Who inspired your avatar?

[Renegade]

This question gets asked every once in a while. I've answered it before, but for completeness' sake:

Renegade is based on an old superhero RPG character I played throughout the '80's. He had a high tech electrically charged quarter staff that broke down into two hand held battle staves, almost like an amalgam of the Tim Drake Robin and Nightwing weapons. Although he and his weapons predate both of those DC character concepts by many years, there is actually a lot of connectedness between Renegade and Dick Grayson going back to when I first created the character (a fellow gamer asked if the drawing I did of him was supposed to be one of those new Robin designs) all the way up to when Dick Grayson adopted the Renegade (!) identity in his book a couple of years ago.

Must be why I'm so fond of Dick Grayson.

[style]

Batman/Casey Jones/DC's Static

[detourne_me]

detourne_me is kind of based on the X-Statix U-Go Girl, and possibly a bit of Vertigo (from the Marauders) and Scarlet Witch. oh, and circus acrobats.

[BentonGrey]

Haha.......Aquaman........yeah...a little bit.

[Uncle Yuan]

Batman/Casey Jones

Casey Jones ftw!

I tried to dress up as Casey Jones for a Con, but everyone thought I was Jason from Friday the 13th :(

[GhostMachine]

My avatar is a tricky subject, because the av pic I'm using at the moment isn't the "true" GhostMachine - its my City of Heroes character GhostMachine, and the "true" GhostMachine was the Freedom Force skin pic I used to use. I've been meaning to do a new skin of the Freedom Force\FFvTTR version, but haven't gotten around to it.

The CoH character's appearance is partially influenced by the Shadow (ie, the hat and face covering on most of his costumes and the trenchcoat on the level 40 outfit), but that version of GhostMachine used to be a scientist working on a device using tech cobbled from two different CoH villain groups. He suffered severe damage from exposure to the device's power source and had to be turned into a scientist to save his life. He's an Electric\Devices Blaster with the Stealth pool (Stealth, Grant Invisibility, and Phase Shift) and Munitions Mastery epic power pool.

The "real" GhostMachine is more or less a cross between Batman, Iron Man and The Vision. He is a wealthy inventor (but, unlike Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark, he didn't inherit his money) who got fed up with seeing too much crime and decided to do something about it. He wears a suit of high tech armor that boosts his strength, lets him fly and shoots energy beams from the gauntlets and a concealed projector on the helmet's forehead with various gadgets concealed inside the belt and hidden compartments and uses customized shuriken. He has fairly decent detective skills (although, he's not as good as Batman or Sherlock Holmes) and could give Tony Stark a run for his money as an inventor, but he's a fairly weak hand to hand combatant.

In case you're wondering where the Vision comes into the mix, the armor is designed to make him look somewhat like an armored humanoid instead of someone wearing armor, he has a supernatural motif, and due to an accident while on a mission early in his career he gained the ability to become intangible, which is only real super-power. However, unlike the Vision he can't do the disruption attack thing and he can't become diamond-hard, just intangible and its all or nothing - he turns completely intangible, and can't limit it to just one body part.

Both the CoH and FF\FFvTTR versions of GM share two things (well, really three, if you count color scheme.....): they both use gadgets and both use a base of operations hidden underneath a supposedly haunted abandoned factory.

I plan on eventually developing the Golden Age version of GhostMachine, who will more or less be a cross between the Shadow, the Green Hornet, and Batman, with a little but of the Phantom thrown in.

P.S. Bit of trivia: one of my original online names (I went by two other names before GhostMachine, but the other two names were used both at the same time) was Revenant71 (long story, but I had (well, technically still have, but I don't play anymore) a Shadowrun character (Street Shaman - Wolf Totem) named Revenant and the 71 is from the year I was born), and I did preliminary work on a character named Revenant similar in physical appearance to the CoH version of GhostMachine, but never fully developed him. The character was much darker in tone, and was sort of a cross between the Crow, the Punisher and Doctor Who! I am considering reviving that character at some point, but will have to come up with a new name as there is (or was), I believe, an online comic called The Revenant (I think it was originally called The Spook, or something else, but they had to change it - probably due to the (now deceased) Batman villain - and we already have the skinner-mesher by that name here.

Yeah, I know I'm long winded.  :P

[Glitch Girl]

Hmmm...

