The supporting characters and villains of the story

The Supporting Characters

Mamadou Mbodj

The Senegalese pyrokinetic who works as a cook for a Toronto restaurant, he is another superpowered civilian like Patricia Kyenge. If because it’s tiring seeing civilians becoming superheroes upon getting powers that it’s about time that some of them remain civilians, especially if they have no inclination to fight yet aren’t outright villains either. As Patricia Kyenge uses her restorative powers in nursing, then Mamadou could use his fire powers for cooking. He cooks almost anything and everything, but it’s clear that Jean-Louis often orders meat and John with anything vegan.

Let’s not forget that Jean-Louis also knows how to cook, but as usual he tends to cook meat using lasers to burn wood and meat with. That he’s an avid hunter in his spare time says a lot about his food preferences, so much so if he were to go to Mamadou’s restaurant he’s going to order meat. If John were to go to his restaurant, he’ll always order vegetarian and vegan meals. To the latter’s credit involving his preference for vegan meals (when there are any at all), Mamadou knows how to cook tofu and any tofu-based meal. So you have tofu slices, soy patties and soy hotdogs.

Because there are Jojo references and inspirations here, so Mamadou Mbodj could be construed as the game or story’s own version of Muhammad Avdol and has the same powers. While Muhammad Avdol could be construed as Nubian given his features, Mamadou is most definitely Wolof and Senegalese. He came all the way from Dakar and went to Canada for better job opportunities, sort of like the other immigrant characters here. Maurice Lù has reasons to work for the Canadian police force, so does Mamadou when you consider this.

Better pay, better salaries. Some people will always go elsewhere for safety, better job opportunities and education, these two are pretty much no different from each other in some regards. Guilherme Nagamura came here for better education, so his family has its own reason for migrating to Canada. Mamadou Mbodj has had job experience in Senegal, but it’s only in Canada that he needed more money to support himself and his family. So he brought along his whole family along with him, so that they wouldn’t feel too left out by him.

Elaine Szapiro-Zelensky

John’s mother who is supportive of his music career but knows and realises he can’t make much money in Goth and punk rock, so she’s aware of that he works as a superhero/forensic psychiatrist most of the time instead. She’s also supportive of his decision to become vegan, despite his electrical powers being useful for fur farms, much like her husband and his father Randy. When it comes to the subject of Jewish mothers in fiction and the like, whilst not all of them run into stereotypes (Rugrats’s Didi Pickles doesn’t run into it much, as far as I recall) but it is hard to make a mother character Jewish.

That’s without swinging into either extreme that it’s best to treat a mother character who happens to be Jewish a person first, so Elaine Szapiro is actually supportive and encouraging of her son. But she’s also aware of the career choices he had to abide by when submitting to his superior by a few years (Jean-Louis Lumiere), since he’s not too approving of his desire to be in a Goth punk band as he knows John wouldn’t make much money there. Elaine has known John as a child and has eagerly supported his ambitions to become a musician, going so far to buy him a piano and a guitar for him to practise.

Randy too supports his son’s desire to become a musician, so both of them have him get classically trained. They’re both fine with his tastes in music upon realising that Johnny isn’t harming anybody whenever he plays and enjoys punk music, though they were initially shocked as they know he was into classical music before. Then again I come from a family of musicians and music lovers, I actually listen to more music than I read comics or fiction in general. One of my uncles enjoys classical and punk, I listened to Goth bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Sisters of Mercy.

The thing with both Elaine and John seems reminiscent of Felicity Smoak and Donna Smoak in Arrow, except that Felicity was written by somebody who’s not a fan of actual Goth music. Somebody like Kai Decadence pointed out that not only are a lot of Goth characters female, but also because they’re strangely not that into Goth music themselves. It’s like somebody just liked the look but has no real interest in the music and bands themselves, which explains why they’re the way they are. A male Jewish Goth with a doting, supportive mum is a sure antidote to those anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Jemima Szary

I considered calling her Jennifer Szary as well as Jennifer Shore and it’s kind of hard finding a surname that’s reminiscent of the character she’s based on (Antonia Fraser’s Jemima Shore) without being the name of a real-life person, sometimes you have to give a character a more unique name as to avoid being confused with a real-life individual. Maybe not necessarily unique but distinctive enough to not infringe on somebody else’s name, so Jemima Szary stuck as it’s reminiscent of Antonia Fraser’s protagonist. She’s even something of an investigative journalist, though she has no powers to speak of (mind you the superheroes in this story are all involved in law enforcement themselves).

She pretty much resembles her in other ways like the reddish blond hair, love of cats (which she shares with a few other characters) and her tendency towards curiosity. However some aspects of Jemima Shore, the character which she is based on, are given to Jean-Louis Lumiere instead. Much like her, Jean-Louis lost both of his parents (which is why he lived with his uncle for a time being) and went to a school which its faith is the opposite of the one he is raised in. Jemima Shore is Protestant but went to a Catholic school, Jean-Louis is Catholic but went to a Protestant school. Even their friends and classmates went onto become people of the cloth, then getting murdered along the way.

Also Jean-Louis’s dog is named Minuit, just as Jemima Shore’s cat is named Midnight. Jemima Szary also likes dogs, but some of it’s a Nancy Drew influence as both have dogs named Togo. Again she’s not a complete carbon copy of Jemima Shore, this will change a little further if I were to get influenced by other things (including nonfiction).

Her boyfriend is Officer Maurice Lù (formerly Mauricio Locsin), who is the son of a Chinese immigrant and a Filipina woman. She initially dated John Zelensky but got intimidated by both his interest in Goth and punk music and also by his fashion sense, given he habitually dresses in black both at work and in his spare time. But dating other women is a persistent problem for Johnny, if because there’s not a lot of women who are into the things he’s into. Nor are they willing to date a man who dresses the way he does, which is intimidating and kind of hard to pull off. Such is the lack of a male equivalent to the ‘Goth Girlfriend’ meme.

