I mentioned the other day how I was kicking around some ideas for a comic pulling together some characters from existing fiction. Well, I've been giving it a lot of thought the past couple of days, and had some intriguing notions on the concept.
First, all of the similar existing ideas I've seen thus far (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the "Wold Newton" universe, etc.) have a tendency to focus on Western literature. Sure, bringing Captain Nemo in gives adds Indian to the group so it's not totally homogeneous, but the fictions themselves were all based on Western literature. Stevenson was English, Verne was French, Twain was American... I think it would be more interesting if you pulled in a more global flavor. How about a character from Japanese or Chinese mythology? Where does South America get represented? Hey, what about getting an African in there? True, you don't want to alienate your largely English-speaking audience with characters and concepts they're wholly unfamiliar with, but that's why you still include some Western literature.
Next, what's wrong with mixing significant fictional and historical figures? I've seen all fictional, and all historical, but how about merging the two to allow for a little more realism/believability?
So, who do we have here anyway?
From left to right, my current "team" (and I'll explore why I use the term in quotes later) consists of John Henry, John Watson, Alice Liddell, and Sun Wukong. Henry was an early African-American who's a part of American folklore, Watson of course is the famous sidekick of Sherlock Holmes, Liddell is the famed character from the Alice in Wonderland stories and Wukong is from Chinese legend. I know I still need a few other international folks to round out the group, but this who I've come up with so far.
I have to cut this short at the moment because of time restraints, but I'll let you mull that over for a while.
And, hey! Any artists out there who might be interested in helping to develop this concept? The more I kick this idea around, the more interested I am in actively pursuing this.
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