The Legion of Net.Heroes was a group of amature writers who had created their own universs which parodied much of comicdom.  I discovered them on usenet quite by accident while in college and decided I wanted to write something, but for that I needed an avatar.  The charter said you should create a character that reflected something about yourself "...so if you have the personality of a limp asparagus, you should be Limp Asparagus Lad" and so on.

At the time I was having... odd luck with technology. The timing was apropo, and thussly, Glitch Girl was born -  a less than confident character with a bit of "everyman" thrown in trying to make sense of erratic powers.

Glitchie's look was inspiried in part by Pulp Adventures in general (cool outfits and useful too), and a little bit of backlash at the "Bad Girl" trend that was very popular at the time.  Plus I like pockets and spandex don't have pockets.  :)

[El Condor]

El Condor is my original City of Heroes avatar.  He is a unique hero, but probably traces his lineage to the minority mutant-class status assigned to the super-beings of X-Men lore.  Creating him was a fun way to continue the working-through process that most bi-racial minorities such as me labor at.  Like me, he's a Chinese/Colombian-American; not white, yet neither wholly Asian nor wholly Latino.  When selecting the nature of Condor's origin, I chose mutant origin, and his personal struggles are much like those of Marvel's mutants; a constant outsider, not entirely belonging to any one community except that of his fellow mutants. In trying to stay with this idea, I gave him what is considered one of the "odd-ball" power sets in the City of Heroes game: the ability to project and shoot sharp, toxic spines from all over his body. The name is straight-forward: the Condor is the national bird of Colombia, and "El Condor" sounded to me like a sleek, cool, and original name for a super-hero.

EC

[psychopanda]

PsychoPanda was a normal, mild-mannered guy whose doorbell rung one morning. Upon investigation, he discovered someone had mysteriously left a box at his door. Opening the package, he found a black and white costume...and his wacky adventures went on from there! 'Panda has the powers of super leaping, weirdness magnet, extraordinary luck, and agility.

The character was inspired by some of my favorite comic creators, Steve Ditko, Keith Giffen, and Ben Edlund. His origin is taken from a comic I started at one time.

[Spring Heeled Jack]

Captain America and Spider-Man!!

[lugaru]

Mine is a mess...

Basically I used to listen to stories of the Loup Garou (which I processed as Lugaru) and loved the name, and in my big role playing days where I was almost always the DM Lugaru would often be an NPC villain capable of slicing time and space with his claws besides performing some other cool tricks... like wolverine but 90% shaman and 10% berzerker badboy.

Then SYN released a nice logo for FREEDOM REBORN villains, people started asking who is a villain on this forum so I created my own Lugaru avatar... a mexican dude with an evil nagual (animal spirit) inside him. The guy is inherently good (used to be a political radical and petty thief) but has a major streak for magical mischief. On the other hand he avoids violence, since that makes the nagual stronger... so he has been turning a bit into a hero the more I think of it. That and I have a "hero" version called Xilam, although his powers are more like Page Guthrie, in other words he can break through his skin into the shapes of monsters from Mexican folklore. When not in a beast shape he's a competent shaman and magic wielder.

edit: any one else curious about Phantom Eyebrow?

[Midnight]

Phoenix

you in a green spandex suit is a sight that should not be seen by mortal man

And on fire, don't forget on fire.

[The Phantom Eyebrow]

I always like these threads.

My character evolved because I had to come up with a name in order to post here (I was playing FF long before I even knew there was a community).  Once the name was in place I wanted to create a herofile for the character.  For a while he was running around in a Moon Knight mesh.  The look is entirely down to the creative talents of various people in the community who have taken on board the character and done some top-notch skins for TPE with only the vaguest of instructions on my part. 

The powers evolved gradually.  I had thought of trying to use FFX to have an Inner Eyebrow, where TPE could release a powerful Eyebrow entity that could cause great damage while he would be rendered temporarily vulnerable.  I also thought that he might teleport by detaching his eyebrow, throwing it like a grenade and then reforming where it landed.  I decided to give up on all this as it was too silly.

The powers are still largely based on clumsy puns on phantasmality or eyebrowy-ness but they do form a slightly logical whole now; something along the lines of Microwave or Adam Zorn or the Vision I suppose.  Temperament/personality wise I suppose he's a cross between Minuteman, The Watcher and Father Ted.  There's probably some other influences in there too.

[BlueBard]

Me.

The name hearkens clear back to my early days on AOL.  I like music, I occasionally fancy myself a poet and a storyteller, I like Medieval/Renaissance stuff, and I like the color Blue.  For a long time it was my preferred nickname on any forum.