(Johnny would eventually date a Malaysian-Canadian punk rock woman, much to his joy and pride when that came.)

Maurice and Jemima get along real easily, often hanging out at each other’s houses. She’s also good friends with Fabrice Tientcheu and his sister, Yvette (whom Jean-Louis dates). Jemima tends to be caring and in for good causes, though sometimes she can be misinformed or naive about other matters. More often than not she gets scolded often by people like Akosamesew Kanewopasikot if she starts taking about indigenous problems, she has been threatened with violence by Nootaikok Alakannuark (who, by the way, manipulates the cold and ice). Nootaikok tends to have quite a short temper, just like Jojo’s Ghiaccio and pretty much where much of his powers and attitude come from.

Yvette Tientcheu

The twin sister of Fabrice and she pretty much has no powers to speak of, she’s Jean-Louis’s girlfriend and since Jean-Louis is based on David Bowie (to some extent) so logically Yvette is his Iman. Iman being Bowie’s second wife after Angela Bowie, she’s the one whom he had a daughter with. This would be pretty controversial for some people, gamers and readers alike if this game ever gets a webcomic tie-in, but the thing here is that David Bowie is no stranger to dating black women himself. Not that he fetishises black women, he probably and really doesn’t.

But that he has dated Slash/Saul Hudson’s mother and then Iman, before marrying her eventually, shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who would be drawn to Jean-Louis because he is kind of based on David Bowie himself. Jean-Louis even dresses like David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust days, though he’s not exactly like Bowie in other regards. But because he resembles David Bowie that it’s natural Yvette will be his Iman, the second woman Bowie married after divorcing Angie. People who aren’t David Bowie fans wouldn’t get this.

Yvette is also based on PD James’s Emma Lavenham, again like Jemima Szary, she’s not exactly based on her but enough to be comparable and traceable. As you see, Yvette works as a professor of literature. She had just recently moved to Ottawa to be with her brother, since she misses him real badly back in Cameroon. She has studied literature before and has published a book of poetry, if there’s anything that draws Jean-Louis to her isn’t just that she’s into sewing and reading books. In fact, what drew him to her is that she has rather good taste in books, since she herself doesn’t seem too fond of reading fiction by the way.

She tends to read up on things like animals, fashion, geography, astronomy (something she shares with her brother), football and even oceanography. Some of the things she’s interested in reading are the things he’s also into, so they clicked each other immediately and began dating. Another thing that impresses him about her is that she’s very talented at sewing, that she moved to Canada not just to be with her brother but also to sell clothes there. She even has an online shop, that Jean-Louis feels she’s reminiscent of his late mother is one of the things that drew him to her. It helps that she’s rather compassionate and willing to compromise to serve others.

Margaret ‘Greta’ Mirren

One of Jean-Louis’s girlfriends before dating Yvette, Greta Mirren could be construed as his Angela Bowie if you get my catch. An aspiring actress and a total theatre nerd, she harbours ambitions to appear in a successful television series. Jean-Louis and Greta have dated each other for some time, though he never seems to be interested in television and film as much as she does. Likewise, Greta has complained about his hobby of hunting when he has the time for it, wondering why the dreamboat she ended up dating is a macho man who has little to no interest in theatre.

To make matters worse, she has cheated on him with Jonathan Bindon. Yes, another David Bowie reference. John Bindon is one of the men Angela Bowie had a dalliance with, despite being Mrs David Robert Jones in the 1970s. Jean-Louis eventually moved on from her, realising he doesn’t have much in common with her. To those who are real David Bowie fans, Angela and David grew further apart over the years. They had a connection enough to bother raising Duncan Jones for as long as they had, but not so much that they eventually broke up and divorced each other.

Their relationship at the time would be now called ‘sotsukon’ by the Japanese, or graduation from marriage where they grow further apart despite being legally married and together for each to some extent when it comes to raising children. Comes to think of it this way, AJ McLean and his ex-wife also did sotsukon for some time too. Growing apart for some reason, then it all falls apart as time passes. In the case with a number of Japanese people who do these, divorce would be too costly so simply living apart is a doable compromise. This was probably the case with Angela and David.

Well in Jean-Louis’s case he pretty much lost interest in her, if because he doesn’t have the time to attend her theatrical performances on top of his love of hunting. While Greta was attracted to Jean-Louis because he is intelligent and cultured, or so it appeared to be in the early days but he never was into theatre. He doesn’t understand musicals, he liked Quebecois folk music more.

Patricia ‘Trish’ Kyenge

Fabrice’s girlfriend who works in nursing and consequently shares his interest in cats, despite looking like the Diamond is Unbreakable version of Josuke Higashikata and having his power (restoring things back to normal), she is also based on Trish Una in a roundabout sort of way. Her stand Spice Girl is also based on cats, though it’s not very obvious at first. It does manifest itself whenever the stand leaves claw marks on something, which is a giveaway of the animal that it is based on. Then again Fabrice shares her interest so this is one way both of them are inspired by her, her cat is named Victoria (as in Victoria Beckham, AKA Posh Spice). Fabrice’s cat is named David, as in David Beckham.

Not to mention there is a shortage of superpowered civilians, given not everybody who has superpowers necessarily goes on to become either a crimefighter or a criminal. It could’ve been brought up before in some stories, though not very often even if it’s possible. A superpowered character could still be useful in some way and in Trish’s case, she even works in nursing and uses her power to help heal others. If a non-powered character can prove themselves to be capable fighters, then a superpowered character could still be useful in another way. Trish is one of those and she needn’t to be in law enforcement to save people.

I’m on the fence on whether to give Jemima powers or not, I don’t want it to be really showy and if I did, it would be more in the lines of Yasuho Hirose in that her power is practically like a GPS device. Good for investigative journalism and that’s it, one might wonder why nobody (to my knowledge) ever bothered making Spider-Man use his Spidey-Sense to aid himself in journalism is strange. Even stranger still is how nobody bothered writing stories where you have characters making silk but for the purpose of weaving, sewing and cutting fabrics with.

