Superheroes!

[Patine]

The IndieWire review of Blue Beetle (2023) is a riot.

IndieWire, 16 August 2023 - "‘Blue Beetle’ Review: At Least It’s Better than ‘Black Adam’?"

The Rock would be annoyed.

 

[EgonSpengler]

The Rock would be annoyed.

Well, I'm annoyed with The Rock, so that's only fair.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Check out this funky jam.

I was looking at what are purported to be artist's sketches of unused costume designs for Spider-Man: No Way Home, and one of them looks like an homage to Nicholas Hammond's Spidey, with the shape of the eyes and the spider on the chest.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

I'm not qutie a fan of superheroes. yet I tend to go for Ishinomori's style ones. but not much

 

[EgonSpengler]

This trailer is awesome.

 

[Caesar of Bread]

Thinking about creating a comic series with some friends. I may need some help in hero ideas.

 

[Patine]

Thinking about creating a comic series with some friends. I may need some help in hero ideas.

I have tonnes of ideas for lore, characters, in-setting reasons for powers, aliens, cosmology, etc. for a comicbook world (I statified by the '80's Marvel Super Heroes RPG by TSR with catchy named power ranks, for number-crunching purposes). But, big, big problem has ALWAYS plagued - huge one. I CAN'T DRAW!

 

[Caesar of Bread]

I have tonnes of ideas for lore, characters, in-setting reasons for powers, aliens, cosmology, etc. for a comicbook world (I statified by the '80's Marvel Super Heroes RPG by TSR with catchy named power ranks, for number-crunching purposes). But, big, big problem has ALWAYS plagued - huge one. I CAN'T DRAW!

Neither can i. But I do have some friends who can. I‘d also like to see your ideas!

 

[EgonSpengler]

Thinking about creating a comic series with some friends. I may need some help in hero ideas.

I have tonnes of ideas for lore, characters, in-setting reasons for powers, aliens, cosmology, etc. for a comicbook world (I statified by the '80's Marvel Super Heroes RPG by TSR with catchy named power ranks, for number-crunching purposes). But, big, big problem has ALWAYS plagued - huge one. I CAN'T DRAW!

Many years ago, I was the GM of a game of Champions (ttrpg) with friends, and inventing characters was always my favorite part.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Thinking back on my Champions game from back in the day. I invented a team of "Golden Age" heroes for my players to interact with, but I never ended up using the idea. I was a big fan of the Golden Age characters in both Marvel and DC, but my friends weren't.

In the history of my game, superheroes first appeared in the 1920s, during the era of Prohibition, the Jazz Age, and gangsters ruling places like New York City and Chicago (my campaign was set in the United States, obviously). I started with the irl comics eras: The Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, and the Modern Age.

Real-life comics eras:
The Golden Age, 1938-1954. Roughly from when Batman & Superman premiered to the introduction of the Comics Code Authority.
The Silver Age, basically beginning with the introduction of Barry Allen as the new Flash in Showcase Comics #4, September 1956, and then really taking off like a rocket with The Fantastic Four #1 in November 1961.
The Bronze Age is a little harder to pin down, and different people point to different things. For me, it's 1970, when Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams took over Green Lantern and teamed him up with Green Arrow, and started telling and drawing more mature stories, the most famous of which was when Roy Harper - Speedy - was revealed to be using heroin. Another milestone of the Bronze Age was the death of Gwen Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man #121 in 1973. irl, in the United States, we're basically talking about the end of the Vietnam War, the Watergate crisis, the killing spree by the Zodiac Killer in California in '68-'69, and the turn of the 1960s hippy counter-culture into something darker (the murder of a festival-goer at the Altamont Festival in 1969 is often cited as a specific turning point).
The Modern Age is usually pinned on Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985, and Batman: The Dark Knight and Watchmen in 1986.

I suppose we're still in the Modern Age today? Has there been a "post-modern age"?