Then came the Fiction Challenges, and for one of them I had to come up with a sort of origin for this guy.  I decided that he was a 'sono-empath': someone who could manipulate sound in order to alter the emotional states of people as well as to produce devastating sonic vibrations.  He's also a sort of swashbuckler, an amateur detective, a Jack-of-many-trades and master of none.

The look I credit to Glitch Girl, who once drew a Timm-style avatar for me.  While I don't use it often anymore it's still my favorite.

[Tomato]

My avatar just sort of evolved from my n00bish stupidity, I think. I was involved in a Kingdom Hearts RPG, and we had a forum on there called OOC, or "Out of Character", which was sort of like our "Randy's Abattor" which included things like fights between giant Teddy Bears and hand puppets, torture with cookies, and the like. And, similar to MJB, I was killed very often. In my brilliance, every time this occured I would "Sit up and eat a tomato" and then respond by killing whoever killed me. Thus, the nickname attached itself to me.

Later, in that same rpg, it became kind of a fad to have characters having conversations, so I would have my two (You'd know them as Kid Rocket and Ch'nybe) having conversations, and I eventually added myself, as Tomato, to argue with them.

At about the same time I became friends with Kirk Sigmon, who had taken himself, under his Helios SN, and several fake characters to create what he called "Vs" He'd intended them as scripts for little cheapo flash movies, but he was lazy so he ended up posting them as they were. Each character was identified by their graal head(graal was/is basically a LoZ:A Link to the Past MMO), followed by their name. I thought this was cool, not knowing what the game was, so I made my own head, a tomato with a face. Then when I found out about the game, I made a sheet of the head, submitted it, and looked for an appropriate body. Despite my attempts at adding green to anything, I found the best-looking match for the head was Black and red Armor. I've tried many different modifications to the thing, but if you compare the original drawing with my current design, they're still almost identical.

As for the powers, my SN somewhere was "Tomatosfromhell" oweing to the fact that tomato was taken for some reason. So I just gave him flame powers at the time, and haven't ever changed it. I've thought about switching to Plant powers a few times, because that would at least make sense with the head, but I like flames more.

[Flying_Infant]

Not counting the Sinfest picture I'm currently using....

I have no idea where the whole "Flying Infant" name even came from, it was years and years ago I started using it in chat, and it stuck.

As for what inspired it, I dunno that either, though I think I started out as Flying Wolf Pup, and someone made a comment about a flying baby, so I became Flying Infant. *shrugs* maybe.

As for pictures of him, well, both TW and TJ did awesome ones for me, but I always tell people to think of the Van Halen cover. (Though I no longer smoke.)



OH YEAH! And that picture down there too. Darn crazybear. :D

[psychopanda]

*cough*



:P

[AquaSurfer]

mines: silver surfer and aquaman!!!!!!! :cool:

[daglob]

DaGlob was inspired by Plastic Man. Neither Mr. Fantastic nor Elongated Man gave me as much fun as the Plas. I created him in the fourth grade, and totally reimaged him when I got involved in a Champions game. His real name is "Artificial Soldier  Sequence Number 13, Assassin/Infiltration Type , Designation Tankerbogus Mk. 2", aka Boogeyman 2, aka Bogey 2. The Glob prefers Bogey 2. He's one of those government experiments that got away (very, VERY long story involving several years of Champions games).
I had a Blue Light account (K-Mart once had a free internet program-the only really bad thing was the banner that took up a couple inches of screen), and in order to have that I was supposed to get a Yahoo identity (e-mail, chat, so forth). I chose The Glob.

And now he's here.

His power are pretty much like those of the Golden Age Plas, with shape-shifts coming fast and furious during combat.

Funniest thing he ever did in game was turn into a demon and "eat" an unconcious teammate before a group of bad guys could kill him. Then while the villains were all trying to get away, the "demon" got sick and threw the now-concious hero up on them.

It counted as a surpise attack.

[Uncle Yuan]

My avatar is an original Champions character I was playing when I first got into FF and created an account at Freedom Fans.  The character design came from Carravaggio who created my first pic, and all subsequent pics are based on his.  This is good and bad.  Good because it was a great picture and I've had many great variations on it.  Bad because it "looks" nothing like the "real" character, who was supposed to look like the character Egg Shen from Big Trouble in Little China.

