When I started working on lessons for the 7th grade math classes last year, I inadvertently resurrected the Solution Squad. It wasn’t my initial intention. I just wanted to make a school for super-powered teens. The Mutants & Masterminds roleplaying game had a fictional school called The Claremont Academy, named after X-Men writer Chris Claremont. I thought, well, my favorite teen hero artist was George Pérez, so I’d name mine after him. And once I thought about how they would get around, I thought, why waste a perfectly good design? I have the Coordinate Plane.
But where would they get a Coordinate Plane? Why, from La Calculadora, of course. She designed and built it for her team. And that’s when it hit me. Her last name was also Pérez (not a coincidence). The school could be named after her! But she was an eternal 16-year-old. She couldn’t run a school. And so she and the rest of the squad got aged up to adulthood, 21-22 years old, and the story took place five years after the graphic novel. When I tried to design La Calculadora in ChatGPT, it could not, would not, get the uniform right. I spent no less than eight hours trying to force the image generator to get the suit right. It just couldn’t do it. It also gave me some frighteningly real-looking images in its attempts.
Now, I have a secret. I have always thought that most live-action superheroes look like Adam West playing Batman. People in superhero costumes look ridiculous to me. They have ever since I became an adult. I don’t judge people who choose to do it. It’s just not for me. For me, superheroes belong in comics and cartoons. After all, they were intended for kids. So, when I chose to create La Calculadora for everyday classroom use, I went with an American animation style with cel shading.
But still, every single time, it failed to get the boots right, and it failed to do the rib panels on the costume right. Eventually, I just settled for saying the Squad’s costumes had evolved over time.
And that’s the way it went for the whole school year. Every time I brought a member of the Squad in, I modified their costume to match this set.
But then this morning, I found, quite by accident, a picture of La Calculadora’s inspiration, George Perez’s niece, Milla. And I went back to ChatGPT and asked it to model the character closer to her. And what do you suppose it did? It got the costume 95% right on the first try! Suddenly, there’s 16-year-old La Calculadora, staring me right in the face! I did five minutes worth of Photoshop work on it to get it just right. A year later, ChatGPT has figured out how to do what it absolutely couldn’t do before.
This was, without a doubt, the closest image to how my mind’s eye saw the character. And just as suddenly, the floodgates opened. There’s nothing stopping me from making new Solution Squad material, just as they were in the graphic novel that came out nine years ago!
I worked on a turnaround sheet for the character and now it can be drawn on-model again and again. Now, I know all the arguments against AI are going to come up again. I have recently been attacked online by one of my former Solution Squad artists. But perhaps, not coincidentally, said artist still owes me artwork that I paid $400 in advance for, eight years ago. My time for spending money on artwork that I wait years for (or that I never receive at all) has come to an end. I’m also not rejoining the comic book world. I did my time out there, never to be repeated. This time, I am going to stay in my own little corner of the universe, doing what I’m best at: creating materials used to teach kids math!
One of the favorite characters I played in Champions was Silverwing. When I first joined the Aegis campaign right out of college, with Scott Burnham running, I initially played a speedster, which Scott wrote up for me. Scott and I had been friends while I was in college but I didn’t have the time to devote to gaming that he did. I had my studies to concentrate on. Scott ran DC Heroes for us when our little gaming group could get together, and he often playtested his scenarios on our little group before he ran them against his group down in South Bend. Once I graduated in June 1987, I got to sit in on an Aegis game, but there was no room for me as a player. As fate would have it, however, Scott was in a major car accident that summer and was in traction for a month, having broken his hip. He also had permanent nerve damage in his ankle and couldn’t move his foot up and down on the accelerator of a car. When he was well enough to travel, he asked me to drive him to South Bend every Sunday, and they made the concession to let me play since I was useful to the person running their games.
I didn’t really know much about Champions at the time, having only played once before, early on in college. But after two lackluster performances, I knew I didn’t like my speedster and wanted to try something else. At the time I was living in my grandmother’s spare upstairs room and substitute teaching for a teacher on maternity leave in Allegan. My evenings were pretty free. So, I dug into the Champions books to learn what I could about what I was doing wrong. I knew I wanted to play someone fast, someone with martial arts skill and a shield, Captain America being one of my favorite Marvel characters; and Alpha Flight was a popular book at the time, so the flying battlesuit sounded like a fun idea, too. And so I wrapped my patriotic character up in Honolulu blue and silver like my Detroit Lions and off we went.