That’s really what they do with silk in most cases and situations, they use to turn into clothing as it is in places like China for years. As if these writers at the very least mostly read superhero comics and not anything else, not that they’re autistic but that they’re not that well-read enough to cook up stories where there are other practical uses for superpowers like these. Some like radar sense may not easily lend itself to showy fights at times, so much so that it could be useful for investigation and journalism. Though you really need to read up on or do something else to come up with something else.

Mary Stilfox

An older female surgeon and another superpowered civilian who neither indulges in criminal activity nor is she into law enforcement, just like Aya Tsuji (via her stand Cinderella) she has the ability to generate implants to replace organs with. Comes to think of this way, this very power’s well-suited for plastic surgery. Not just for saving one’s life when they have a serious medical condition or injury, but also if the client/patient seeks cosmetic surgery. This makes her a very in-demand surgeon and one who also earns a lot for it, which makes you wonder if some Jojo stand users have powers convenient or perfect for medicine.

Especially the Diamond is Unbreakable version of Josuke Higashikata and Aya Tsuji, I’m certain Hirohiko Araki learnt something about medicine later on when writing the Jojolion stories as they have doctors and nurses, possibly earlier with the Golden Wind stories but it’s something he himself never considered. Even if he had the audacity to remake a character like Yoshikage Kira into a doctor, that logically he should’ve turned Aya Tsuji into a surgeon since her stand is perfect for cosmetic surgery if she were to remain in-character. I still think it involves having to read up on something to do something with powers, especially if the character is not a combatant at all.

This is something many superhero stories are prone to where much of it involves characters using their powers a lot in combat, even if nonpowered characters also get in the act themselves that it’s fair some characters who get powers ought to remain ordinary civilians. Albeit those who find their true callings elsewhere, sort of like how both Mary and Patricia found theirs in medicine. It’s something that’s rarely if ever brought up in fiction, even if it’s perfectly possible to come up with situations like that. If only people read more about something, they could get more from such powers in a way combat doesn’t.

Being older than Patricia Kyenge and also having two adult children herself, she’s like a mother figure to her advising her what to do when working with patients and on the operating table. Just as Patricia uses her restorative power to heal patients with, Mary Stilfox uses her powers to create implants for those missing a limb or organ due to injuries and stuff. In fact she even uses the same powers for those seeking cosmetic surgery, such as the one woman who sought breast augmentation that she had to give her the organs she wanted. She’s also married to Richard Stilfox and both of them moved from Scotland to Canada.

Beyhan Kocabeyler

Another character named after the wife of a musician but this time he’s much lesser known than David Bowie is, she’s named after singer Peter Murphy’s wife Beyhan though her surname belongs to another Turkish luminary altogether. She is a very skilled dancer, well-versed in waltz and ballet. Beyhan and her family moved to Toronto when she was younger, perhaps somewhere in her teens when this happened. She pretty much attended the same schools as Jean-Louis and Akosamesew did, in fact she was their classmate in high school.

Well in most classes that is and she shared ballet class with Jean-Louis’s and Akosamesew’s future colleague at the police force, the Brazilian immigrant Guilherme Nagamura. Although they remain friends to this day, they went their own separate ways. Beyhan went out to become a professional dancer, Guilherme became a police officer and a capoeirista to boot. It was Beyhan who got him into doing ballet together with her, at the time he was heavy into football/soccer like Jean-Louis. He wasn’t and still isn’t a skilled martial artist on par with Akosamesew.

He does make it up for greater acrobatics and gracefulness in doing so, thanks to Beyhan being his gateway drug to ballet. I could pretty much upgrade these two’s relationship with one another to dating proper, if I were to go the extra mile in writing their relationship together. These two are pretty inseparable whenever Guilherme goes off-duty, Guilherme will do anything to attend her dance performances and doesn’t want to miss it in any way.

Beyhan also has other things in common with Guilherme, this includes a love of opera and fine dining, Turkish cuisine (she introduced him to it) and light orchestral music. Guilherme in turn introduced her to bossa nova, samba and Brazilian cuisine, though he’s not as good at cooking as she is. There are also other ways Beyhan isn’t a completely female version of him: she is also into badminton, solving puzzles, knitting and soy milk. Guilherme’s pastimes include stamp collecting, playing football with some of his colleagues and camping.

Melanie Crusoe

Graham’s girlfriend who’s increasingly concerned over his habit of exploding people to death, she was initially attracted to him because he seemed like the most attractive person she’s ever met. To her, he has it all. Looks, intelligence and money. While Graham Knightley’s based on Yoshikage Kira, he’s also a dig at some romance novels’ habit of incorporating or depicting billionaires as love interests so this makes Melanie Crusoe a dig at the heroines who desire those heroes.

I really don’t read romance novels but I get the impression or feeling why they’re so commonplace, despite even some romance readers’ apprehension to it, is really the thrill of the unattainable. Why bother going after somebody who’s just financially stable, when you can have somebody who has far more than they do? In the case with somebody like Justine Wilson, she was married to a future billionaire. Unfortunately it didn’t go as expected (well, the way she saw things), since Elon Musk seemed to like blonds more.

Graham Knightley might have the tall, dark and handsome looks going on for him (same with Anatoly), but he’s not really a good person given his habit of killing people by exploding them with Melanie not noticing it until now. She’s no saint but she’s definitely not a bad person either, as much as she pretty much has the misfortune of dating a serial killer whom she grew to distrust. Seems like marrying a billionaire doesn’t always guarantee happiness, if Mackenzie Scott’s divorce from Jeff Bezos is any indication. The same goes for Justine Wilson towards Elon Musk, as I said before in this section.

