Biology 101

I finally got The Millenials in the mail! The disc sat around for a bit and I kept forgetting to take it out with me. I guess I was a little afraid of the commitment and kept thinking I was going to go back in and edit things some more. Then I remember the Magus Council motto. "Finish it!" So it's off. Hopefully I'll have copies in hand by Dragon*Con.
Now, a little story about the origins of the The Millenials.
It's the 80's, my sophomore year of high school, which makes if 1984, since school has just started. I'm sitting in Biology 101, which is dreadful boring and made even more so by the dried up little man teaching the class, when my best friend in the world Travis O'Neill turns to me and asks "If you can have any superpower you want, what would it be?"
As many of you know, this is a standard question among geeks. It doesn't sound profound or out of the ordinary, though I think that's a deception. It is a very profound and revealing question. I'm sure Travis and I had this discussion before, we had been friends since seventh grade, but I don't recall the question begin asked so specifically. It caused me to stop and think carefully about my answer. I let my mind conjure up an image I found desirous, appealing, enchanting. Some channel of communication was open that day between my self and unconscious, my body and my mind. I saw images of young, lithe athletes contorting with improbable agility. Body's that moved with grace and ease, folding and extending in gravity's embrace. I saw scenes from my favorite martial arts films, the flips and flying feet, my favorite wrestlers, the high fliers and risk takers, and even some flashes of Lion-O in his feline grace. All this raw date translated quite elegantly into a character with animalistic characteristic, something ferral and powerful, lethal and predatorial. Strength, speed, agility, senses, all heightened like a jungle cat. And of course, augmented healing. This was very important and prove to be even more telling and crucial than my original visions of balletic superhuman agility.
A name followed soon after. I always hesitate to say where I got the unusual moniker of Tiger Nightfight. Perhaps I'll give a prize if anyone can guess correctly.
And all this occurred rather quickly.
Travis answered the question for himself and created an alter ego for himself, somewhat in contrast in several ways to Tiger Nightfight. The two formed the nucleus of a super team based largely on people we know and ideas that we had been entertaining for some time. Since we identified so strongly with these characters, in fact, they were us, with our own lives as the background and foundation, we nutured them and invested time and energy into them. This was the first idea we seriously considered turning into a comic book. This was our flag ship, our X-Men, our Justice League. A world grew around them, slowly but surely.
Time passed and Travis and changed. We grew older and our lives became more sophisticated. I moved away and we grew apart. Our correspondence diminished and then came to a halt. I went to college and exploded into a millions pieces, all fighting for escape and peace. But these characters never left me. I continued to nuture and develop them. They proved resilient to change, and became greater and stronger in my mind. I never let go of the dream they represented, of the first comic book I was going to write. Of course, the only character that's left from the original idea is Tiger Nightfight. It's just as well, the others weren't really mine to use anyway. Oh, the group is very similar to the one we invented in biology those many life times ago. Stands to reason those themes and dynamics are going to show up over and over again in my work. It's it's own animal, though. I completely reinvented the idea after reading the Watchmen in 1990. I'll admit, not shame in that. I'm not trying to write the Watchmen. I know better, but I'd be a poor scholar and a bloody fool if I didn't readdress the way I related to tea genre after reading Moore's book. I reinvented them again in 1999 after a particularly revelatory night watching WWF's Raw is War.
And that's a not too brief story of the origin of the Millenials.
I hope you were paying attention. There will be a quiz.