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CrazySugarFreakBoy!

Member Since: Sun Jan 04, 2004
Posts: 1,235
In Reply To
HH

Subj: Heh ... I wasn't even thinking about those ...
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 at 05:53:39 am EDT (Viewed 412 times)
Reply Subj: Okay, I never seriously expected anyone to find an actual use for [former poster's spoiler items]
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 at 05:11:45 am EDT (Viewed 2 times)

Previous Post

A use for Finny's retractible high-heeled pneumatic combat boots!

... Although, now, I'll totally have to reference them.
Really, this was more about reconciling some gaps that had emerged in April's character, since I started writing her.
The gecko-gloves were inspired by actual scientific discoveries of ways in which humans might soon be able to climb walls like geckos, by using gloves which emulate the geometry of geckos' fingerprints.
From there, I used this as a springboard for April to live out a homage to Spider-Man, but even though I based a lot of April's character on being kind of a female equivalent to Peter Parker, there began to emerge ways in which April was fundamentally different from Peter and Spidey both - in part because she was also based a lot on Mary Jane Watson, and also due to the fact that creating a female equivalent of Peter actually results in a character who is almost the opposite of Peter in a number of ways, ironically enough.
The most obvious one is that teenage boys get bullied for being too skinny, but teenage girls get shunned for being too fat, so in order to preserve April's full figure as a superhero, I had to find ways in which she could credibly use her weight to her advantage, and that's pretty much exactly the opposite of being an acrobatic wall-crawler, as Epitome so astutely observed.
I've wanted to get April back into the superhero game for a while now, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that those attributes of the Groovy Gecko-Gal would run counter to April's strengths, which manifested in April's ambivalence about suiting up again.
As a Groovy Grasshopper-Gal, though, she'd finally be able to be a high-flying, (literally) ass-kicking superhero, for all the reasons that Epitome correctly outlined - and also, for the fact that "Grasshopper" is a call-back to David Carradine's character in Kung Fu, likewise a martial artist.
And since it's long been in April's nature to be sort of a "work in progress," in terms of choosing how to define herself, rather than retconning her Gecko-Gal past away, I can show her transition into being a Grasshopper-Gal as a sign of her growth, albeit aided by her friends (and getting by with a little help from your friends is just fine in my book).
It all came together for me when I saw the following scan from Flex Mentallo (bottom of the page):