Alice Buquid

Maurice’s younger maternal cousin, she has the ability to make animated origami out of almost anything including high-tech devices. These creations in turn have the ability to disorient people, making them unable to recognise faces, induce confusion and exaggerate the appearances of something. She’s pretty much in her mid-twenties, closer in age to John Zelensky though she doesn’t like his taste in music either. She visited Canada to see her older cousin again, though she admits to finding his adopted home strange. She’s never seen animals like bears and raccoons before, so she’s scared of them.

She tends to see him as an older brother, given they were very close to each other as kids. One of their favourite hobbies while growing up together was playing hide and seek, Alice misses him a lot and personally wants to move to Canada to be closer to him once more. But she also realises she doesn’t make much money to be able to move there in any way she likes, mostly because she spends half of her well-earned money on supporting her older sister, who’s now a single mother doting on two boys. Her occupation’s that of a seamstress, selling Filipiniana and hanfu for a living.

She did make some friends during her short time in Canada, most notably Jemima Szary and Patricia Kyenge though she’s also friendly to Jean-Louis but mostly when it comes to getting rid of rats. As I said before about her not befriending John immediately is that they don’t share similar tastes in music, I’d go on saying that she likes listening to OPM and Philippine folk music more. You could say that she tends to have very non-western tastes, right down to her musical and sartorial preferences but I’m pretty much projecting myself here so.

I actually have a habit of sewing and selling hanyuansu clothing, that’s non-hanfu clothing with hanfu techniques and listening to OPM these days. If because due to Radio Disney, I got overdosed on western music. Radio Disney’s still a thing in Latin America, by the way. But listening to more non-western music is something I actually yearned for, before fulfilling this with another Philippine radio station. Not to mention it’s actually not uncommon for authors to base characters after themselves and people they personally know, or at least things that happened to them before so.

Christine Skroce

She is somewhat shorter than the other women, fat and green-eyed with dark brown hair. She likes reading books but her taste, well the way Jean-Louis sees this, leaves much to be desired. She not only reads erotica a lot but also has crushes on celebrities, especially those she sees in sexually explicit programmes. She tried dating Jean-Louis Lumiere but he pretty much friendzoned her immediately, she’d concede that nobody are out there to date her in any way she likes. She tends to be something of an outspoken feminist, but contrary to the stereotype she owns dogs.

She pretty much works as a forensic blood analyst, just as Fabrice is the forensic chemist, despite her rather poor taste in books. Christine tends to live alone, entirely on her own, despite having some friends and family. She had bouts of bulimia before, though she’s put on a lot of weight recently. Thus she is critical of diet culture, despite her efforts at exercising and eating right, she has participated in fat acceptance rallies and still does to this day. While she has traits from one blogger that I know of, she is also my version of Patty Spivot.

I tend to see Patty Spivot as fat and with rather unsophisticated tastes in books, despite her occupation and greater education, a kind of striking contrast to the usual portrayal and perception of her. Unsurprisingly, Christine Skroce has the same occupation as her. Like I said before about Patty Spivot, I really don’t see her as ridiculously attractive. Nor is she incredibly charismatic, so the Arrowverse of Patty Spivot isn’t and will never be my Patty Spivot. (Oddly enough, I barely read comics myself.) But even then it seems with Patty Spivot, some writers portray her as an alternative to Iris West.

Rather than making her into her own character, equidistant to both Barry Alley and Iris West. She’s not particularly intrepid, she doesn’t share Barry’s taste in comics and he with romance novels and erotica. With Christina Skroce though her work is valuable to her colleagues, she’s unable to form a relationship with Jean-Louis whom she has a crush on. She’s unable to form relationships with any other man, not helped by her unwillingness to compromise when it comes to some matters.

Coumba Mbodj

She is Mamadou’s wife and she’s a veterinarian, she and their daughters (Fanta and Aminata) came to Canada to accompany him. Just so he can have company and a bit of home to keep him from being homesick, she likes looking after sick and injured animals that it has become a career for her as she grew up. Even in Toronto, she does the same thing. Sometimes if an animal’s really injured, she calls upon Patricia Kyenge to heal it right away. She may not have powers, but she’s a very supportive wife. She’s her husband’s biggest cheerleader, always by his side whenever he’s feeling down.

In addition to being a good friend to her husband and daughters, she’s also good friends with Patricia Kyenge, the Tientcheu twins, Hector Yang, Maurice Lu and also Jean-Louis Lumiere. She’s the one who gave his dog Minuit medicine when it got sick, she’s the one who vaccinated their dogs. Coumba is also shocked by the racism she faces in Canada, since it’s something she’s not used to. She tries to keep her children safe from racists, often having Patricia and Yvette look after them to keep them from being too alienated. The time she got shot by Zachariah Campbell, she had to be healed by Patricia.

No wonder why she’s growing shyer by the minute, she’s been targeted by racists before. So much so that she wants to go back to Senegal so that she wouldn’t be harassed anymore.

Gabrielle Buquid–Amita

Alice’s older sister who’s in her early thirties and has become widowed, she used to work for the Department of Health but after losing her husband she had to compromise by working as a stay-at-home discharge nurse just to better look after her sons whilst still working in medicine in some capacity. That’s not to say video games and comic books lack single mothers and widows before, but it can be hard to live the life of a single mother who works in medicine. If because one has to make compromises or arrangements to be able to work and still have time to look after her children.

So much so that she’s going to get help from others when it’s needed, since she can’t shoulder the burden entirely on her own. She might as well make her children do chores, get others like her own relatives and friends to look after them and stuff to make her life easier. No surprise that Alice has to be there for her, since her husband recently died and had to look after her kids from time to time. Much of this takes place before Alice visits Maurice in Canada, while she wants to stay there to see him more often but can’t because she uses half of that money on supporting her older sister as she’s going through a really rough patch.

