Attache

One of my more popular characters on Virtue was Janet Planet and Big Chris brought her to life for the first time. Janet comes from a possible future where humanity has split into 3 sub-species: The intelligent Lectors, the beautiful but simple-minded Idio, and the gruesome but mechanically inclined Trogs. I'll give you three guesses where Janet falls in that lineage. Most people people think I got the name Janet Planet from either Rocky Horror, Schoolhouse Rock, or Alan Moore's run on Supreme. The name may have been lurking in the back of my brain because of those influences but I didn't consciously pick it because of any of them. I was just looking for an alliterative name and it popped into my head. I didn't recreate her on Everlasting because the fact that there is another Janet Planet is comics bugs me even if you are hard pressed to find an actual image of her. Disclaimer: I am not the artist of any of these works. In most instances (though not all) I merely created the characters in City of Heroes. Sometimes, I directed the artist with lots of notes and other times I let them do their thing. The late 00's were a different time and not all design choices then would be the same today.

Juggertha was an artist / art collector back in the OG days of the game and he did this one for me after I'd ran a contest in the All-Star Sentinels to try to drum up some interest in red side and the ASA's rogue's gallery. I don't really recall now many people took part but Condor King was the winner! This character is not mine but actually belongs to my old friend @ApeChild. Disclaimer: I am not the artist of any of these works. In most instances (though not all) I merely created the characters in City of Heroes. Sometimes, I directed the artist with lots of notes and other times I let them do their thing. The late 00's were a different time and not all design choices then would be the same today.

Hey LL! I've been here since Homecoming launched and on Everlasting since *it* launched. The All-Star Sentinels had an all too short revival but soon faded away. I think I'm about the only one who still regularly plays. I've been thinking about posting up the various scaps I used to do for the ASA forums and I found these from when you helped me set-up Doctor Epoch's introduction to the All-Stars. Good times!

She's known simply as Mime now on Everlasting but back on Virtue with taghuso drew her, she was known as Maniac Mime. I also did a Who's Who page I did on her in the style of DC's Who's Who in the 80's. Fun fact: The Factoid section references the Amazing Comics Group, editor Sal Rothstein, and Tag's artist alter ego of Terrance Anderson within the ACG! It was layers upon layers! Disclaimer: I am not the artist of any of these works. In most instances (though not all) I merely created the characters in City of Heroes. Sometimes, I directed the artist with lots of notes and other times I let them do their thing. The late 00's were a different time and not all design choices then would be the same today.

The third Torch Titan, also courtesy of taghuso but with an extra special connection. As I dug deeper and deeper into the fictional lore of the All-Star Sentinels, I found that quite a number of the characters from this history were free and available. The first two Torch Titans had been Tag's characters and both were kind of unapologetically modelled on Alan Scott. This was all back in the days before you could buy extra server slots so at some point, Tag had deleted TT to make room for another character so I grabbed it, asking if I could do a Silver Age version. I even said "Think Hal Jordan to your Alan Scott." He was sold. I can't recall if I commissioned this or if he did it as a kindness but either way, it has been one of my favorites. Disclaimer: I am not the artist of any of these works. In most instances (though not all) I merely created the characters in City of Heroes. Sometimes, I directed the artist with lots of notes and other times I let them do their thing. The late 00's were a different time and not all design choices then would be the same today.

Oh, man! Bucky Sheldon from taghuso! This takes me back and also riddles me with regrets all at the same time. Explanation is in order. This is going to get weird. As envisioned by Tag, the All-Star Sentinels of America were a Silver Age SG with a layered metafictional history. We tried to hardcore roleplay them all the time with few in-public OOC brackets but then there was this other element that they were all characters in the fictional Amazing Comics. We even had a fictional timeline of important events as our lore was decidedly different than the game lore. As I recall, the fact that we could never get the forums for the ASA running in-character most of the time was kind of frustrating for Tag and myself. At the same time, some of us were feeling that the ASA was kind of an odd duck within our coalitions, having our own detailed history that didn't match in-game and a very few other RPers seemed to like reference that fact. We talked about it extensively and decided to break our coalitions which we naively thought would be no big deal and ended up with months of drama. Simultaneously, we decided to expand our metafictional universe by creating a lot of other SGs under the Amazing Comics banner and since all of us were now "speaking" for multiple characters on the forums, in an effort to avoid multiple sign-ins, we came up with another metafictional layer of forum identities that evoked the fictional employees of the fictional Amazing Comics. It was getting a bit nutty. James Sheldon was editor Sal's assistant, nicknamed Bucky because he stuck close to him like a sidekick. We never 100% recovered from this and I think only like three of us were into it anyway. The All-Star Sentinels were in until the very end of the game but the Amazing Comics experiment led to so many bad feelings in an otherwise excellent community, it was a huge mistake. But, hey, I still have Bucky to remember it all by! Looking back, it probably would have been less effort just to try to make some real comics. Disclaimer: I am not the artist of any of these works. In most instances (though not all) I merely created the characters in City of Heroes. Sometimes, I directed the artist with lots of notes and other times I let them do their thing. The late 00's were a different time and not all design choices then would be the same today.

