So Greg raised this question the other day, “what’s your pitch for an ongoing series starring your favorite obscure character?” and while I was typing up my reply, I remembered what our much-missed friend Greg Hatcher used to say: don’t waste material. We use the whole pig. So that’s what I’m doing. Here we go.
First, since we now have the luxury of space, let’s have some back-story. Shortly after I joined CBR in 1995 and met a bunch of people that I still consider friends almost 30 years later, one of those folks posted a plot synopsis as a gag. Jonathan Bogart, who posted under the name GoldenAger, proposed reviving The Inferior Five as a ridiculous satire of the abuses heaped on DC’s Justice League stars during the publisher’s “Grim & Gritty” phase of the early ’90s. Here’s Jonathan’s post:
The Inferior Five: A Midsummer Night’s Hullaballoo
A forty-eight-page one-shot showing what effect the 1990s has had on everybody’s favorite joke team. Divided into six chapters, it traces the descents of Merryman, Awkwardman, the Blimp, Dumb Bunny, and White Feather into their own private hells—and gives a pretty good indication of why they haven’t been seen anytime recently.
Chapter One: “Merryman: The Dark Jester Returns”
Obsessed by gaining the approval of his dead parents, Merryman turns dark and neurotic, the tassels on his cap growing ever longer. He practices his own form of vigilantism, gets his back broken, and takes his jester’s outfit back from a psycho who used it to kill.
Chapter Two: “The Blimp: Interminable Velocity”
The Blimp goes New-Age, learning to tap into the Slow Force, and spends hours doing transcendental meditation in the air. He also falls in love with a waitress and is rescued innumerable times during crisis situations by the power of that love.
Chapter Three: “Awkwardman: Time and Clorox”
Awkwardman loses a hand and replaces it with a grappling hook, grows out his hair and beard, and gets deeply involved in the politics of the local YMCA swimming pool, eventually being crowned king. He quits the Inferior Five several times over.
Chapter Four: “Dumb Bunny: The Challenge of Artichoke”
Taller, sexier, and skimpier than ever, Dumb Bunny has the title stripped from her by an upstart Playboy bunny, and seeks inner peace. Then she dies and comes back, and dies and comes back, and dies and comes back… Oh yeah, and she becomes a goddess too.
Chapter Five: “White Feather: The Longbow Blunders”
White Feather moves to Seattle, kills several people (but it’s all, for some reason, morally justifiable), stops using trick arrows, gets involved with a Japanese assassin, and discovers that he has sons littered about the landscape like fallen leaves in autumn.
Chapter Six: “A Midsummer Night’s Hullaballoo“
The team comes back together thanks to a world-wide threat that only they, for some mysterious and unexplained reason, can handle. Or can they? This is the Inferior Five, after all.
I loved the idea and started drawing some sample pages, intending to try to pitch it to DC, but was told that DC hates funny; eventually it got put aside due to other real-life concerns.
I named the faux-Wolverine guy “Bandicoot” because (a) it’s close enough to Bane to be a nod at the Batman story we were mocking, (b) Crash Bandicoot was still a popular game, and most importantly, (c) Bandicoots have stripes on their ass and I thought that made for a funny costume.
I posted these pages on Gail Simone’s “You’ll All Be Sorry!” forum at CBR, which led to collaborating with Craig “Cream Filled Taco” Kemper on a weekly web-comic called ‘The Fourth Wall’, which led to creating MonkeySpit as a place to post the cartoons, and which eventually led to co-creating Atomic Junk Shop with Greg Hatcher.
Some time later, a bunch of CBR folks decided to create a comic anthology to be distributed at SDCC, and I discussed doing the I5 with long-time friend (and new Atomic Junk Shop contributor) Mordechai “Typo Lad” Luchins and Spinner Rack Comics founder and writer Tom Stillwell, this time expanding the concept to be a parody-criticism of the big “event” comics series that were clogging up the shops, from Identity Crisis to Infinite Crisis and beyond, with our wacky version being titled Inferiority Complex.
Unfortunately, this was right in the middle of a 15 year stretch of job-hopping (three places I worked for went out of business between 2003 and 2008) and scrambling to make the mortgage on freelance gigs and temp jobs, and there was no time to spend on spec projects that had almost no hope of ever making a dime. Eventually I distilled the idea down to three gag illustrations for The Fourth Wall:
Around this time, I became a member of CAPS, the Comic Art Professional Society, and had met and begun socializing with many cartoonists, writers, and editors, including some who worked for DC, and thought I might somehow finagle a chance to pitch an Inferior Five concept. I pretty much abandoned the Inferiority Complex concept in favor of a different approach, a straightforward reboot of the original, which is the series I’m now going to pitch here. It occurred to me that there is a simple way to turn the Inferior Five into a humor strip that works: make them kids. Morts then came up with the brilliant idea of adding the Justice Brigade’s sidekicks, the teen heroes, and playing off sibling rivalry themes. Tom immediately started writing a plot and commissioned an artist to create some pages for us to show with the pitch. I can’t for the life of me find any of our email discussions of the project, so I just asked Tom the artist’s name. She’s Luisa Russo, and she’s from Italy.