Anyway, when I did my timeline of superheroes for my Champions campaign, I used the following Superhero Eras:
The Pulp Age, 1920-1940: Prohibition and the Great Depression, ending with WWII. Heroes inspired by The Shadow, The Phantom, Doc Savage, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, The Rocketeer, and the Golden Age Sandman.
The Golden Age, 1935-1955: The first "four-color" heroes, inspired by Captain America, Batman, Superman, The Invaders (Prince Namor, the original Human Torch), and The Justice Society (the Golden Age Flash, the Golden Age Green Lantern, Doctor Fate).
The Silver Age, 1960-1980. Pretty much the same as irl. Characters inspired by Fantastic Four, the Justice League, the original X-Men.
The Bronze Age, 1970-1990. Pretty much the same as irl. Characters inspired by the new X-Men. Some Frank Miller-style "street-level" vigilantes.
The Modern Age: Mid 1980s-mid 1990s, which was when my game was set. My players didn't want to be the first superheroes, they wanted to be young heroes in a world where superheroes were well-established. So there were a lot of characters from the previous two Ages, plus some people from the early '90s. I was reading Hellblazer and Static in the early '90s, so I had a John Constantine-alike and a team of teen heroes modeled on the New Teen Titans as NPCs.

You'll notice an overlap in the dates. I did that on purpose, because in each Age there were some heroes from the previous Age still active. I figured most superheroes were good for a 20-year career, give or take, so anyone who started late in one Age would still be fighting crime well into the next Age. Some hardy few would last longer, of course.

I had an idea for my players to meet a team of Golden Age heroes in the present. As I said, I was a fan of comics like The Invaders and All-Star Squadron when I was a kid, but none of my friends were, so I couldn't convince them to play a game set in the 1930s-40s. They wanted to play in the modern day. So I came up with a story that would bring an entire team of Golden Age heroes forward through time into the present, much as Marvel Comics brought Captain America into the 1960s. In my story, the Golden Age team of heroes (whose name I can't remember ) had disappeared in the mid-'50s and nobody really knew why. It turned out they'd been captured by a mega-villain and stuck in suspended-animation pods in a secret base on the far side of the Moon. Imagine if the entire Justice Society were frozen the way Steve Rogers was. So the modern-day heroes would make their way to the secret base on the Moon, find the Golden Age heroes in suspended animation, and revive them.

As I say, I never got around to using this storyline in my game, so I'm not really sure what would've happened after that. After freeing the Golden Age heroes from their prison, I suppose the next step would have been a big confrontation with the mega-villain who'd imprisoned them, with the Golden Age team teaming up with the modern heroes (my players) in a giant battle. I was thinking of when the Avengers and the Fantastic Four fought Galactus in Fantastic Four #244, June 1982. But having seen Avengers: Endgame all these years later, we can also imagine something like the Avengers, Asgardians, and Wakandans all fighting Thanos and his army. At the time, I was imagining someone like Darkseid, but I never got around to figuring exactly who or what he was, or what his nefarious plan was.

 

[Sommerswerd]

I suppose we're still in the Modern Age today? Has there been a "post-modern age"?

Definitely postmodern... everything nowadays having to do with art always seems to get classified as postmodern... we might even be to a point where we are past the postmodern and need a new term... Post-postmodern?

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Silver Screen Age.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Black Mirror Age

 

[Gori the Grey]

I mean, fourth should be iron. Just sayin'

And the one after that can be clay.

 

[Patine]

Thinking back on my Champions game from back in the day. I invented a team of "Golden Age" heroes for my players to interact with, but I never ended up using the idea. I was a big fan of the Golden Age characters in both Marvel and DC, but my friends weren't.

In the history of my game, superheroes first appeared in the 1920s, during the era of Prohibition, the Jazz Age, and gangsters ruling places like New York City and Chicago (my campaign was set in the United States, obviously). I started with the irl comics eras: The Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, and the Modern Age.

Real-life comics eras:
The Golden Age, 1938-1954. Roughly from when Batman & Superman premiered to the introduction of the Comics Code Authority.
The Silver Age, basically beginning with the introduction of Barry Allen as the new Flash in Showcase Comics #4, September 1956, and then really taking off like a rocket with The Fantastic Four #1 in November 1961.
The Bronze Age is a little harder to pin down, and different people point to different things. For me, it's 1970, when Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams took over Green Lantern and teamed him up with Green Arrow, and started telling and drawing more mature stories, the most famous of which was when Roy Harper - Speedy - was revealed to be using heroin. Another milestone of the Bronze Age was the death of Gwen Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man #121 in 1973. irl, in the United States, we're basically talking about the end of the Vietnam War, the Watergate crisis, the killing spree by the Zodiac Killer in California in '68-'69, and the turn of the 1960s hippy counter-culture into something darker (the murder of a festival-goer at the Altamont Festival in 1969 is often cited as a specific turning point).
The Modern Age is usually pinned on Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985, and Batman: The Dark Knight and Watchmen in 1986.

