Around Bear Corner takes place in a larger universe, and sometimes I go overboard. One of the bits of backstory is that the 80s and 90s looked a lot like Marvel comics.Because I love Marvel comics. Unfortunately, the superhero team that's actually relevant wasn't quite super enough, so I ended up sketching out a proper Avengers stand-in. I have no idea what their name would be, but they formed in 1981 and probably disbanded by the mid 90s.Front and center, we have

Shooting Star: A Captain America stand-in. Since Steve from Here and Queer is also a Captain America expy, I need something to differentiate this guy. Right now he has a gun. Maybe he's a bit jingoistic, who knows?

Steel Rocket: The armored tank and smart guy. I based him off the Mark-I armor to give him more personality.

Stormhammer: Not Thor. A godling who pops up throughout the decades of superheroes. He was probably born around 1900, so he's rather young. The hammer bit might change, but I really like hammers.

And from the left:

Orchid: The hot chick who has no real powers.

Doctor Titan: I really like Giant Man and the Wasp, but I already had a big guy / tiny woman duo elsewhere in the 80s. Then I remembered there's nothing more Marvel than multiple Giant Mans running around.

Pixie: Basically just the Wasp.

Dark Angel: This reskinned Spider-woman is an old character. I originally created her as a reskinned Spider-woman 20 years ago for a New-Mutants-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off fic I was tossing around. So when I needed a Spider-woman, I called her up.

Bombshell: Is this character green? Does she have a radiation-related origin? I have no idea. I just really like She-Hulk.

To the right:

Victorious: The first character who is actually still around in Around Bear Corner (she shows up in chapter 5 or 6) I gave her a goofy face mask for this incarnation.

Stranger: A gemental pretending to be an android. This guy is problematic. Are they the first gemoid? They are throwing my world-building into disarray. Eh, I'll figure it out later.

Weaponsmith: The father of Clint from Around Bear Corner. I couldn't come up with a costume so he kinda just got a sucky Hawkeye ripoff. He was on a team with Steve back in the 60s, so I guess he's in his forties here? He's also the token black guy. Yes, I made sure there was only one. Because these are Avengers.

Tempest: So my first superhero team that I made when I was 12 are in this setting, but some of the ancillary characters got dropped. Tempest existed in a single drawing, and was reworked into Alchemy, who has a direct lineage to the Abigail Queen character I used in a bunch of comics back in the day. So when shuffling characters around, I made Tempest Abigail's mother, and the sister of Gemagick (Weaponsmith's wife). And when I needed a Scarlet WItch that was sassier than Gemagick, Tempest was there. What's great is she also embodies the main trait of the Scarlet Witch, which is being crazy.

So that's Earth-ABC's Mightiest Heroes. What will they get up to? I'll figure that out if I ever actually write a story set back then.

I have tentative campaign rules for Gemfarers, which required coming up with recruitment rules. How best to give players a meaningful choice without stifling them? I settled on grouping everyone into three groups (because the game uses six-sided die): Humans, Fae, and Other. This provided for random chance but still allowing the player some control over how their army looked. Here's all the freaks of Gemfarers (which coincidentally exist in Around Bear Corner, since they share a universe).

Humans (and derivatives)

Humans (Earth): The people of Earth. They recently learned about gemfaring after the Fae Realm was rediscovered in the 90s. According to faeries, the magic of Earth humans tastes different. Faeries can tell which humans were born on Earth by their scent.

Humans (Fae-born): Humans who were born in the Fae Realm. These humans are descended from humans who either wandered into the Fae Realm or were kidnapped. There is no real difference between them and their Eath-born counterparts, except how their magic "tastes" to faeries.

Human Furries: Unlike Faerie furries, who get their forms from a god, human furries rely on gem technology. Faeries do not consider them to be real furries, and treat them as they would any other humans.

Mutants: The ESPers of Gemfarers. They have inborn magic abilities similar to those granted by gems. For millennia, they were rare, but the event that caused the rediscovery of the Fae Realm in the 90s also increased the birthrate of new mutants.

Numen: A small, isolated ethnic group where everyone is a mutant. Inspired by Marvel's Inhumans, because as annoying as they were I always liked the idea of a society of super-jerks. All numen wear masks, another reference to the Inhumans.

Godlings: Long-lived, divinely-touched humans created to serve the gods. They live in the Fae Realm in a Warcraft-inspired region. A few of them are active on Earth as superheroes because why not?