I really got into playing Champions. I mean really got into it. I bought a game bag in my character’s colors, with matching 12-sided dice. I customized a metal miniature of Vortex, the flying character from The Elementals, and glued a triangular shield on his arm that I cut away from a D&D miniature, and painted it.
By the time January 1988 rolled around, I started tracking my experience points on a piece of graph paper. I also made notes of what or who we faced that week in the game, which later came in handy when I wrote adventure recaps. Just today, I found those experience point trackers in my character folder. I played Silverwing until June 1990.
This progression of character sheets shows not only the changes in the character over time, but also the changes in art styles and even game systems, as the final character sheet is in 4th Edition Champions with the hero creation software.
I’ve been thinking. I know, I guess I’d better have been thinking because I sure as heck haven’t been posting anything here in a while. A few years ago, one of my friends, Scott Burnham, passed away. I met Scott when I was in college. I had just bought the DC Heroes Roleplaying Game, and we wanted to play, but had no one to run for us. We didn’t know how to run games, so we went to the college gaming group and started recruiting. Scott volunteered. Over the years, I played in a number of Scott’s games and he in mine. And when he passed away, our local comic book store purchased his original art, comics, and gaming materials in the estate sale. They told me, because there were quite a few pieces that I had done among the collection. I’m told this one was his favorite:
Psiren
Now, don’t get all judgy. Scott was a lonely guy. I know why, but that’s not my story to tell. And now that he’s gone, it doesn’t really matter. We had a couple of fallings out over the years, but I still considered him my friend. Anyway, the owner of the store didn’t want to spend the time going through the box because most of the artworks was of Scott’s own characters and the market wasn’t very good for something like that. So, I was given the opportunity to buy all of his art pieces and non-book gaming stuff, character sheets and all for $300. I didn’t really have $300 to spend at the time, but I did it anyway, with the thought that I could probably sell enough from it to at least break even on the deal. And I’d have a lot of my artwork back that I did decades ago.
As it turned out, among the pile in the box, and that’s exactly what it was–a pile in a box, I found this piece:
Dragon by Stan Sakai
I promptly sold this drawing on Ebay for $300 and the bargain was made. Anything else I got from the collection was gravy and I had all my artwork back. I spent some time going through the pile. And I found some gems, and some not-gems. One of the fun drawings I found was this one:
Psiren, by George Perez
And where did I find it? Inside a sheet protector with character sheets for Psiren! There were dozens and dozens of character sheets for Champions in the box, and as I sorted through them, I remembered encountering most of the bad guys in there, and some of the heroes, too. Then it occurred to me that with all of the myriad characters I’ve created, I don’t want them to end up in a pile in a box. So, I am creating The Masquerade Files.
Back in the early 90s, I belonged to a Champions amateur press alliance (APA) called The Clobberin’ Times, and my zine was called Of Masks and Men. So, every two months, I would put at least one character picture and their background in, Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe/Who’s Who style, and sometimes I would include a character sheet.
Abattoir. Hey, the 90s were dark!
Yes, that is indeed a dot-matrix printer page from my Tandy DMP-107, and I wrote it on a Tandy 1000 SL2! Radio Shack at its finest!
With today’s technology, I can do a little better than that!
Boy, the 90s were a dark time!
Now, Abattoir has an interesting history. I was teaching at Lew Wallace High School in Gary, and I had a Vietnamese student who did, indeed, get suspended for getting jumped because the vice principal assumed that, being Asian, he knew Kung Fu or something. I stared at him, dumbfounded. That part of the story is absolutely true. To my knowledge, he was not recruited by an evil corporation and was not experimented on. But then again, it’s been a long time.
Abattoir was the main villain in a Clobberin’ Times gathering at Chicago Comicon one year. A whole bunch of us midwesterners played our main characters in one big game. As was our habit at the time, there was a vote at the end of the game for who played their character best, and that person won the original art, which is seen in the profile box. . Moving forward I will be taking good, long looks at some (or all, if I live long enough) of the characters I’ve created for gaming, comics, and just fun, and I’ll be assembling them all into one big file. I’ve had to go back and relearn InDesign all over again to make the template, but I think I have a handle on it now.