I suppose we're still in the Modern Age today? Has there been a "post-modern age"?

Anyway, when I did my timeline of superheroes for my Champions campaign, I used the following Superhero Eras:
The Pulp Age, 1920-1940: Prohibition and the Great Depression, ending with WWII. Heroes inspired by The Shadow, The Phantom, Doc Savage, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, The Rocketeer, and the Golden Age Sandman.
The Golden Age, 1935-1955: The first "four-color" heroes, inspired by Captain America, Batman, Superman, The Invaders (Prince Namor, the original Human Torch), and The Justice Society (the Golden Age Flash, the Golden Age Green Lantern, Doctor Fate).
The Silver Age, 1960-1980. Pretty much the same as irl. Characters inspired by Fantastic Four, the Justice League, the original X-Men.
The Bronze Age, 1970-1990. Pretty much the same as irl. Characters inspired by the new X-Men. Some Frank Miller-style "street-level" vigilantes.
The Modern Age: Mid 1980s-mid 1990s, which was when my game was set. My players didn't want to be the first superheroes, they wanted to be young heroes in a world where superheroes were well-established. So there were a lot of characters from the previous two Ages, plus some people from the early '90s. I was reading Hellblazer and Static in the early '90s, so I had a John Constantine-alike and a team of teen heroes modeled on the New Teen Titans as NPCs.

You'll notice an overlap in the dates. I did that on purpose, because in each Age there were some heroes from the previous Age still active. I figured most superheroes were good for a 20-year career, give or take, so anyone who started late in one Age would still be fighting crime well into the next Age. Some hardy few would last longer, of course.

I had an idea for my players to meet a team of Golden Age heroes in the present. As I said, I was a fan of comics like The Invaders and All-Star Squadron when I was a kid, but none of my friends were, so I couldn't convince them to play a game set in the 1930s-40s. They wanted to play in the modern day. So I came up with a story that would bring an entire team of Golden Age heroes forward through time into the present, much as Marvel Comics brought Captain America into the 1960s. In my story, the Golden Age team of heroes (whose name I can't remember ) had disappeared in the mid-'50s and nobody really knew why. It turned out they'd been captured by a mega-villain and stuck in suspended-animation pods in a secret base on the far side of the Moon. Imagine if the entire Justice Society were frozen the way Steve Rogers was. So the modern-day heroes would make their way to the secret base on the Moon, find the Golden Age heroes in suspended animation, and revive them.

As I say, I never got around to using this storyline in my game, so I'm not really sure what would've happened after that. After freeing the Golden Age heroes from their prison, I suppose the next step would have been a big confrontation with the mega-villain who'd imprisoned them, with the Golden Age team teaming up with the modern heroes (my players) in a giant battle. I was thinking of when the Avengers and the Fantastic Four fought Galactus in Fantastic Four #244, June 1982. But having seen Avengers: Endgame all these years later, we can also imagine something like the Avengers, Asgardians, and Wakandans all fighting Thanos and his army. At the time, I was imagining someone like Darkseid, but I never got around to figuring exactly who or what he was, or what his nefarious plan was.

The Golden Age, and a good part of the Silver Age, interesting had a LOT of competing companies to Marvel and DC in that genre (a genre which Archie Comics and a few others didn't fti into, nor did comics, at the time, interestingly enough, published, or liscenced by, Disney or Warner Brothers, which back then, only made comicbooks around those two companies' iconic cartoon short characters). Many of the best-selling and most-popular of these other companiies' characters were bought-up as IC's and TM's by Marvel and DC, before said competing companes failed and died, before the end of the Silver Age.

In the, "Bronze Age," and going into the Modern Age, a new generation of competition in the genre proper came along, but they sought to differentiate themselves much more in lore, theme, tenor, and mood from Marvel and DC than the Golden and Silver Age competitors had. Malibu, Image, and Dark Horse Comics were good examples. At this point, Marvel and DC showed no interest in buying their characters and properties as these companies died, and many of them have unclear and uncertain ownership of their intellectual rights.

