Lightning

My earliest memories of having fun fall into three categories. 1) Being sung to by my parents, probably while bouncing on their knee. 2) Wrestling with my dad or riding on his back. Usually, while he was pretending to be a Gila Monster. 3) Drawing.

When I was very young, I used to do a thing I would call “make(ing) it out of a toy.” What I was really doing was making my art into a toy, specifically paper dolls. (I believe my fellow Headphone Bro ChuD was also present for the origin of “making it out of a toy,” but it was coined by me. Sadly, we had mostly outgrown this by the time Tim came around.) I believe the true origin of the phrase came from a Marvel cookbook that appeared in our house one day. One of my parents might know where it came from, but I have no idea. In addition to planting the seeds for my eventual comic book obsession, this book had lots of illustrations of dozens of heroes and villains. We would copy the characters out of the book for fun, practicing our drawing skills. The first ones we took scissors to were a page of four superhero cookies. These cookies were just the heads of heroes, and the only one I vividly remember was The Thing from the Fantastic Four. We drew The Thing’s face and cut it out. Voila! We made it out of a toy.

Very soon we had a collection of our own handmade action figures. While the cookbook served as inspiration, we were not familiar with the characters otherwise. We began drawing our own heroes and villains with the intent to “make them out of a toy”. My favorite things to draw were aliens, monsters, and alien monsters. Most of the monsters I drew were villains I created to challenge my very first creation: Lightning.

I’ll need to dig up an old drawing of Lightning from my parents’ house and attach it to this later, but for now I’ll describe him as best I remember. Lightning was a hero from the planet Saturn, although he appears human. Despite coming from a home so far away, he could traverse the solar system by transforming into electricity and bolting through space. He wore a yellow, skin tight bodysuit (standard issue superhero garb) with stylized lightning bolts running down the arms and legs. He had a gun that shot lighting bolts, and rockets on the back of his shoes that shot even more lightning bolts, to increase his running speed in human form. While his suit only went up to his neck, he wore a helmet with a visor covering his eyes, so only his mouth and chin were exposed, although you could see his eyes through his visor.

His helmet had jagged spikes all over it that basically just looked like Bart Simpson’s hair. Now, I’m sure that I invented Lightning before the Simpsons ever aired, so I’m sure I wasn’t inspired by Bart, but it probably helped my enjoyment of those early Simpsons episodes to see a character with hair that looked like my own hero. The helmet, with the exception of the visor, was also yellow.

Beyond living on Saturn and fighting a collection of many-eyed, many-limbed green aliens (the drawings of which always scared my grandma,) Lightning didn’t have much more of a story than that. The exception was that he had a partner. Since I spent so much of my time playing with ChuD at that age, Lightning needed a partner for when we were playing. Obviously, he was Thunder.

Thunder was a robot. He appeared to be a human superhero wearing a suit much like Lightning’s, but with clouds instead of lightning bolts. He had big, friendly eyes and the top of his head was covered in curly hair. He kind of looked like Harpo Marx. The top of his head would open, exposing a robotic, telescoping arm. From within his hollow skull he could retrieve whatever deus ex machina was required to get us out of any sticky situation. I think I sometimes drew him with a gun that shot “thunder,” but I had a hard time imagining what that meant so I would focus much more on his Swiss-army cranium.

Being kind of a bossy and unknowingly mean brother, I created Thunder to be very stupid. This ensured that Lightning always took the lead and would always have the best ideas.

Lightning only lasted a few years before being replaced with more fleshed out characters. ChuD quickly decided to design his own characters, and proved to be incredibly prolific. We created out take on the Fantastic Four: the Killer Quartet. We both came up with two of the four. I played as Vicious, with my ally Savage, and ChuD was Killer, with his ally Ooh-ooh. By now we were mostly past the “make it out of a toy” stage, instead drawing the characters as a kind of concept art that we would then role-play as we ran around outside.

Our last great character wave came when Tim started to join our make-believe hero play. My new character was Brainiac. ChuD had Animal. Tim was relegated to being given a hero specifically designed by us to fit into the dynamic already established by me and ChuD, but that’s a story for another time.

I think I’m going to revisit Lightning on this here website. Since he stems from my early childhood, perhaps Logan and Malcolm can help me flesh him out and finally start telling Lightning’s story.