Long John

With this character, we come to the end of our retrospective redesign of characters Josh and I created in our teenage years; however, we’ll be looking at this character for the next few weeks as, once again, both the character’s original designer, Josh Tobey, and I will be redesigning the character of Shockwave, the final member of our superhero team called, alternatively, Cybers, CyberTech (or “Tek”), CyberNet.

These last few weeks have been incredibly busy for me as the school year wrapped up and I had to wade through the grading mire. So, my redesign will be up next week and, until then, we’ll be focusing on Josh’s design, which makes sense since it is his character.

Of the design, he had this to say:

Redesign was pretty straight forward. I thought of him as a conductor. His suit and facial implants bring an old sci-fi element to his design. Metallic and bulky seemed right with his new design.

Shockwave, as a character, was left rather undeveloped. His original design, while as nebulous as the other characters, had a pretty strong aesthetic. He was kind of “the heavy” of the team. He was the most tricked out, technologically speaking, and his power revolved around electricity and electromagnetism. This allowed him to be the only character with ranged attacks built into his power set, being able to fire blasts of electricity from his hands. He was also able to fly. Beyond that, however, he didn’t really have much of a story. I think the closest thing to a backstory we have for him is a tw0-sentence description that alludes to him being a military man who was a POW at some point. To summarize, even though he wasn’t particularly an actual character, he was probably the most fun for us to draw (tubes! chrome! electric sparks!)

This description also notes that “70% of his body is bionics,” and, to be honest, that’s what I remember most about him. Of the team, he was the most extreme case, more man than machine. Kind of like Robocop, I guess (for a bit, he even had a visor very reminiscent of Robocop).

So, like Backfire, Shockwave is ostensibly a clean slate and a redesign can kind of go anywhere.

Since this is Josh’s final contribution to this round of redesigns, I figured I would use this chance to fully embarrass him with even more old drawings of these characters. Created at the same time as the Shockwave drawings above, he apparently went through and drew a standing post and an action pose of each character and, since they’ve all been redesigned, I humbly offer these glimpses into the past to you (and sorry, Josh).