And, then, of course, there were (and still are), "Indy," comics, defined by not being sanctioned by the CCA, and thus not having it's stamp of approval on the upper-right corner on the cellaphane, due to violating one or more CCA rules in their content, but doing so deliberately, and accepting more limited sales, advertising, and places that would sell them, for a certain, "edglelord," and rebellious prestige and mystique in a niche market. The Watchmen, Spawn, and Preacher, are good examples series within this sub-genre, and the Boyz are a latter-day harkening to that feel and motif. DC created the Vertigo Imprint as a, "separated subsidiary," and distinct from the lore and storyboards of the mainstream DC Universe, specifically to tap this market, and the Morpheus, Blade, Deadpool, and Punisher series in later Marvel (all four titular characters of whom first appeared, more or less antagonistically, in a different issue of a Spider-Man comic, each) definitely had strong vibes of this market. The CCA became a dead letter in the early 2000's, but the sub-genre label is still used.

 

[Caesar of Bread]

Thinking back on my Champions game from back in the day. I invented a team of "Golden Age" heroes for my players to interact with, but I never ended up using the idea. I was a big fan of the Golden Age characters in both Marvel and DC, but my friends weren't.

In the history of my game, superheroes first appeared in the 1920s, during the era of Prohibition, the Jazz Age, and gangsters ruling places like New York City and Chicago (my campaign was set in the United States, obviously). I started with the irl comics eras: The Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, and the Modern Age.

Real-life comics eras:
The Golden Age, 1938-1954. Roughly from when Batman & Superman premiered to the introduction of the Comics Code Authority.
The Silver Age, basically beginning with the introduction of Barry Allen as the new Flash in Showcase Comics #4, September 1956, and then really taking off like a rocket with The Fantastic Four #1 in November 1961.
The Bronze Age is a little harder to pin down, and different people point to different things. For me, it's 1970, when Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams took over Green Lantern and teamed him up with Green Arrow, and started telling and drawing more mature stories, the most famous of which was when Roy Harper - Speedy - was revealed to be using heroin. Another milestone of the Bronze Age was the death of Gwen Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man #121 in 1973. irl, in the United States, we're basically talking about the end of the Vietnam War, the Watergate crisis, the killing spree by the Zodiac Killer in California in '68-'69, and the turn of the 1960s hippy counter-culture into something darker (the murder of a festival-goer at the Altamont Festival in 1969 is often cited as a specific turning point).
The Modern Age is usually pinned on Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985, and Batman: The Dark Knight and Watchmen in 1986.

I suppose we're still in the Modern Age today? Has there been a "post-modern age"?

Anyway, when I did my timeline of superheroes for my Champions campaign, I used the following Superhero Eras:
The Pulp Age, 1920-1940: Prohibition and the Great Depression, ending with WWII. Heroes inspired by The Shadow, The Phantom, Doc Savage, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, The Rocketeer, and the Golden Age Sandman.
The Golden Age, 1935-1955: The first "four-color" heroes, inspired by Captain America, Batman, Superman, The Invaders (Prince Namor, the original Human Torch), and The Justice Society (the Golden Age Flash, the Golden Age Green Lantern, Doctor Fate).
The Silver Age, 1960-1980. Pretty much the same as irl. Characters inspired by Fantastic Four, the Justice League, the original X-Men.
The Bronze Age, 1970-1990. Pretty much the same as irl. Characters inspired by the new X-Men. Some Frank Miller-style "street-level" vigilantes.
The Modern Age: Mid 1980s-mid 1990s, which was when my game was set. My players didn't want to be the first superheroes, they wanted to be young heroes in a world where superheroes were well-established. So there were a lot of characters from the previous two Ages, plus some people from the early '90s. I was reading Hellblazer and Static in the early '90s, so I had a John Constantine-alike and a team of teen heroes modeled on the New Teen Titans as NPCs.

You'll notice an overlap in the dates. I did that on purpose, because in each Age there were some heroes from the previous Age still active. I figured most superheroes were good for a 20-year career, give or take, so anyone who started late in one Age would still be fighting crime well into the next Age. Some hardy few would last longer, of course.