They may not always get along but Alice has to support her because she’s struggling with both work and family as she’s the only surviving parent around, so a helping hand is needed to shoulder the burden with together. This is why she never visited Canada, she has to be there for her sons because their father’s not around anymore. Only Alice left and from time to time, Maurice sends balikbayan boxes to Gabrielle to support her whenever he can. Jemima Szary also sometimes sends presents to her, often in the form of toys and money to support her the best she can.

She may be the only remaining parent in her children’s lives, but she does her best to support them on her own at times. She isn’t perfect, she’s doing her best.

Notes on the way the female characters are portrayed:

None of them have thin waists and big breasts together, none of them should have thin waists and big breasts together. If the video game and its accompanying webcomic (if it were to get one on Webtoon at all) were to portray them, they shouldn’t have these in tandem with one another. If the video game and the comic were to garner a wider audience, it should portray women in a way that wouldn’t alienate them. Given both the video game and comic book industries’ troubles at attracting female audiences, they’re getting better at this nowadays but this should serve as a reminder if people were to want their products to attract a bigger audience.

Not to mention I don’t want to see any anatomical mishaps with the female characters, no ridiculous outfits for them and so on. Not that they can’t dress well at all, if it were to happen, but I feel they’d benefit a lot from being inspired by actual fashion magazines. Actually the fashion magazine influence makes it easy to find a way to make flamboyant superhero outfits work without needing to be tactical, since both fashion models and musicians have worn rather flamboyant outfits themselves. Jean-Louis is inspired by David Bowie after all, other characters are inspired by others who are part of subcultures such as industrial rivetheads.

There are some superhero cartoonists and costume designers who do take cues from real world outfits, though others are still married to the tactical look even if some musicians and athletes hit the sartorial sweet spot between flamboyance and practicality. Observe ice skaters, tennis players, sprinters, wrestlers, ballet dancers and the like, real life is a good deal stranger and more flamboyant than what contemporary superhero designers and cartoonists strive for. But please don’t put Yvette, Jemima and the rest in outfits exposing their thongs, cleavages and so on. Please don’t at all.

Also no thigh gaps either.

The Villains:

Manhattan Men:

A US vigilante group that got into a series of controversies regarding two of its members being involved in sexual violence, sexual harassment and sex trafficking, one of them got into trouble for killing his wife when he got into an affair with a younger woman. It’s actually based on the Backstreet Boys, though it’s not obvious at times. Its members are based on the band’s idealised superhero selves, especially when it comes to their powers and abilities. Not to mention America has a history of vigilantism, something Canada doesn’t have in spades.

It’s been pointed out that the superhero character has a lot in common with the real life vigilante as both take justice into their own hands, especially whenever they fight crime and criminals at all. If this is true and while this is not always the case with other countries, but it’s evident why countries like Canada, Britain and Ireland don’t have much of a persistent superhero industry. In Ireland’s case, many superheroes like Banshee and Siryn actually practise sociopolitical vices. This is probably why not a lot of Irish writers do superheroes.

The fact that vigilantism is so heavily baked into the superhero story is why both Canadians and Britons have difficulty doing straight superhero stories, so much so that if we’re going to work on a superhero game for a Canadian company we’d have to find a way to make our story’s angle stand out enough to not be this imitative of DC and Marvel. Something that’s barely if ever done before so ours would be more strongly rooted in crime fiction, something like what Alan Moore’s Top Ten did before.

So many of the superheroes in this game are in fact involved in law enforcement themselves, as police officers, detectives, forensic scientists and forensic artists. Jean-Louis Lumiere is a detective for instance. Save for the Manhattan Men who are all proper vigilantes and come closer to the prototypical American understanding of superheroes, kind of meta to have the differences between Canada and America be played out when all the Canadian superheroes are the police and all the American superheroes are vigilantes.

As for what the Manhattan Men look like, they are based on the Backstreet Boys and in here, the band’s fictionalised incarnation the Backstreet Project. Since this is the 2020s and not the early 2000s, the Manhattan Men should dress in tactical versions of what the Backstreet Project Boys wore. The tactical look is in when it comes to contemporary superhero productions, even though our dear Canadian officers dress more like actual athletes and musicians (Jean-Louis resembles David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust days).

The Backstreet Project was something of a coproduction between the Backstreet Boys and Stan Lee, since his two other companies went bankrupt and thus both their trademarks and copyrights lapsed with them so these creations (unlike Marvel, which has Disney’s backing) are effectively public domain. Therefore you could see the Backstreet Project episodes on YouTube, we could easily make characters based on those without fear of litigation.

Even then the idea of the Manhattan Men look like modernised versions of the Backstreet Project is kind of amusing since superhero costume design has progressed to the point of incorporating more detail and influences from tactical clothing, mostly as a way to keep the general outfit recognisable whilst making it presentable enough to be taken seriously.

Ermentrude Wolfenbarger

The criminal and witch who moved from Switzerland to Canada, mostly to avoid detection from Swiss detectives and police. If because she often enchants wolves with the aim of making them attack innocent civilians, which is something you wouldn’t expect witches to do with animals. It is odd to think that wolves would be associated with witchcraft in places like Switzerland, Germany and parts of Italy at some point, but if you believe studies like ‘Demons of Urban Reform’ it really was the case.

It also got me into thinking that the she-wolf that appears in the Divine Comedy might also represent witchcraft, it could be my opinion but this is a logical possibility. Again this hints at a now-forgotten association between wolves and witchcraft, since witches are commonly said to shapeshift into animals (not just cats but also dogs, wolves and hares) where it could be said that lycanthropy is a form of witchcraft itself. As wolves used to be associated with witchcraft, so an argument can be made for werewolves being witches.

I feel the current tendency to separate shapeshifting and especially lycanthropy from witchcraft reflects a mindset that’s far-removed from what early modern people actually conceived of and understood those things to be this intimately connected, the best examples still in existence would have to come from places that take witchcraft seriously. Something like Cameroon where some people, especially pastors, say that witches have the ability to turn into animals to harm people with.