Taghuso really liked Liberta so he gifted me this piece of her after I'd been in the All-Star Sentinels of America for a while. It was always an amazing surprise to get the gift of art. Disclaimer: I am not the artist of any of these works. In most instances (though not all) I merely created the characters in City of Heroes. Sometimes, I directed the artist with lots of notes and other times I let them do their thing. The late 00's were a different time and not all design choices then would be the same today.

I remember! Satin Doll and Neowolf! I was slowly working towards this one! 🙂 Good to see you here, man!

That is an awesome piece of work! Very cool!

Thank you!

A lot of my early commissions came from taghuso thanks to things like friend prices and outright freebies. He did this one in a little more of a cartoon-style. The Chrono King is Doctor Epoch's arch-nemesis. He also *is* Doctor Epoch from about 10 years in the future when personal tragedy turned him into a villain. When I re-rolled Doctor Epoch and the Chrono King after Time Manipulation was introduced to the game, I lost the ability to Level Pact them (they were on separate accounts) so getting them back to 50 was pretty tedious. Disclaimer: I am not the artist of any of these works. In most instances (though not all) I merely created the characters in City of Heroes. Sometimes, I directed the artist with lots of notes and other times I let them do their thing. The late 00's were a different time and not all design choices then would be the same today.

Thank you very much!

Commissioning art kind of faded from my interests but the first piece I got commissioned was kind of a lark. By 2010, I was earning a ton of overtime each week so I budgeted out of that excess and reached my pinnacle of getting work done through most of that year into a bit of 2011. As I recall, around that time I had some artists ghost after payment without producing the work and a couple of commission I was not pleased with so I bowed out.

The next piece was also courtesy of taghuso and came with a little bit of backstory. A few people in our SG - the All-Star Sentinels of America - had been talking about getting a commission from an artist named Douglas Shuler who was mostly known in the CoH community at the time for producing these digital pieces that bordered on the photoreal. He was kind of expensive and getting people to organized for a team commission was a little like herding cats so by the time I got everyone on the same page, Doug had stopped responding and it fell apart, I felt kind of bad for the diehards who had committed early so I took what I would have spent on that commission and asked Tag to whip up this homage cover to the first appearance of the Justice League as a kind of thank you to the folks who has been in early and made things painless.. None of these characters are mine but they are, clockwise from the top, Astromarvel, Doctor Gorilla, Maiden Glory, Spirit Panther, and Lord Liberty. Thread Disclaimer: I am not the artist of any of these works. In most instances (though not all) I merely created the characters in City of Heroes. Sometimes, I directed the artist with lots of notes and other times I let them do their thing. The late 00's were a different time and not all design choices then would be the same today.

Part of what got me into commissioning art is that the SG I joined via Liberta (see above) had its own resident artist. I had already reached out to taghuso for a commission of my first alt in the group, the mysterious time-traveling Doctor Epoch - Grav / Kin Controller well before we had any of the Time powers. Originally, Doc had a gold cape with green lining (see right) but shortly after this commission was delivered, Tag had included Doctor Epoch on one of the SG's faux comic covers and had mistakenly colored it solid green. It looked much better so he was kind enough to do a quick re-coloring for me (see left), cementing his look until the end of the game. Taghuso came back for a bit on Everlasting but didn't stick around. He still seems to be taking commissions pretty regularly and back in these days he was fast as lightning. I once commissioned a character from him and it was done in two hours. Ah, the benefits of being pals! Thread Disclaimer: I am not the artist of any of these works. In most instances (though not all) I merely created the characters in City of Heroes. Sometimes, I directed the artist with lots of notes and other times I let them do their thing. The late 00's were a different time and not all design choices then would be the same today.