The quote under the av suggested itself based on Carravaggio's great-but-wrong drawing.  His design was very monk-like, and since UY is an elderly man that everyone tends to either ignore or underestimate (at least in the game) the quote from Terry Pratchett's The Thief of Time came to mind.  The quote refers to Sweeper, an old man who sweeps up at a Shao-lin type monastery.  When one of the advanced students is disrespectful to Sweeper, he learns the hard way that it was the Sweeper essentially founded the monastery.  Where upon he is reminded of the first rule all students are taught when arriving at the monastery, the so-called "Rule One."

[Silver Shocker]

Batman/Casey Jones

Casey Jones ftw!

True Dat. Love the Jones.

He could probably beat Minuteman in a fight and Batman

Except that nobody can beat Batman.

Yes. Nobody can beat Batman. Except for the characters that have in various DC series.

My avatar was designed as a mix between the Shocker from Spider-Man and Spider-Man's silver spider-armour (not terribly surprising, considering the straightforward name). The personality stems a good deal from myself in general, but I think the SS character as I've sometimes portrayed him owes a lot to Marvel Comics' Darkhawk (particularly how he was written in his own series) and some of the young new blood heroes to spring up lately, such as Gravity and the new Ant-Man (though I havn't actually read the new Ant-Man book so I don't know that for sure, but I get that vibe).

[ow_tiobe_sb]

I'll try to avoid giving away too much about my avatar before I finish the work of fiction I've been writing for some time that...hints at his origins.  The Phantom Bunburyist (who is not to be confused with ow_tiobe_sb, the forum user) is based on (in descending order of direct influence):

1. The concept of "Bunburying," as discussed in Act I of Oscar Wilde's play, The Importance of Being Earnest (oh and, in case you did not catch the reference, "tiobe" is taken from the initial letter of each word in the play's title);

2. Victorian aestheticism (often borrowing from the likes of Ruskin, Pater, and early Yeats, in addition to O.W.), the aphorisms of Oscar Wilde (which TPB often quotes verbatim or tailors to the occasion), and the colonial struggle between Ireland and England;

3. The late 19th-century London dandy, as parodied by Wilde himself (a native Dubliner);

4. Of all people, Black Tom Cassidy (even though TPB is a hero, not a villain): the channelling of blasts through his shillelagh translated into the focusing of energy through the London dandy's cane;

5. Bertie Wooster, the quintessential 20th-century fop invented by the inimitable P. G. Wodehouse.  Lane (a name which also appears in Wilde's play), TPB's gentleman's personal gentleman, is shockingly derivative of Jeeves, Bertie's valet.

When you mash these influences together, you produce The Phantom Bunburyist--masked adventurer, wielder of greenish energy blasts, idle doer of good deeds, epicure extraordinaire, pompous playboy, poetaster, and (formerly) master misdirector of the PALS/LAPSE/GASP threads on various forums--a mysteriously time-displaced Victorian hero constantly coming to terms with life in the 21st century.  Luckily, his partially omniscient valet, Lane, is there to assist/correct/flog him whenever necessary.  His current whereabouts are unknown, having disappeared during a PALS adventure several months ago...

ow_tiobe_sb
Phantom Bunburyist and The Prat in the Hat

[kylepacker]

Lord Humon-Gus is basically a Giant Man, with the insanity of Tiax from Baldurs Gate, coupled with the Ruler type side of Doctor Doom (Humon-Gus has turned a small city into his own country) and he has a few energy based beam powers.

He's essentially a good guy, but doesn't really thank about the consequences of his actions ('I KNOW the citys destroyed, and a hundred people have been buried under rubble, but at LEAST that bank robber has been caught!')

He always shouts too, like Brian Blessed.

[PreRaphaelite]

Well, I haven't a clue to be honest. I'd called myself Preraphaelite on other accounts but didn't really have an idea of an avatar to go with it. In the end I just made something up. The original idea was that Pre-Raphaelite was a base human who gained passive empathy hereditarily through the family line. (Stopping crime? Hah. More like the "So how does this make you *feel*?" Kind of guy). In the end he seems to have very quickly become some sort of clone. Kind of a jump there, but *shrugs* oh well.