This wouldn’t be too out of place with its early modern European counterpart, this makes you realise how strange it really is to separate shapeshifting from witchcraft. It’s like for some people and especially some modern writers, witchcraft’s just limited to spellcasting and familiars but not shapeshifting and vampirism. I feel the actual reason why both lycanthropy and vampirism are linked is because they are forms of witchcraft, especially if you believe the book ‘Bloodsucking Witchcraft’.

Trần Khôi Mạnh

A member of a notorious Vietnamese gang, he has the ability to manifest zippers in anywhere and on anything not only to detach something but also hide something. This comes in handy as he’s a skilled marksman and a good hitman to boot, he pretty much prefers pistols and revolvers to do the job. As a number of characters here are based on their Jojo counterparts, he’s unmistakably based on Bruno Buccellati. It would be kind of amusing that the character based on Ghiaccio, Nootaikok Alakannuark, is a police officer but he is a criminal, thus a bad guy in a way.

What he does to him and vice versa’s reminiscent of the time Guido Mista shot Ghiaccio, but since this is a superhero story that’s also heavily based on crime fiction that it seems the Jojo stories’ penchant for favouring clever tactics when deploying supernatural powers, well in Jojo’s case anthropomorphised supernatural powers at that, it’s an influence that meshes well with the crime fiction basis in a way a straightforward superhero basis wouldn’t do. That’s something those who mashup Jojo with either DC or Marvel don’t get, if because most don’t really read crime fiction.

Even if the crime fiction influence is the better suitor to mash Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures up with, but in here with superheroes being the window dressing. I guess that’s because the average superhero fight largely consists of fistfights and the like, not so much clever ways of using otherwise subtle or macabre abilities to overpower people with. And in this story’s case, there are people who use their superpowers outside of both villainy and crimefighting. You really have to read up on or experience something else to do something else with superpowered characters.

Zachariah Campbell

A clairvoyant gunman on the run, it’s another character that I came up with but from a dream believe it or not. It’s one thing to have a psychic character, but it’s another to have a psychic gunman. This gives him the ability to find stealthy ways of shooting victims, looking for weak spots to exploit and then attack. He’s highly skilled with shotguns and rifles, the fact that he finds ways of attacking people’s weak spots so easily that the entire police force has to find ways of taking him down.

They have to strategise to keep him from attacking any further, Nootaikok has to freeze the ground to make him slip and Jean-Louis has to blind him to stop him in his tracks. Zachariah Campbell is a wanted criminal in Nova Scotia where he has shot many victims, some of them constitute hate crimes as he’s notorious for targeting minority ethnic immigrants. He is also a massive white supremacist, prone to conspiracy theories. Admittedly he’s going to rub certain people the wrong way, if because they also share his sentiments.

Colin Sallow

He has the ability to slow time enough to be seemingly stopped, though he has to create a black hole to do so anyways. Even then he uses this to throw knives at people with, he did this to Yvette and her family which Jean-Louis had to save. He did this to his other victims before, as well as finding ways to shoot people by locking them in place. He can be construed as the game’s Dio Brando, if you get my catch though he also came from a dream.

He even dresses like what you expect Dio Brando to wear, that is a yellow jacket, black shirt and trousers or something like those. A good number of the characters here are based on their Jojo counterparts to varying degrees and sometimes in a roundabout sort of way, Colin Sallow’s no different despite having darker hair than Dio does. Even if Hirohiko Araki has a habit of giving many of his characters different hair colours per illustration, Yasuho Hirose has been shown with white and blond hair at various points.

(It could be argued that Yasuho has been blonde twice, Trish Una has been blonde thrice by the way.)

Even then, to anybody who know a thing or two about Jojo should know that a number of these characters are based on their Jojo counterparts, even if not all of it’s direct nor straightforward as some characters’ traits and influences are partitioned to others. If you’re a Jojo fan, you should know this by now.

John Birdwhistle

The hot-tempered spy who seemingly works for the police force, only to backstab them when he reveals his real intentions. Yet another Jojo reference as the character he’s based on not only shares his power of unleashing a devastating virus that can kill people, but also how this character (Pannacotta Fugo) was going to betray his team the same way too had Hirohiko Araki not been in a bad mood. As this police force already has a grouch in Nootaikok, that this bloke feels like more of the same person. But with a much deadlier power that can kill something when infected.

No surprise that they readily get into fights and on each other’s nerves, so much so that they had to get others to stop them at any point. There’s even a situation where he unleashes a deadly virus out of anger, killing a bald eagle immediately by accident. Pannacotta Fugo did the same but to a raven, well it’s not hard to see where this reference is coming from. When the ruse was revealed, that’s when they started arresting him. The first to sound the alarm was Akosamesew Kanewopasikot, given his knack for reading body language. Then comes John Zelensky, who is sometimes something of a mind-reader himself.

The game’s version of Pannacotta Fugo turned out to be working for a nefarious organisation, hellbent on assassinating people with that power alone. He eventually got arrested in time and then imprisoned.

Anatoly Smirnoff/Smirnov

The Russian mafia’s go-for hitman who has the ability to manipulate nuclear radiation, not just by irradiating something and causing nuclear explosions but also by phasing through surfaces and stuff because one aspect of nuclear fission involves quantum tunnelling where one thing passes over another. This might have been attempted before with DC’s Firestorm, who has some of the same powers as he does, that I think whoever wrote his adventures likely has some decent understanding of nuclear physics. But there are other aspects of him that is influenced by another publisher’s character altogether.

Her name is Kitty Pryde, also known as Kate Pryde at this point, where it manifests itself in almost every aspect of his life and personality. Much like her, he got brainwashed into becoming a ninja by a yakuza (well Orgun in her case). Then comes his habit of losing his cool to the point of beating somebody else up over name-calling (she did this to somebody too), throwing tantrums and getting mad at his principal for putting him in a group full of people closer to his age. What he has done before, she also did the same too. Then comes the time where he kills people in different ways, as retaliation for killing his fellow Mafiosi.

