Reimagining ideas

About four years ago (has it really been that long?), I started playing with ideas for what I soon dubbed the PDH (Public Domain Heroes) universe. Basically, I took a look at Golden Age comic book superheroes that fell into public domain and tried to see if I could revamp them.

So, why did I decide to play with those incredibly obscure characters most comic books fans never even heard of? Because, by that point, I read lots of non-"Big 2" superhero comic books which featured thinly disguised versions of popular characters from DC and Marvel universes. It was first few times, but somewhere along the way, it got really annoying. I remember thinking something along the lines "if you are going to rip something off, how about ripping off something we haven't already seen thousands of times?" I have always been interested in history, so I figured that I might as well use some old school comic book characters that haven't been used in decades. And when I discovered that lots of those characters were in public domain and anyone could use them any way they pleased, I was more then happy to take advantage.

I started with characters from Lev Gleason Publishing, but as the months went by, I expanded my scope to characters from other publishers. I scoured the few websites that had any information on them, read a whole bunch of scans of Golden Age stories put in all together into an enormous list of potential ideas. Over time, I took it and developed it into an extensive fictional universe that had decades of history and lots and lots of legacy heroes.

That was all fine and dandy until I realized that my PDH Universe was nothing but old school characters and people who took up their legacies. In other words, I created a world that was eternally stuck in the past, living off decades-old ideas. By that point, I was becoming very disillusioned with DC and Marvel Universes. They had very little meaningful change - just lots of continuity clutter and old ideas reused over and over again. All the new characters and ideas were lost in an ocean of characters that were older then I was - in some cases, older then my parents. I didn't want my PDH universe to be like that. I tried to inject some newness into it, but it never really worked, so I decided to shelf the concepts for the time being and move on to something else. Which I did.

Flash forward to about a year ago. I kept toying with a couple of ideas that I just couldn't get off the ground. There was something I tentatively called "Evil Corporation," a story about an entertainment company (a very thinly disguised version of Disney) that was secretly founded by superheroes that wage war against supervillains that founded a company of their own. Over time, both companies lost sight of what they were originally fighting for, but they still used super-powers to fight battles for ratings and revenues. There was an idea for a novel about a former Japanese mecha pilot, a kind of kid/teen hero that shows up in shows like Gundam and Giant Robo, trying to adjust to a very mundane life. A story about a new generation of superheroes who had no respect for popular superhero tropes such as proper costumes, code names and secret identities. I kept playing with those ideas, but, as I said, none of them really went anywhere.

Then, a couple of months ago, while riding the 'L' train to Chicago, I imagined a scenario involving a former superheroine stuck in a traffic jam caused by a mecha battle. I wrote down the initial idea and some basic notes. Because I love history, I couldn't help but try to develop her background. Before I knew it, I sketched out a superhero group she used to be part of, a gathering of heroes that was basically a collection of hero archetypes from late 80s/early 90s kid shows, the kind of stuff I grew up with. All the research I did for PDH universe was still in the back of my mind, so I couldn't help but incorporate a few Golden Age heroes and concepts into the emerging world's back story.

At some point, it hit me - if I was going to use some concepts, I might as well take the whole thing. My old public domain universe concepts would be part of it's history, but the present day would be dominated by new heroes. They had some connections to old characters, sure, but the connections were background details, and they had other influences to draw on. I even incorporated the evil corporation idea, turning it into Trenton Incorporated - an organization created by a 1960s superhero group in order to raise the next generation of heroes. The dissipate concepts became part of the greater whole.

I am not sure how much traction I would get on this before I run into another dead end. Hopefully, I won't run into it for a while. and if I do, I still other, more original ideas to develop. So, really, it's all good.

Over the next few weeks, I will post some concept sketches from the newly integrated universe (which I am calling PDH 2.0 universe for a time being), complete with lots of over-detailed explanations. Stay tuned.