I had an idea for my players to meet a team of Golden Age heroes in the present. As I said, I was a fan of comics like The Invaders and All-Star Squadron when I was a kid, but none of my friends were, so I couldn't convince them to play a game set in the 1930s-40s. They wanted to play in the modern day. So I came up with a story that would bring an entire team of Golden Age heroes forward through time into the present, much as Marvel Comics brought Captain America into the 1960s. In my story, the Golden Age team of heroes (whose name I can't remember ) had disappeared in the mid-'50s and nobody really knew why. It turned out they'd been captured by a mega-villain and stuck in suspended-animation pods in a secret base on the far side of the Moon. Imagine if the entire Justice Society were frozen the way Steve Rogers was. So the modern-day heroes would make their way to the secret base on the Moon, find the Golden Age heroes in suspended animation, and revive them.

As I say, I never got around to using this storyline in my game, so I'm not really sure what would've happened after that. After freeing the Golden Age heroes from their prison, I suppose the next step would have been a big confrontation with the mega-villain who'd imprisoned them, with the Golden Age team teaming up with the modern heroes (my players) in a giant battle. I was thinking of when the Avengers and the Fantastic Four fought Galactus in Fantastic Four #244, June 1982. But having seen Avengers: Endgame all these years later, we can also imagine something like the Avengers, Asgardians, and Wakandans all fighting Thanos and his army. At the time, I was imagining someone like Darkseid, but I never got around to figuring exactly who or what he was, or what his nefarious plan was.

Great idea! Can I use it for a possible campaign?

 

[EgonSpengler]

And, then, of course, there were (and still are), "Indy," comics, defined by not being sanctioned by the CCA, and thus not having it's stamp of approval on the upper-right corner on the cellaphane, due to violating one or more CCA rules in their content, but doing so deliberately, and accepting more limited sales, advertising, and places that would sell them, for a certain, "edglelord," and rebellious prestige and mystique in a niche market. The Watchmen, Spawn, and Preacher, are good examples series within this sub-genre, and the Boyz are a latter-day harkening to that feel and motif. DC created the Vertigo Imprint as a, "separated subsidiary," and distinct from the lore and storyboards of the mainstream DC Universe, specifically to tap this market, and the Morpheus, Blade, Deadpool, and Punisher series in later Marvel (all four titular characters of whom first appeared, more or less antagonistically, in a different issue of a Spider-Man comic, each) definitely had strong vibes of this market. The CCA became a dead letter in the early 2000's, but the sub-genre label is still used.

A couple of my favorite publishers back in the day were Comico (The Elementals; Mage: The Hero Discovered; Grendel; Macross Saga) and First Comics (American Flagg; Jon Sable, Freelance; Lone Wolf & Cub English-language reprints). There was a very short-lived publisher called Capital Comics that did Nexus, Badger and Whisper, which were picked up by First when Capital shut down. Image of course was the one that made the biggest strides towards making the Big Two publishers a Big Three.

Great idea! Can I use it for a possible campaign?

Sure, yeah.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Trying to remember the members of my Golden Age group... (I'd prefer that nobody steal any of these outright, but maybe something rings a bell or spurs another idea.)

Agent Midnight. An ambulance driver and nurse in the First World War, somehow got powers of super-regeneration, like Wolverine or Deadpool. She was one of the first 'superheroes' of the Pulp Hero Era, fighting gangsters, anarchists, mad scientists, and evil Lovecraftian sorcerers throughout the 1920s and '30s. Since the game was set in the 1990s, I decided that she was still alive, age ~100, having aged about 20 years in 80 years (so she looked about 40). She would have been my players' entry-point into the story about the Golden Age team of heroes frozen in suspended animation. She had escaped the trap set by the mega-villain, and because of her regeneration powers, she was still around 45 years later. She looked a bit like Will Eisner's The Spirit, with a dark blue fedora, suit, gloves and mask. When I was GMing tabletop games, I frequently cast my NPCs with Hollywood actors, as if they were going to be in a movie or tv series. Having just seen The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996, and still one of my favorite action movies, if you haven't seen it), I decided that Agent Midnight would be played by Geena Davis. A League of Their Own - still one of my favorite movies - was only a few years before, so of course I still had the image of Davis with the 1940s hair and makeup and the WWII pinup-girl looks (although she was blonde in that movie; Agent Midnight is a brunette and I think Davis usually is, too).