This includes phasing a gun into someone’s head, phasing a heart out of a person, fusing two people together after throwing one at another, phasing two nearly exploding grenades into people’s torsos before escaping and then snapping somebody’s neck. Then we get to the part where he threatens somebody with a gun and then stabbing somebody else to death with a sword. All of which Kitty Pryde has done before too, he even has a pet python named Mikoyan and a lynx named Katya. One of her other nicknames, she has a dragon named Lockheed and she’s known as Lince Negra (Black Lynx) in Portuguese.

Both Mikoyan and Lockheed are also names of fighter jets by the way, that dragons are assumed to be based on snakes is saying. He kidnaps Jemima but his plan gets foiled by Jean-Louis, where he and his team rescues her in time. To keep him from attacking people any further, he starts a fire to stop him and makes an escape. When Anatoly does make an escape himself, it’s too late as he gets arrested. Kind of makes you realise that given the way Kate Pryde ended up these days, the way she’s written and characterised are more befitting of a villain.

No surprise that she constantly and angrily snaps back at Professor Xavier, who is even the figurehead of the X-Men and the one his team is named after and fights for in his honour. Like how one’s point about the way Merida is written accidentally made her into a villain is why we sometimes have characters who are mischaracterised as heroes, even when they’re clearly square pegs in a round hole.

Ken Inubashiri

Much like Ermentrude Wolfenbarger, he is another unusual witch character. Unusual in that he actually uses a dog (a spirit dog by the way) to attack and harm people with, though it’s not that unusual in Japanese culture and folk belief. There’s a study called The Catalpa Bow which focuses on people like him where they use dog, fox and snake spirits to attack people out of revenge, which is exactly what he does to Jean-Louis when he arrested his fellow Yakuza members. It’s not that there aren’t any characters with dog familiars, the best-known example would be Dr Faust and Mephistopheles.

This belief was pretty common in Scotland and England, if you believe the books Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland and Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits by Emma Wilby. It’s really a matter of reading and learning something else to come up with something else, especially if it’s rarely done in stories that something else is needed to shake things up. Not to mention the inugami, as it is called in Japan, can possess somebody and painfully torment them. There are instances of Ken using dog spirits to not only possess his victims and those who angered him, but also making them fall ill as a result.

So much so he gave Jean-Louis a terrible flu, which Yvette had to tend to using a variety of remedies. She also had to call upon Patricia to speed up the recovery, just so he can go back to work or something. It may have been attempted in some Japanese comics/manga before, but even then it’s something that I feel has to happen in some way because I think there’s too much cat familiars and not enough dog familiars even if the latter also appears regularly in folk demonologies nearly the world over. Same goes for witches having dog guises, where you can find this in Philippine and Cameroonian folklore.

Graham Knightley

The game’s very own Yoshikage Kira (where his surname sounds like Keira Knightley, get it?), he has the ability to make something and somebody explode. He does this to get away with murder, just like what Mr Kira does in Diamond is Unbreakable. However Jean-Louis and his team have been trying to get him, finding clues to where he’s been doing, what happened to his victims and more. He is also a billionaire and an heir to not only his father’s company, but also his multibillionaire family’s heritage. That they are related to the British gentry is enough to inflate his ego.

It’s also a dig at the popularity of billionaire heroes in romance novels, even if not all romance novels feature them as heroes and some even have lowlier heroes instead, but the fact that this stereotype is so common it’s baffling why it’s so persistent. Not that women can’t marry for money, but it seems the popularity of the billionaire hero also lies in his unattainability. It’s one enough to be supported by somebody who has more money than you, it’s another to lust after the unattainable which billionaire heroes fall under.

It’s not that there aren’t any genuinely charitable billionaires out there in the world, it’s not that there aren’t any genuinely charitable rich people in general either. But I do feel that some romance novel heroes are built on unattainability, that is to make them more desirable and interesting than if they’re more grounded and attainable. He has a girlfriend who loves and dotes on him, but is getting leery of the fact that he explodes people to death. Again another dig at the popularity of billionaire heroes in romance novels, one would wonder if this is the real reason why Olicity took off on Arrow.

It would have never taken off if Oliver Queen was portrayed as being of a lowlier standing, say he’s a lumberjack or even middle-class. But that would mean the way Oliver was portrayed on Arrow also plays on the billionaire hero’s unattainability, which goes double if he’s a CEO or businessman instead of being a footballer, which would justify the physique he’s expected to have and in fairness, there are likely romance novels with footballer heroes by the way. While Graham also has a habit of exercising half-naked as his girlfriend watches, he also rubs her the wrong way the more his murderous nature is revealed.

Cyril Darkholme

Affiliated with a Winnipeg drug cartel, he’s their hitman who has the ability to absorb light and electromagnetic energy and turn it into darkness. Not just any darkness but particularly shadowy constructs like force fields and weapons, which he manages to render both Jean-Louis and John impotent. He doesn’t just use shadow shields to hide himself but also trap others and drain any source of light and energy, so Jean-Louis had to come up with a way to stop him in his tracks. Especially after he got rescued by Jemima Szary of all people, since she spent much of her time investigating where he had been to.

So his solution to stop him is to lure him into a dark place, since his darkness powers don’t work in the dark. This is because he realised that Cyril primarily does his criminal deeds during daytime, or anywhere that’s lit and since this is how he causes brownouts he has to find a way to undermine him when he does. As for his appearance, Cyril’s generally the opposite of Jean-Louis in some regards. Though both men have blond hair, only Jean-Louis got his dyed red. Cyril not only dresses more modestly than he does, but he also dresses in black. He actually dresses like a rivethead to be very honest, as in somebody who likes industrial music.