The last book I had read was The Martian, by Andy Weir, and while I liked the movie very much, I loved the book even more. Andy Weir is not afraid to get nerdy and lay out some serious math and I’m here for it. While I started thinking about reading a book by another favorite author, Scott Turow, some of my friends urged me to read another Weir book, Project Hail Mary, and I am so glad I did. I was warned to avoid the spoilers in the movie trailer that is out now, and I’m relieved that I did so. Because Project Hail Mary unfolds like a flower. It begins with the Amnesiac Hero trope, but it serves the book well as the protagonist’s (no, I’m not even going to tell you his name) story is told in parallel, with a series of flashbacks filling in the gaps as his memory returns…slowly.
I honestly can’t tell you too much about this book without spoiling it. But I will say this: If you liked The Martian, you will love Project Hail Mary. I love the problem solving, the humanity of the protagonist, flawed though he may be, and a satisfying conclusion that didn’t feel rushed, a trait that is more and more common these days. Oh, and the audiobook reader, Ray Porter? He kills it. Great job.
Three days preparing for students to start school. Three days.
Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It isn’t. I’m just glad I went in last week to get started because I’m still not done. On Monday, all one thousand or so of us teachers congregated in the auditorium at the high school and listened to the superintendent talk for two hours. Well, I assume someone listened to him. I didn’t. I tried to listen but he couldn’t figure out how to talk into the microphone he clipped on. He walked around, gesticulated a lot, and from his tone, I think he was excited. But I couldn’t make out much of what he said. Everyone who spoke into the microphone at the podium were crystal clear. Unfortunately, that portion of the program was only about 20 minutes.
After catching a ride with my principal back to my school ( I hitched a ride there with my friend and neighbor Amber) I ate my lunch and had a whole 30 minutes to continue to unpack and situate my room, before–aw, you guessed. A staff meeting.Two and a half hours of presentation and information overload. After 90 minutes, it was all just bouncing off. Fortunately they gave us all a digital copy of the presentation with links to the important documents. The hard wooden furniture in B128 used to be in the library. I recognized it right away. It did quite a number on my back after two and a half hours. The library, on the other hand, has some nice, comfortable chairs. Probably not enough to seat the entire staff, though. At the end of the meeting, I got to see one of my old students who is now an assistant principal. That doesnt’ seem quite possible, but there you go.
By the end of the meeting, I had about an hour to work in my classroom. I was beat.
On the second day, we began with–aw, come on, you’re too good at this game–a meeting. A training, really, in how to use our new textbooks. The school system hasn’t adopted a math text in, let me count here, 16 years. But now we are using RevealMath, which includes both consumables and digital content. They are allegedly aligned with Indiana standards, but my very first search proved that wrong. Prime factorization is kind of my thing. My entire Solution Squad book starts out with prime numbers, then moves on to prime factorization, then solving proportions with simplifying ratios, which is done with prime factorization. It’s incredibly useful. Well, in Indiana, it’s a 7th grade standard, but it was nowhere to be found in the textbook that we are being given. It’s part of the 6th grade course. And we were told that we were only allowed access to the coursework that we actually teach, so the 6th grade book is not available to me, as I teach 7th and 8th grade. Now, you might think that something like that would upset me, but it does not. That just means I get to use my Solution Squad materials! It’s actually cause for celebration. What did make me a little angry, though, is that the filter I applied for my search was by Indiana standard, and lo and behold, it’s the old standards, not the 2023 ones. For a big company like McGraw-Hill, that’s just lame. At least I got some time in my rom after lunch.
The third day began with–no, you really don’t have to guess–a meeting. We had a math department meeting to talk about scope and sequence, distribution of the new books (which hadn’t even arrived yet), and who was teaching what courses. It was necessary to have, but holy moley, so many meetings. I would love to say that I spent the rest of the day preparing, but the books came in around lunchtime, and after I devoured my steak burriito and Mexican Coke from Ricky’s Taqueria (the best little hole in the wall in all of Elkhart), I hauled 200 books in two loads on my cart up from the library. I got all four bulletin boards done, but there’s a pile of totes in my room that have nowhere to go.
I probably should mention that there is not one cubic inch of storage available in my classroom. The teacher who had my room last year passed away from cancer, toward the end of the year, and all of her stuff is still in the cabinets. They’re still trying to figure out what to do with all of it. In the meantime, I’ll just stack my totes in a corner.
I would normally have been done with everything by now, but with all the heavy physical stuff, my back was warning me to slow down and take breaks. Getting older sometimes isn’t that much fun.
The kids are coming today, and I can’t wait to meet them!
