12.29.08

Guy With Beard and Shavonda

Posted in Tommy Chicago at 7:17 pm by Administrator

These two are probably my favorite supporting-supporting characters, and they were both pretty much happy accidents..have you ever noticed that if someone tells you they had an accident, you automatically assume it was something bad? Is it really fair to the word that we have to qualify it with a word like happy to make it good? Anyway, more on this some other time. Now back to the characters.

I have the memory of a goldfish, so I had to check with Bob for the origin of Guy With Beard and he tells me that GWB was created way way back in the day when we were working on the original (and abandoned) Tommy Chicago mini series.  If there’s one thing I hate to do, it’s naming characters. Heck, I hate naming anything, if I ever have kids they’ll probably be named Optimus Prime and Tommy Chicago.  So I had a misc. character who had a beard and I apparently put in the script that I’d figure out the name of the character later, but we stopped work on that series and I lucked out.

That luck wasn’t to last though, because eventually we started up the ol’ Tommy Chicago bus again and in issue 6 I needed a random guy and Bob drew our old unnamed friend. I was able to avoid naming him again because in the story he wanted to keep a low profile, but I knew deep down time was running out (not really, I just think that sounds dramatic!) In issue 8 we needed a random guy to meet the Chili Monster. And when I saw the finished artwork, who should appear but that guy and his magnificent beard! At that point in my mind at least he became the unluckiest guy in Chilitown. Not only does weird crap keep happening to him, but nobody even knows his name..Not even me! We haven’t done much with him since Future Tommy Chicago blew up his car, but rest assured if the Tommy Chicago universe needs an innocent bystander to have wackiness inflicted upon them, Guy With Beard will be there!

Shavonda is a different story. I didn’t need a throw away character that later stole my heart and became and intricate part of the Tommy Chicago universe. Nope. It was a throw away line. There is a 3 year gap in story time between the end of the first series and the beginning of the second series.  A 3 year gap which is partially covered by 3 years of Tommy Chicago Free Comic Book Day stories, the third issue should be out for FCBD 2009.

Now I don’t know much about kids but I’ve been told they grow up fast. Well I didn’t need that kind of problem with Jimmy. If I were to give TC a moody teenage sidekick the abuse TC heaped upon him would seem deserved, and readers might not be sympathetic towards Jimmy. Then I’d have to set up a 900 number to kill him off, and I honestly didn’t need that kind of stress in my life. So as I was writing issue 1, I decided I would just throw out a random line (lizard men, universal remote, hot dog vendor with a heart of gold) and then promptly forgot about it. Until once again I saw the finished artwork. Where I had expected a random hot dog vendor, Danno had given the world Shavonda.  So far she’s just been seen in that panel in issue 1 and a short story we did to give out at Fallcon, but you’ll be seeing more of her in the future, because as Jimmy says “She’s sassy!”

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