The Adventures of Superchum and the Mighty Befrienders

Author notes

Page 6

SteveMyers22

on Sept. 20, 2007

Editor's Note: BEN-BOT-1 is an acronym for Big Evil Nuisance Robot Version 1.0. Just as LEE-BOT-1 stands for Little Evil Einstein Robot. After BEN-BOT's failure, Baron Bad Guy did a little more than plot Superchum's downfall. He tweaked the scope of his robotic minion division and made them smaller and sleeker. He also made them much more efficient and a lot more intelligent. To put this in baseball terms (because baseball terms are always hilarious when put in the context of super hero comics, amirite?) … The Baron obviously ascribes to the Whitey Herzog formula of Small-Ball instead of the Tony LaRussa formula of wait for the big hitter.

Anyways, this week's adventure was fun to draw. And very experimental, kind of. The past couple of pages I've been using a brush to ink quite a bit more. My teacher would be so proud. The blue line pro pages I just ripped open to do my latest comics on were kind of a dud. The paper looks great, but really is some of the crappiest I've ever bought from Blue Line. It soaks up and bleeds my ink pens. So I figured since the end product was going to be rough no matter what, this was the PERFECT chance to get some practice in with ye ole Sable Hair Brush and bottle o' india ink. The practice has been great so far. Who knows, maybe I'll never look back, heh.

As far as this week's story goes, this is something that's been a part of the Superchum mythology since I wrote my first script. But it's something that not even the most observant chum-fans tend to remember, because in the first two versions of Superchum, it was never really explained except in one panel, and even in that panel it was easy to overlook.

But just like with a lot of earlier parts of his origin story, this new Superchum comic has given me a lot of elbow room to finally flesh out these characteristics. Basically Baron-Bad Guy is a master of robotics. But Superchum is the empathically empowered on a scale that it can even disrupt the cold, scientific programming of the Baron's robotic minions. That's kind of the backdrop for why the Baron pursues Superchum as obsessively as he does.

Next week, I plan to finally delve into the masterplan for stopping Superchum! It's devilishly simple.