SomethingTober #02 - Perfecto Mexico

SomethingTober continues with another Power Universe hero: Perfecto Mexico, leader of The Three Team!

Alright, look, I was like 9 or 10 years old when I made him up. There were a lot of rando-as-shit characters in my old supers universe. In hindsight, he probably seems like he'd be a good fit for Krazy Komix, but he wasn't actually a silly character in the comics. In fact, he was one of the most powerful heroes of the Power Universe, noted as being the 4th strongest hero on the planet!

Perfecto Mexico's "gimmick" was that he had an amazing six, count 'em, six super powers! Superhuman strength, elasticity, size-alteration, electrokinesis, flight, and... I think force fields? Or was it invisibility? I know he was also super tough to go along with his strength, but I think that was just a given. Anyway, he was pretty extra, especially for one of my early Power Universe characters. His teammates, Fly Solider and Jaguar, were the second and third strongest heroes, behind Fabulous Five member Brawn, and as such, they battled against some of the biggest, baddest villains in the setting. Even though most Power Universe teams had no problem combining heroes of wildly varying power levels, from street level to continent wreckers, the Three Team as a unit just fought on another level.

Unfortunately, they didn't last in continuity. To my shame, at that particular age, I thought nothing of making "rip-offs" of other people's characters, be they established in official publications, or from the sketch books of friends. While not all my oldest characters were rip-offs, a fair chunk of them had very blatant "inspirations", and the Three Team consisted of character designs I stole from another friend during one summer where we were drawing together. In my tepid defense, I was a dumb kid, and I just drew whatever I felt compelled to draw, and I thought his designs were cool, so I drew them myself as well. Later, I tweaked them a bit, and drew them in a comic as my own versions of the characters. I later found out he was pretty annoyed by that.

A few years later, I grew a guilty conscience over it. It was one thing to make my own analogues of Ice-Man or Spider-Man or Dracula, but I came to resent how many of my oldest characters were just obvious knock-offs, and I felt particularly bad about ripping off friends of mine. This led to an attempted "soft reboot" of the Power Universe, in which I vented all such characters from continuity due to a big Crisis Event or one of the big wars, or something, leaving only the non-rip-off heroes left. I'd like to say I never ripped anything off so blatantly again, but, well, there's still plenty of post-reset heroes you could probably trace some obvious influences from. Still, I have managed to not rip-off any character ideas from friends since!

Now I just call them "homages"! :V

I did have an idea to quasi-revive the character in another setting with a completely different look as "Captain Mexico" or "Aztlan" but that was one of many series that never got past the notes stage.