Orcs: I took a long time figuring out how to add orcs to gemfarers. Eventually I made them a cursed group of humans. They live in the Warcraft-inspired region and are few in number. Their culture is very Scottish.

Lichlings: The counterpart to Warcraft's forsaken. They are created by daemons from human corpses, but are very much alive and not rotting. Their faces resemble skulls, with sunken, empty eye sockets. A small, glowing gem sits in one of the eye sockets.

Faeries

Faeries: Horns, pointy ears, and tails. Faeries feed off magic (and food). They were the first gemfarers. Faeries do not have names for genders and instead use "orii" (smaller) and "ogre" (larger). These words can also apply to the two types of faeries. The normal-sized are orii, while the rare few who choose to magically increase their size are ogres. Ogres are powerful gemfarers who absorb enough magic and grow to nine feet tall. Ogres are usually fat, but rather than the fat organ, most of their mass comes from a magic-absorbing organ that conveniently behaves exactly as fat would on a similarly-proportioned humanoid that wasn't scaled up. For narrative convenience.

Furries: Furries come in a variety of forms, which conveniently translate to the English anthro, feral, taur, naga, kemonomimi. One of the rules of Gemfarers is that names should be simple whenever possible, so why not use the real-life furry terms? Most furries follow the goddess Ligra, a tiger-headed serpentine dragon. Furries can be ogres, and a rare few are pixies, a very orii form that is only a few inches tall. Pixies are mostly small religious sects, as it is very hard to live at that size.

Elves: An off-shoot of faeries covered in velvet fur and with three fingers and shorter, monkey like tails. Elves adapt to their environment. You can usually tell where an elf is from by their fur or unique features.

Duegers: Basically dwarves, with mouse-like features. Like all faeries, they can be ogres, sometimes simply increasing their height to a respectable 6 feet, sometimes more. Very rarely, a dueger will grow themselves to eighteen feet, becoming sedentary mountain kings.

Gnomes: Orii monkey people. They can often be found living with dwarves, but also far from civilization or in Lichling lands.

Others

So. Gemfarers.

I first started coming up with the idea of Gemfarers in 2015. I have been playing table-top miniature games since 2004, and longed for a proper Warcraft miniature war game. That never happened, so I made my own game. I wanted to blend the Warcraft aesthetic with magical girls and dapper outfits.

Originally, Gemfarers was set in space, hence the name. Adventurers would travel the stars using gems. I eventually decided to set it on a single fantasy world, and made it a parallel to Earth so I could create a queer-friendly fantasy world without losing queer history. Also superheroes.

The main theme of Gemfarers is having one large general commanding squads of petite troops. This is inspired somewhat by Warcraft, where commanders are typically scaled up to ridiculous heights. It's also inspired by my just liking size differences. The squad size was set at four, to mimic the five-man band trope. For example, in Sailor Moon or Samurai Troopers, there was a main team of five, with a further team of four that the leader would also fill the fifth slot for.

The general (called a gemaster) has a special assistant unit. This was originally lifted from another war game, Wargods of Aegyptus, where the priest unit existed solely to give buffs (and command archers, if you're short on commanders). I changed assistants over time to be more of a romantic partner, like Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon, or Pearl from Steven Universe.

I wrote up a draft of the rules over the course of a year, going through numerous iterations of how special attacks worked. They were always based on DiC Sailor Moon rules, where attacks usually had three words in their name, starting with the planet. Eventually I settled on a system where the first two words have no game effect. The finalized special powers use the naming scheme [Gem] [Talisman] [Power], where power is one of the special skills available in the rules. For example, one gemfarer's special attack might be "Jade Sword Slash".

There were a lot more pit stops along the way, but that's the gist of how I got from writing up Warcraft army lists to having the skeleton of a magical girl war game.

So I finally have a real website to house all my projects. Mainly my comic, Around Bear Corner, which will update very sporadically, I'm sure. Eventually I hope to get the Gemfarers section set up as well.

Looking back at websites past, my first was on Webcomics Nation (Miss you, Joey). I had a comic strip that ran for two whole weeks. I've had a Tumblr for ages, where I've posted random art and comics over the decades. At one point I tried hosting a comic on Wordpress, though I think I gave up and just dumped it on Tumblr.

This site is run on ComicControl, which is way more streamlined than Wordpress. The about page is literally just the built-in gallery template.

Here's to webcomics! May they never update on a schedule.