Since he makes darkness-based constructs, he not only creates force fields to hide himself and to trap others with. But also create multiple force fields for him to climb his way out and trap more people this way, shadow weapons that take on the forms of axes, spades and knives and work the same way too, and finally create shadow shields that destroy items. The better to obfuscate evidence with, no wonder why it took the combined efforts of both Jean-Louis and Jemima to take him down.

The Influences

The influences for a number of characters are pretty diverse, sometimes as unlikely as it is tangential. This gives you an idea of how diverse these are, that they can be pulled off if something like that in a game and/or comic book ever comes to fruition. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is one such source of inspiration to the characters and scenarios presented, even if it’s sometimes shown in a roundabout sort of way. But it is still obvious to those knee-deep in Jojo lore where one could draw comparisons between one another.

Another would be crime fiction though some of it is tentative, since I’ve yet to read other crime novels and short stories. Some of it’s also presented in a roundabout sort of way, regarding both Jemima Szary and Jean-Louis Lumière. Both of them are based on Jemima Shore, which the former is named after. Certainly changes have taken change where Jemima Shore’s cat Midnight has become Jean-Louis’s dog Minuit, though her preference for cats is retained in Jemima Szary.

Then there’s Nancy Drew, an earlier character and protagonist of her own adventures. She’s been described as having strawberry blond hair and blue eyes, close to what I assumed Jemima Shore to be (and why Jemima Szary has a very similar appearance). She even has a dog named Togo, just like Miss Szary that Jemima Szary could be construed as a grown-up version of her. Maybe by a decade since Jemima’s in her late twenties, whereas Nancy is a late teenager or arguably a young adult.

Then we get to the fictions of PD James regarding Jean-Louis’s lady love, Yvette Tientcheu, where she works as a literary professor just like Emma Lavenham. Some of the differences lie with how more of Yvette’s relatives are still alive, most notably Fabrice Tientcheu whom she’s very close to. Another is that Jean-Louis is closer in age to her than what Adam Dagliesh is to Emma Lavenham, the former two are in their late twenties (as it is with many characters here).

This is tentative since I’ve yet to write comics so there could be more of a PD James influence in the future, if I were to write stories based on any of hers or even something else altogether. It could be any one of the other influences I’ve enlisted before, so either one or two of them will win out in the end when I get to write the finished product. If it were feasible at all, though this is about to change as much of it’s still tentative. Who knows which influence will win, as a lot will change in the future.

Then comes folklore and folk demonology in particular, regarding two characters Ermentrude Wolfenbarger and Inubashiri Ken. Both of them are immigrants who’ve escaped their home countries to avoid detection by their nations’ own local police, both of them resort to witchcraft to harm people with. That they both use canines in their sorcery sounds like an odd association in this day and age, except that it was more commonly believed at various points before.

It still is so in some places like Ghana and Cameroon, where either the witch uses a canine to do her evil bidding or become one to do the same. It’s even less odd in some parts of Japan where according to the book The Catalpa Bow, Japanese witches were reputed to use dog familiars to harm people with or something like that in addition to foxes and snakes. This is exactly why Inubashiri Ken does, this would be known as inugami in Japanese but it’s still practically the same as it would be in Ghana.

Another one and perhaps the biggest in some regards is the influence of real life on a number of characters, Jean-Louis is based on somebody like David Bowie right down to his fashion sense (even his dyed red hair and mullet), preference for dogs, bibliophilia and his love interest Yvette paralleling Bowie’s last wife Iman. Jean-Louis isn’t exactly like Bowie in other regards, such as a love of hunting and being both a detective and skilled in unarmed combat like wrestling. But it’s detectable enough for a David Bowie fan to get.

Then we get to more obscure figures like the possibly now deceased Nancy Moody, author behind the book Nobbut where she mentioned having dark blond hair in her youth and pet cats. The fact that she had a redheaded brother is the inspiration behind why Jean-Louis’s interactions with Jemima are like brother and sister, since she’s also into investigation though she’s not formally engaged in forensic investigation as he is. That Jean-Louis has a female cousin whom he’s close to is also why he tends to treat Jemima as a sister.

Pardon me any future shippers between the two but Yvette is Jean-Louis’s woman, just as Jemima is Maurice’s woman and let’s face it, there are Asian men who do date or marry non-Asian women. Not just Chinese men leaving out of wedlock children in places like Ghana and Kenya, but also Indonesian men prostituting themselves to white western women by the way. Joni Tada is married to a Japanese American man, Francis Manapul is of Philippine descent and he’s married to a white woman.

But I’m getting off-topic here, so I’ve enlisted a number of the things that have influenced my conceptions of the characters and their interactions with one another, since these are characters that I’m going to give to a video game company if I were to work for them in the future that a lot might change in the future. That’s if I’m assigned to write their adventures in comics form, if that video game were to get a comic book adaptation at all and honestly it better be on Webtoon so that it can get a bigger audience.

Now as for John Zelensky, he got the surname from the Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky (who’s also Jewish). But he’s the only Ukrainian that came into my mind at the time I created him, let’s not forget that John Zelensky also dresses in black very often and listens to Goth and punk bands like Bauhaus (La Maison de l’Architecture), Siouxsie and the Banshees (Susanna e le Fate), The Damned (Les Damnés) and The Clash (L’Affrontement). Admittedly these are all the bands I listened to before and I was into 1980s Goth music when I was a teenager.

To those who know something about the band Jane’s Addiction, its singer Perry Farrell is Jewish and was involved in a SoCal Goth band called Psicom. John is Jewish and is Goth, not just in the way he dresses but also the music he plays both on his playlists and with his band. Somebody like Kai Decadence pointed out that not only do a lot of Goths in animation not listen to real Goth music (barring Serena from Downtown and the Goth Kids on South Park), but also how a lot of Goth characters there tend to be female.

So it’s about time to have Goth male characters at last, including John Zelensky for this video game.