My first commission came courtesy of Randy Kintz or rantz as he was known on Deviant Art. The character is Liberta, my Broadsword / Invulnerability Scrapper back in OG CoH. Today she is a Staff Fighting / Invulnerability Brute, hoping beyond hope that a proper Greco-Roman spear gets introduced into the set. Liberta was never this busty but it was kind of Randy's style at the time. I recall I provided him a reference on a Roman Belt as the none of the belts in the game in 2007 worked very well. The bracers and arm bands were his interpretation. I'd love to have some neck jewelry like this in the game. Thread Disclaimer: I am not the artist of any of these works. In most instances (though not all) I merely created the characters in City of Heroes. Sometimes, I directed the artist with lots of notes and other times I let them do their thing. The late 00's were a different time and not all design choices then would be the same today.

I am not an artist. However, I did briefly get into commissioning art from about 2007 to 2011. While I look back at it now and feel, yeah, I certainly could have used that money for other things I really have no regrets. The commissioning community back then was pretty awesome and I met a lot of cool people. I hooked up with most artists through Deviant Art so where those accounts are still active, I will link to them. Thread Disclaimer: Again, I am not the artist of any of these works. In most instances (though not all) I merely created the characters in City of Heroes. Sometimes, I directed the artist with lots of notes and other times I let them do their thing. The late 00's were a different time and not all design choices then would be the same today.

I have a decent number of characters that get random compliments as I run through Paragon City but the Actioneer™ is never one of them. It's a shame really because I've always loved his look.

Groundhog the Dev? The one who always repeats themselves?

Never has someone so appropriately named so appropriately commented. And, hey, I'm with you - it always seemed a bit weird for something named the Spring Fling to be over by March 2nd but given that it centers around Valentine's Day, they are locked into having it on or around February 14th, no?

Should we all be Flinging some Spring right about now? Did I miss an announcement?

I touched upon that in the bottom portion but if you are going to keep animal ears with ears, there may be some folks who want both. I have a huge muscle-bound character who dons what are supposed to be plastic bunny ears from time to time so it makes sense that he would still have regular ears too. I'm sure it would make people unhappy but considering their location and with limited attachment points, they fit better in Detail 1.

Oh, wow! Only a few people know this fun fact but the Blue Weasel does occasionally work with Hero Corps! 2022 Blue Weasel B.costume

I renamed my Level 50 character Asia and released it into the wild. It was a cool name and mythologically accurate for an Oceanid but I wanted one not so linked to a continent and found something that sits a little better. Have fun!

Maybe I was an otolaryngologist in a previous life but I've been semi-passionate about the way ears are dealt with in this game going back to Live and I felt and feel like I'm alone in the wilderness. Just seeing if anyone else cares or agrees with me would be lovely at this point and would do wonders for my self-esteem. My job is ending in April and I need a boost of confidence to go sell my tired, old surly ass in a succession of job interviews. Pet Peeve. I really NEVER liked the perfect little vacuum-sealed ear shape you get when using the Full or Standard mask options. See example: I know that since our masks are a simple recoloring of certain parts of the face with no real texture and that adding texture is probably nearly impossible given the game's age and graphic limitations. This is why I think taking the covered ear look from Spectrum or Ninja or Bonehead and adding a colorable Covered option to Ears would go a long way towards selling our masks as an actual piece of cloth pulled over our heads. Forgive the rough photoshop example: So much better and since a full graphics upgrade is something out-of-reach for the game, this goes a long way towards updating the look. That all being said, inexplicably exposed ears also have a rich tradition in comics so there should be a Skin sub-option on the Human ear. Since we have skin options for the other Ear types, I'm assuming this is doable with having to reinvent the wheel. Again, forgive my hasty photoshopping. Am I a huge fan of this look? No, not really but I can see it working with many of the mask options very well. Again, it is something that that gives a boost to the character design without tearing everything down to rebuild it. A patch, yes, but a doable one. ((My other thoughts are probably more controversial so maybe I will do a Part 2 but let's start here and get some feedback. We can talk later about how the various Animal Ears should really be in Detail 1, about how there should also be a None option for Ears so that people wanting to use the various head-mounted Animal Ears as their actual ears shouldn't require them to pick a face without ears or pick a hairstyle that covers them. And I'm sure I'll hear from someone who thinks clipping their Imp ears through their Ear Muffs is the best thing ever but I believe you get more cool design choices moving all ear-covering pieces into Ears than you do keeping a character from having both Eye and Ear pieces at the same time. ))