Monthly Archives: July 2010

Sometimes regionally-themed characters can be great (hello Alpha Flight!) and sometimes they can blow chunks (hello Great Lakes Avengers!), but therein lies your challenge for this week: Create a character (or characters) based on the Southern United States, the fabled Dixieland of old, stretching from Louisiana to South Carolina, from Florida to Virginia, and all those rolling lands of gentility in between.

Buddy John Hartwell had a group of villains set in an alternate universe where the South won the Civil War, and it was a real hoot. I suspect that prompted him to suggest this idea and I am glad he did! The Sketch of the Day for today featured Gumbo, just as an example of something along the lines of what I am thinking, a character with Southern roots whose public identity is linked to their home in some way.

The rules are the same as usual:

• All entries must be posted to a publicly accessible server like the UGO forums, PhotoBucket.com, ImageShack.com, or what have you;
• A link to the JPG or PNG (please, no BMPs, they're too big) hosted on that server;
• Next Monday I will pick the winner, the image that best conveys the concept of a character from the US South, and its creator will win a choice of either any item or any portrait to be included in the final HeroMachine 3 version.

Good luck everyone!

Edited To Add for Clarity:The South isn't a list of states, it's not borders on a map, and it's not the Confederacy. It's a culture, based in a geographic area yes, but much more than that. It's gentility and manners and steel magnolias and chivalry and heat and mint juleps and sweet iced tea and race relations written right into your bones. Worrying about whether a STATE is in The South or not is to miss the point entirely.

Cowboys are not Southern. Ted Turner's TBS network, while based in Georgia (which IS Southern), is not Southern itself. Cattle rustling is not Southern. Dallas is not Southern. Tex Mex is not Southern. Pizza with artichokes on it is not Southern. This isn't a "Civil War" contest, it's a REGIONAL CULTURE contest, and the regional culture in question is THE SOUTH.

If you want to enter someone called The Texas Tornado, go right ahead and staple a copy of the Articles of Confederation to his forehead if it makes you happy, but I'm telling you right now he's going to lose.

For my money, accounting for Veronica's scream of outrage posed the most difficult challenge in the panel for Caption Contest 80:

I thought the following six people did the best job of accounting for all of the various bits of the image, while managing to make it funny as well. Great job!

Vote for as many of these as you think are worthy of a win, and click on any image to see it at the original, larger size. The panel with the most votes as of whenever I check it next Monday will win for its creator the choice of either any item, or a portrait, to be included in the final release of HeroMachine 3.

Good luck!