How Nightmare City Came to Be

I don't really have any special drawings to show you today, so here's a story instead!

Every once in a while I do character quizzes on DeviantART. This one in particular just asked you to list characters and say things like which was your favorite, what they'd do in situation x, things like that. One particular question asked what the newest and oldest characters you had were.

My oldest was Cat. He's a character I've never really talked about on this blog; basically he's a cyborg created to fight for the military who eventually turns against their school of thought and goes AWOL. This blog is not about him, but have a picture of him anyway.

^{With and without shirt!}
My newest character at that point was named Lily. She was a character I had created for the game Champions Online, who I named and backstory'd in about three minutes. That backstory was "She fell into a vat of vats and decided to fight crime." Not very good, even if it is supposed to be funny. And here was the first picture I drew of her!

^{There are a lot of superfluous knickknacks on her costume that got removed later.}
After drawing that picture, I was thinking about Lily a lot. Then, I saw on the list of characters I had, "Lily" was next to "Chekhov."

At that point, Chekhov was a throwaway character concept I once had and basically a play off of Chekhov's gun. But for whatever reason, seeing his name next to Lily's sparked something in my mind, and Lily suddenly had a black market arms dealer on her side. But it didn't stop there--after adding him to Lily's backstory, I wanted to explore Chekhov more. Soon he was a Russian refugee and a superhero/vigilante in his own right.

And it just sort of spiraled from there.

Hopefully I can get a better picture of Chekhov up here soon so I can tell you all more of the story!