation came about in the wake of a large team-up event between the older characters, and several new characters who debuted during the event. As such, I should briefly touch on the two series that came before:

Tabitha's Prologue

My early life was one of adventure. You might think it was worthy of a whole series of exciting memoirs, detailing my many, many adventures battling monsters and demons and dark gods, of helping my fellow champions save the universe time and again. But honestly, looking back, it all blurs together for me. Not to say I’ve forgotten the details, or that I confuse events; not at all. Each adventure is as clear to me as if it happened yesterday.

Power Universe Retrospective: The Fabulous Five

The first real superhero team I ever created, the Fabulous Five would make the first major turning point in my creative direction. Prior to this team, my primary obsession was with monsters and mutants, being largely influenced by 80s cartoons and the toys they were created to shill. At some point, however, I start gravitating towards superheroes, though I knew very little about the genre. You can sort of tell this with the F5, as their design aesthetics were very much still in the monsters and mutants phase; none of them were the spandex and capes types. The Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was as much an inspiration as was the Batman, Superman, and Fantastic Four comics.

Regardless, after the Fabulous Five, my mind would lock very solidly on superheroes. While the F5 were more directly inspired name wise by the Fantastic Four, the team was actually more like the Power Universe’s Avengers and Justice League. Each of the Five was a character I had already created and drew and had come up with solo adventures for prior, and when it came time to pull together a team, they were the best of all the solo heroes I had at the time. Afterwards, I liked the team idea so much, pretty much every superhero idea I had was a team concept from that point on.