SHU: Tips for Creating Homage Characters

Useful tips when creating your homage characters:

We’ve mentioned before that when creating characters, you have to come up with ways to make them different from other existing ones. This especially goes for creating homage, or tribute, characters that are based on existing ones. These are useful if you’re doing an exploration series, like “Astro City,” or even a parody book. 

• Develop the basis
• Playing the “What If...?” Game
• Remember the visuals
• ... more Superhero Universe

Kurt Busiek's Astro City: Confession

• Play on an Aspect: Look at the character you’re using for your basis and play up on a particular aspect or two of that character and how it works. For example, Superman’s alien origins or Wonder Woman’s source of powers, or maybe even the ninja aspects of Batman or Daredevil.
  
• Give Them a Different Origin: Your character’s origin could be similar to the source material, or be completely different. Samaritan, the Superman-style character from “Astro City” shown on the left with Confessor, for example, is a human from a dystopian future who gained powers as a side-effect of time traveling, and became its only survivor when he changed history to prevent said future.
• Give Them Different Powers: The powers of your characters could be different than the source materials, either in nature or how they work. Your Superman-character could still have flight and super-strength, but something different other than heat vision and super senses.

• Look at the character you’re using as a basis: Think of how they could be different. Like what if Batman really was a supernatural creature of the night, rather than just pretending to be one? Or what if Superman had been raised by the government to be some type of secret weapon? The possibilities are endless.
• Give Them a Different Personality: Your character could have a completely different personality than his or her inspiration. Marvel’s Quicksilver is a speedster like the Flash, but he’s a complete jerk as opposed to the easy-going Flash. This especially works if you’re doing a parody, like making your character a jerk as opposed to their basis’ do-gooder nature.
• Be Subtle: Unless you’re doing an outright parody, don’t make it too obvious who you’re basing your characters on, even though your readers will figure it out. Your Spider-Man-type character, for example, doesn’t need to have bug-based powers, and your Flash character doesn’t need to get his powers from a bolt of lightning.

• Keep the Costumes Different: When creating the costumes, keep in mind to try make their costumes similar to their source, but still different enough to not look like a complete knock-off. This can include color schemes, symbol placement, and whether or not they have a cape. This can go for names, as well, like using something that starts with ‘S’ for your Superman-character or having the word ‘dark' or 'knight/night’ in your Batman-character’s name.
• Combine Aspects: As mentioned before, you can combine aspects of different characters to create your own. Invincible, for example, has Superman-like powers but has personal problems similar to Spider-Man.