Since it never went anywhere, I figured it was high time somebody saw it, so here’s my pitch:
Inferior Five
The Inferior Five are the tween children of the members of a super-team called the Freedom Brigade. The kids have that sort of friendship-by-default that kids develop with classmates simply due to being confined together in the same room. For about the last five years, they have been thrown together as a group because their parents got into the habit of dropping them with a robot babysitter at the Freedom Fortress whenever a mission came up. They get along okay, but don’t really consider themselves a group (or even friends) at first. Awkwardman, White Feather and Blimp are probably the closest friends, in a misfits drawn together way (think Sam, Neil, and Bill on Freaks & Geeks), with Merryman and Bunny being best buddies (though she wants more); since everyone likes Bunny, she’s the glue that holds the group together. Each character’s self-deprecating “hero name” is derived from their deeply-felt awareness of their parents’ disappointment. They don’t want to be superheroes, but events force them to suit up.
Most of the members are about 13-14 years old, except for Awkwardman, who is 12, but looks the oldest and acts the most mature. Merryman is actually the most mature, in that he’s the most serious and cautious. He’s a 35-year-old accountant trapped in the body of a tween superhero.
The source of most of the group’s troubles is the sidekicks, those irritating teen superheroes that the parents have taken on as crime-fighting partners, who are snide and dismissive toward the kids, calling them babies and making them feel that the heroes prefer the sidekicks to their own children.
But then disaster strikes, and the “babies” have to step up and save the day.
As in previous iterations, the Inferior Five’s villains are all parodies of Marvel characters.
CAST:
Merryman (Myron Victor)
Merryman is short and scrawny, sarcastic and fatalistic. He’s also a natural leader who is completely in denial of the fact that people actually listen to him. All of his plans start with “I know this is stupid and will probably get us killed, but if we…” He’s always shocked that his plans work and even more shocked that his team actually follows him. His deep-seated insecurity is such that he has preemptively “friend zoned” Bunny, assuming that she could never possibly find him remotely attractive. As a result, he is oblivious and impervious to her attempts to flirt.
Bunny (Athena Tremor)
Although she has been called “Dumb Bunny”, she is not dumb at all, but has a remarkable ability to see right to the core truth of every problem. Her comments sound hopelessly naive and clueless because she is so unfailingly direct. She loves Merryman but he finds that completely impossible to believe, leaving her feeling rejected and unsure why.
White Feather (William King)
A brilliant archer who suffers from target panic; he can shoot perfectly when it doesn’t matter, but overthinks it in the crunch, thinking about every possible way it can go wrong and putting himself on the brink of an panic attack. That is, until the situation becomes so dire that he can relax into fatalism and say “what the hell” and pull off a miracle. His caution and fear are in inverse proportion to the actual threat. He’s also openly gay, and being out is the only thing he’s not afraid of. He has almost no relationship with his absentee father; his mother is one of the parade of women the Bowman never bothered to marry.
Awkwardman (Leander Brent)
Awkwardman is the most relaxed and easygoing of the five, completely comfortable with himself, probably because his parents never had a teen sidekick. On land he’s a bull in a china shop, but in the water he’s practically a dancer. Because of his size, the others forget that he’s actually the youngest of the group, forcing him to try to act more mature than he is.
The Blimp (Herman Cramer)
The Blimp is the most heroically-minded of the bunch, really wanting to earn his way into the Freedom Brigade. He’s one of those big guys who is surprisingly light on his feet, he moves gracefully and nimbly in the manner of a John Belushi or Jackie Gleason, and easily deflects any body shaming aimed his way. Blimp is like the 5’4” guy who wants to be a basketball player, or the big-boned ballerina; he has to be twice as good as anyone else to even have a shot, simply because he is betrayed by the expectations attached to his body type.
FREEDOM BRIGADE – The Parents
Patriot – Dresses like Uncle Sam; patriotism is his super-power, along with a good right hook. Inclined to make inspiring motivational speeches that don’t work on tweens.
Lady Liberty – Dresses like the Statue of Liberty, uses the torch as a weapon. Smothering mother type.
Captain Swift – Speedster. Not a bad guy, but never has time for his kid.
Princess Power – From a hidden island of Amazon-like female warriors. Strident first-wave feminist without a nurturing bone in her body.
