What Type Characters Am I Missing..or am I?

 

The one thing that I find interesting is that some people will comment (never here on CBO, however) that I should have more "black" characters.

I have plenty, thank you. I grew up in an area that had Italian, West Indian, African, German as well as Indian and Pakistani families. I went to school with them so to me including people from these "ethnic" groups is natural. The funny side of this is that the persons stating I need more "black" characters has obviously never read a Black Tower comic!

The other comment is that I should have "a gay presence" in my comics. Do I laugh now? My very first comic had two gay characters and I was told, after explaining this, that "you can't tell they are gay!" Exactly. Do I need to show them having gay sex, kissing a member of the same sex or wearing a big  badge with "a gay" written on it?  In fact, one of my first Slice-of-Life comics was Liz and Jen: A Coming Out Story which was drawn with the assistance of the legendary Ben Dilworth -it's available at the online store!

In The Green Skies, even more than in Return of the Gods, the roll of international characters is massive -hey, we even had some posted to Antarctica. I like the idea of someone in Finland reading through the books and finding out there are Finnish super heroes!  The same with China, Hong Kong and Singapore.  Someone in Kenya or Nigeria or South Africa -same thing. You cannot have a story that has world-wide repercussions and have just "white" super heroes -even in the UK the "ethnic" backgrounds of characters are African, Indian and Chinese, etc.

Task Force Europe was an idea put together for Fleetway but which never went beyond the

first rough issue but, as was pointed out by two people at Fleetway, would have provided great licensing opportunities in Europe. Then someone pointed out that the old days were gone and the creator/artist-writer team would own the rights under European law. Oops.

D-Gruppe was Germany's first super heroes and was on the books for Bastei to publish until they were bought out and every project was dumped. As a kid in a quiet rural village, Dalborn, I often thought about German heroes and why they should exist and so that group came to be. 

When I was asked by Diamond Comics in India to put together a comic featuring Indian super heroes I produced a 44 pager Heroes of India featuring the South Asian Task Force then they decided they did not want to go ahead so that comic itself has never appeared -perhaps a tidy up and a one shot in a future Black Tower Adventure?

I certainly want to at least present the first story of Task Force Europe that I wrote and pencilled and was inked by John (Sepp) Schiltz.

The point, yes it has been very long winded, is that it does not need in your face publicity or imagery to have a gay character. The same applies to people from different ethnicities. These are characters interacting and going about their business just like any normal human being without making a big fuss over what they are.