The Crimson Shroud. Another Pulp Era hero. He was a newspaper reporter who used mysterious drugs to gain a variety of temporary super-powers. He wore a grey hat and trenchcoat and a red full-face mask. A little bit of The Question, a little bit of Hourman. Also a bit of Ultra-Boy from the Legion of Super-Heroes, who had a variety of super-powers but could only use one of them at a time.

The Revenant. Your classic 'crusading assistant district attorney' of the gangster era of the 1930s, who ran afoul of a powerful mobster and was left for dead in a shallow grave. I always liked Harvey Dent, and wanted to make him into a kind of tragic hero instead of a villain. I had also seen Darkman (1990) and The Crow (1994) relatively recently. He had a variety of psionic powers: He could dim the lights in a room, disappear around corners*, make people hear voices, or make people feel fear or feel injuries that weren't really there. Basically terrorize people. He was a little bit The Shadow and a little bit The Spectre (but not nearly that powerful). He was also unusually strong and tough, enough so he could do things like jump off a 5-story roof or take a punch from a goon and laugh it off.

* (Basically, he could teleport, but he had to break line-of-sight to do it. So a bad guy could be chasing him, turn a corner, and he's gone. Or you turn one way and he's gone, and then you turn the other way and he's suddenly right there. Or a big truck drives past and after it goes by he's just gone, but then *poof* he's behind you. He could even go inside a closet or one of those old-fashioned phone booths and vanish into thin air, and you just hear strange voices whispering on the wind. That sort of thing. Even his teammates think he's creepy.)

Spellbinder. A mousy London museum curator puts on a magical Celtic torc and is temporarily possessed by the spirit of a 2,000-year-old witch and punches Nazis. A Doctor Fate rip, but not quite so powerful. Also inspired by Firestorm, with the young host and the older disembodied spirit guiding them.

Starshield. A WWII fighter pilot encounters an alien ship, gets arm-bands and a belt "of sufficiently advanced technology..." and punches Nazis. Light powers, forcefields, flight, energy bolts, etc. A blend of the Golden Age Green Lantern and the Golden Age Starman.

Blue Bolt. Track & field star joins the army, enters a secret German laboratory with his infantry unit, and suffers near-fatal injuries in a mysterious explosion that kills everyone else. Gets super-speed and punches Nazis. I gave him a blue costume, but with speedsters leaving trails of electricity in movies and tv shows these days, I might give him some kind of visual effect that happens to be blue. Does A-Train leave a blue trail in The Boys? I can't remember. His costume is blue, at any rate.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, Blue Bolt is a good example of why you ought to Google character names. There actually was a Blue Bolt in the comics. Pretty obscure, though. He was created by Joe Simon, who also created a certain Star-Spangled Man who punched Nazis in WWII. It must be hard to come up with character names, with so many of them out there already. I guess it's inevitable you'd come up with one that's been used before.

In the interest of not having a total sausage-party (all of the players in my gaming group were guys ), either Spellbinder or Starshield (or maybe both of them) probably would have been a woman. Starshield would have been a WASP, in that case. I ended up making Spellbinder an American only because I couldn't imagine doing a fake English accent every time he/she said anything, but I wanted him/her to be British. I think most of them could be just about any ethnicity. It might be interesting if Starshield was one of the 332nd Fighter Group (aka The Tuskegee Airmen), or Blue Bolt was one of the 442nd (the Japanese-American "Nisei Regiment").

I wanted to include a character who was an homage to The Rocketeer (1991 - I just saw it again recently, and it holds up), but I don't remember if I came up with anything. I also wanted to include a character who was a British spy, either in the SOE or at Bletchley Park. That would be another good place to put a woman into the group, and also the "smart cookie" character archetype, the one who cracks codes and solves puzzles. If anyone's seen The Bletchely Circle (2012), imagine if Susan got hold of Cliff Secord's rocket-pack and helmet, and punched Nazis. Okay, I'm just riffing now...

 

[Arakhor]

I'm spotting a theme with the "... and punches Nazis" bit.

 

[Patine]

I'm spotting a theme with the "... and punches Nazis" bit.

Somehow, Bolsheviks don't get punched - as often...