Bad Superheroes - a lengthy undertaking

Alia Shawkat as my vision of Wysteria

June 13th, 6:15 AM... I sat in front of my computer as I do several mornings, while drinking my tea and eating my toast, and I began to write about a dream I had earlier that morning.

In the dream, young Humans With Abilities (HWA) are on the rise and there is general concern about knowing who has abilities and what those abilities are. It’s a natural concern that one can see would literally take place in a real world scenario of this nature. So there is a branch of the government created that tries to monitor these HWA and furthermore make determinations on which of these are of a quality that is potentially dangerous.

In my dream there was a “superhero” named Wysteria (I don’t know why), who wanted to make more of these young “superheroes” active. There was this committee within the above mentioned branch of the government that determined whom among the people with special abilities qualified as a hero and who didn’t. One woman within the committee said “these young people with abilities aren’t superheroes, they are special and therefore have special needs. These are young people with special needs.”

Awake, but with that dream very much on my mind I thought to myself... In a world of superheroes, they can't all have amazing talents. I like the idea of lesser talented humans with abilities forming a superhero team, where they need to rely on each other in order to get the job done.

Because of the dream I started to create this list of “bad superheroes”, heroes that weren’t particularly useful, but had the desire to do good and when paired up with other superheroes of a similar caliber could actually make a difference.

For example:

Earlier today I was walking and talking with Annie and she told me a story about a mega hop scotch game she was setting up for the kids to play at her summer camp. I hear Hop Scotch and I think... Hop Scott, a human named Scott with the special ability to hop like nobody's business, and loves to draw with chalk on pavement. Side note, he was born with an unusual speech impediment that makes his letter Ts, especially at the end of words, sound like the letters "tch" so when he introduces himself as Scott it sounds like Scotch... "I'm Scotch and I like to hop, some people call me Hop Scotch."

Occasionally I come up with only part of an idea, the name but no well defined skill set.

Al Fresco - (nickname - Al) Not sure which way to go with this one. Is he a superhero who’s kryptonite is the indoors? And then what are his super powers? Or does he have an alter ego whose name has something to do with being indoors (Hank Hermit). Or is he a superhero whose powers specifically relate to being outdoors? And then are his powers contingent upon the conditions of his outdoor surroundings?

Sometimes I even have golden nuggets of pure genius.... at least in my own mind.

Naomi Naive - Her superpower is that her belief in things that probably just aren’t true and couldn’t possibly happen seem to be true or to actually happen simply because she believes it’s true. Often these things seem to be just coincidental happenings and highly improbable things that occur, but have nothing to do with Naomi. Still she always seems to be present when they happen, so no one can prove that it wasn’t her belief that enabled the very thing to occur. Dr. Void - Believed to be only a rumor, no one has ever seen Dr. Void and most (perhaps all) superheroes just don’t believe he even exists. But Naomi Naive is a true believer and sure enough, whenever she brings up his name, “Don’t worry… Dr Void is coming, he’ll save us.” something always seems to happen that saves the day.

These of course are just a few examples of some of my superheroes, and I've also created non superhero characters and villains. I've even created a timeline that begins in the 1970's and is currently up to 2041. In my timeline all of our real presidents are presidents in this universe and our current president is not only elected a second time, but during his second term he changes our system of presidential term limits so he can remain president until he either dies or decides to no longer be president and he holds the office until 2029. I haven't decided if he's defeated or killed off yet.

The thing is, while this started off as a goofy joke.. I'm kind of getting into it and the jokes are becoming less frequent and this is turning into something that I'm personally finding quite interesting. I've got twenty two different characters, one that's actually two characters and another that's actually five characters... so you could say I have twenty seven characters. On top of that I have six other characters who exist in theory, but have yet to be named and defined. And as I've mentioned, my time line begins with "Three Mile Island" in the 1970's and runs through 2041 before my main set of characters... a team of gals I refer to as Girl Team Six (GTS), begin their lives as superheroes.

Now if only I had the skill to draw comic book superheroes I'd be all set.