Preraph basically just wears normal clothes (I don't really have a fixed design in my head for him, except he may wear green glasses/goggles), and his super powers are passive empathy (if anything). So basically, he's an innocent bystander while you corrupt/save the world.
:mellow:

[XLR8er]

kidflash and cyclops!
dc              marvel

[Tortuga]

About 10 years ago, when Madam T and I started dating, I discovered that she liked turtles.  I would constantly ask her Colombian roommate how to say random words in Spanish, so I asked her how to say 'turtle', which, of course, is Tortuga.  Shortly afterward, I bought Madam T an oil-lamp shaped like a turtle, with the wick sticking out the turtle's shell, so that the turtle looked as if it were on fire.  I used the only other Spanish word I knew (El Diablo, from a Hardy Boys book) and called the lamp "El Diablo Tortuga".

From then on, any PC game I bought I always made an El Diablo Tortuga character.  In a university art class, I made a series of prints for Madam T of turtles, this time more properly named "Tortuga en fuego".

By the time I signed up for the original FF boards, I was already 'eldiablotortuga' on various web accounts/registrations.  I shortened the name to Tortuga when I put together my FF skins site.  Captain Spud originally made non-turtle avatars and skins which were great.  But one day I decided it was time to make Tortuga.  I did some looking up online for patterns of turtle shells and skin and bingo, it was done.

To be honest though, the character really never came alive until I played CoH.  Tortuga became real...although I wasn't able to give him his salmonella attacks like he had in FF :(

[psychopanda]

To be honest though, the character really never came alive until I played CoH.

He was alive to me.  :(

[doctorchallenger]

The name came before the character. "Doctor" comes from the fact that I am a PhD student in history - still; Challenger is lifted from The Justice Machine, the team leader of which is named Challenger. I liked the character and consequently stole the name. 

From there, I decided that "Doctor Challenger" had a golden age ring to it. So I created a Golden Age-esque character to go along with it. Long story short, the backstory borrowed heavilly from Doc Savage's comic appearences, in which he ran around with a magical hood that gave him hyponotic powers, calling himself the Invincible.

[UnkoMan]

Alright, so Unko Man. A lot of people ask me what it even means. Well, it's Japanese for poop.

Here's the story... I had been playing the FF demo for a while and loved it. I could make my own dang super heroes! I looked it up and found that I could add meshes and make my own skins too! Okay, so they were horrible, but whatever. Eventually I found the old official forums. I lurked a bit and decided to become a member, but didn't know what to make for a name. I had created various hero versions of myself before, but none of them were anything that struck a chord too much, so I decided to just whip up something random. A pal who I was talking to online at the time suggested Unko Man, so I said why not? Then I selected a little icon to put by my name. It was a vaugely asian looking man with a goatee.

After that I quickly designed the original hero version. I was young and though "Ha ha, poop powers. How can it lose?" Struck by energy X on the can, Unko Man was born. He was inspired by guys like The Tick, Flaming Carrot, Ambush Bug, and such. Eventually I got tired of just poop and started making different versions of him. Medieval, a giant monster man, a weird little ball guy. Totally random, but the basic grey mask over black, and goatee were always there. Then I decided to go back and redesign the original, when I finally started actually posting instead of just lurking around.

I'd always liked Hourman's look, and the first Unko Man was suppose to have a hood... I thought a cape would be neat, too. But after making him I decided that his original colours (yellow/orange/brown) just weren't cutting it, so I did up a ton of other versions. Still undecided, I figured I could just use all of them. And since I was sick of the poop powers, I said to myself "How about he makes clones with random super powers?" Neat idea. Green and purple have always been my favourite colours, so I picked those for the main fella. The gumball thing... I don't know where that came from. Random brainstorm. It worked.

He was interesting, but there was still something that just wasn't working. He was just this crazy cartoon character basically, but with no real personality. I decided to fully flesh him out. Inspired by a picture of The Black Hood (which I still use as an icon) I redid his look in a more Golden Age feel. I got inspired by Blue Beetle, and Unko Man became a sort of mechanical/chemical idiot savant. A lot more two fisted, also. The gumballs got turned into the insane character from before but now most ineffectual, and Unko proper just became highly eccentric.

Now that I've typed too much, that's where he stands. A real old school hero type. Basically no fantastic powers, but he's a real go-getter. Still, he doesn't lose his edge for oddity. Pwime even designed a great nemesis for me, which I went and meshed into his story. I really love the character now, and think up lots of stuff for his little "world."

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Well the forum name catwhowalksbyhimself was originally used for my email names and was a mistaken attempt to name it after the story "the cat that walked by himself."  Somehow I came up with a totally original avatar idea based on that name, a cat spirit which serves are the collective consciousness of all felines.

More recently, I came up with a dog counterpart which has appeared in PALS a few times, the dogwhocrieswolf.