I Must Be Crazy...

As some of you know, April first, aside from being the total pain that is April Fool's Day, is the starting day for two very important events, the first being BEDA, or Blog Every Day April. BEDA is basically where you post a blog daily about anything and everything on your mind. No length requirement, no topic that has to be covered. Just pure and utter brain barf. This will probably be advantageous for me the first couple of days because I'll have topic ideas and things I want to blog about, but as the month goes on, I am going to run out of ideas, trust me.

The second big event that starts on April first is Script Frenzy. Script Frenzy is a bit more rigorous than BEDA, and I'm assuming that it's going to give me a little bit of a harder time (though I've never actually done either BEDA or Script Frenzy before...). Script Frenzy is a program that you compete in and over the course of one month (April), you have to write a script that is at least on hundred pages long. The script can be for a TV show, a stage play, a movie, a comic book, or anything else, really.

For Script Frenzy this year, I am doing a script for a graphic novel. I have always been fascinated by superheroes, and I decided, 'hey, why not have my own?'. So, with that mindset, I set out on a journey to come up with my very own superhero. When creating this hero, I wanted to do something new, something unique, not just the same old, same old. Don't get me wrong, gotta love the classics, who wants to read about a Superman or Batman rip off, right? I finally came to the conclusion that my superhero had to have six key components to even be partially original and my very own:

1) No superpowers! I decided that my superhero was not going to have superpowers because I love superheroes without superpowers (Batman, Rorschach, etc.). I always thought that they were so much more realistic and so much braver than other heroes because they were just average, normal, everyday people who were going out and risking it all to fight crime and save lives.

2) My superhero had to be something besides white. Nothing against white people, I love them dearly, (not to mention I am white), but the whole white superhero thing is overdone. all of the big superheroes are while, and I wanted to add a little color, a little spice, into the mix. This is how I decided that my superhero would be of Hispanic heritage and the comic book would be set in South America. (Not to mention, I love Hispanic names. They are so pretty, and just flow off of the tongue.)

3) My hero was not going to be rich. I'm sorry, Bruce, I love you to pieces, but the whole endless bank account thing may kind of count as a superpower. I wanted my hero to have to deal with real life problems, and I wanted it to be realistic, here again. Realistically, if a person was going out every single night and fighting crime and had a day job, they would be exhausted. They would start slacking on either their job or their hero work, and I'm guessing it'd be the former. Slacking on the job means getting fired or not making a lot of money. That's why I decided to make my character on the poverty line without much to his name.

4) He had to have an arch nemesis. For obvious reasons. How boring would that be without a super villain for my superhero? Anyway, I decided to take the realistic approach on the bad guy, too. The bad guy was not going to be a super genius, he wasn't going to be an unstoppable lunatic; he was just going to be an everyday guy doing extraordinarily bad things. That's why my super villain is a drug lord.

5) He had to have a love interest. That's where my feminist, young, pretty law enforcement officer, Liliana, came into the mix. Where would Superman be without Lois Lane? Spiderman without M.J.? Nite Owl II without Silk Spectre II? Batman without Robin? (Okay, that last one was a joke. I know that Batman and Robin are just friends... for the most part.)

6) Finally, my hero was going to have a dark and conflicted past because he's human, and everyone makes mistakes. I'm not going to go into much detail about this last point because I don't want to give anything away. So, that's my plan for my superhero. I really want both Script Frenzy and BEDA to go well. I am going to try my best to stay on top of them both, but I'm not making any promises because I know how these things generally end up going. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

'Til tomorrow,

--A