Mister Might – Super-strong alien from another planet. Kind of a stuffed shirt.
Bowman – World’s greatest archer, world’s worst parent. He never married White Feather’s mom, and may not even realize that White Feather is his son. He’s not doing all that well with the kid he did try to raise.
Mermaid – Aquatic heroine from Atlantis. Does not understand American culture.
YOUTH BRIGADE – The Sidekicks
Most of the members of the Freedom Brigade have teen sidekicks, who have also banded together to create their own “junior team” along with a handful of other teen heroes, called the Youth Brigade. They feel threatened that the kids are going to grow into the sidekick roles and displace them, so they act like jerks to them.
Johnny Freedom – Named after legendary patriotic teen Johnny Tremain, Johnny is the sidekick to Patriot and Lady Liberty, and is the leader of both the sidekicks and Youth Brigade. An orphan taken in by the patriotic heroes as a foster child, he is the de facto ‘older brother” to Myron, but he’s a bullying and domineering older brother. Wears a tri-corner hat and Yankee Doodle costume.
Blue Streak – Captain Swift’s wife’s nephew who acquired speed powers, Blue Streak is Blimp’s cousin, but they never really been close. He’s a happy-go-lucky kid, the one who’s least rotten to the I5. It’s his misfortune that Captain Swift constantly holds him up as an example to Herman, leading to a lot of resentment and hostility not of his choosing. Wears a color-swapped version of Captain Swift’s outfit.
Hotshot – Orphan archer taken in by the Bowman, basically White Feather’s adoptive brother. They get along somewhat, mostly because they have never lived in the same house and barely know each other. Hotshot has troubles of his own. Wears a different color version of the Bowman’s outfit.
Sue Perior – An orphan girl raised by Bunny’s mother’s culture and given super-strength by their advanced technology. Sue is, or at least thought she was, the proper heir to the Golden Tiara (being the reigning champion in all Amazon competitions), until Bunny came along. A bit of a “Mean Girl.” Wears a modern teen-styled variation on Princess Power’s outfit.
Dart-Frog. An amphibious girl protege to Mermaid, Dart-Frog is entitled and very snobbish, claiming to be a member of the Atlantean Royal Family. Considers Leander a “half breed.”
I later did a couple of sketches of my own, going for a more cartoony look, but I wasn’t really happy with the result. Honestly, if it were up to me, I’d have the book drawn by Travis Hanson.
When I actually talked to the contacts I had at DC, I learned just how difficult it is for an unknown person to pitch a proposal to a comics company; they might see the story and art as an audition piece and hire the artist/writer, but they most likely will reject the project, and company policy is to never read unsolicited manuscripts, due to the liability of a lawsuit if they ever do anything remotely similar. I was also informed that DC was absolutely not interested in any parodies, satires, or comedic takes on their characters. None of them wanted to take on the liability of pitching our project and possibly having it come back in some negative way.
At one point, Morts and I discussed the idea of “filing the numbers off,” renaming and redesigning all the characters and making it a parody version of DC’s parody of itself, with the intention of self-publishing. He wrote up a detailed synopsis and came up with new powers and code names for all of the characters. I’m sure that would have worked, but it wouldn’t be half as fun to do as using the original characters. All of this stuff has been sitting in a drawer for about 10 years now.
But then Greg went and asked about pitches using obscure characters. I hope you’re happy now, Greg.
And this is why DC keeps spinning in circles: no sense of humor. JLI sold like gangbusters and the two return minis did great business. The problem is that too many people in positions of authority seem to have been the nerds that got wedgied and shoved into lockers, because they read comics and have a huge chip on their shoulder about it. Marvel, thanks to Stan’s style of promotion, always seemed more open to a little humor in their line, if not always in some of their books (hell, even Claremont did a comedy issue or two of X-Men).
I always loved Inferior 5 and did my best t o locate their appearances, when I was collecting. I’d read that in a heartbeat!
I never got into JLI but I agree wholeheartedly that humor would be a win. I loved the I5 and I’d pick up either of these proposals.
Of course the one we got was Keith Giffen’s unfunny, uninteresting sequel to INVASION!
Don’t know about Greg, but I’m happy. I’d be even happier if someone could make this happen. Because my lord, that sounds wonderful. The idea of having it be a kids’ book in particular makes me think that it’s doable, since in the recent past DC has done kid-focused comics based on their cartoons, like Teen Titans Go and DC Superhero Girls (I absolutely love the latter one).
Superhero Girls is a hoot.
“Now they’ll have to admit my sister, even though she flunked the psych eval.”
“Dude … HARLEY passed the psych test!”
I mean, yeah. 🙂