AKA
Don’t you wish your Hero was hot like me
I’ve been fiddling with Poser 6 for the past few days with the goal of using it to create superhero portraits for my Mutants & Masterminds game. And it’s coming on very nicely, thank you.
Meet Mercury. She’s one of a team of metal-themed supers (the others include Lead, Silver, Gold, etc), and is very much in the four-colour comic-book mould. Her real name is Emma Chambers, fitness trainer to the rich and famous. It’s during her work that she met, and was kidnapped by Felix Fabian (a Lex Luther style evil genius), who used her as a guinea pig for his Meta-Maker experiments. She ended up with super-strength, the ability to fly and enhanced reflexes. She easily broke out, and now ranks as one of Felix’s sworn enemies.
Here’s how Emma came about, from concept to conclusion.
I had the image of a strong martial-arts superwoman in the style of Kill Bill, but with more of a four-colour comic book image. The initial draft for Mercury started life like this:
That was ok, but said “super-agent” rather than “super-hero”. I’m sure that look will be used at some point in the future though 
So, it was back to the drawing board with a simple concept render:
This shows the inner strength I wanted for the character, but I wanted her more muscular, yet softer at the same time. And I missed that hair!
A change of face, muscle tone, skin texture and back in a red costume, and Mercury took shape.
Emma Chambers now has the comic-book curves and just the right combination of strength and softness. Lovely stuff. The test for a good hero is whether the look works in a wide variety of situations. Batman, for example, looks great all the time (but is at his best in the Urban Dark). Nightwing, in contrast, just doesn’t do it for me at all. Will Mercury work, whatever the weather or lighting condition? Time to find out….
She can be a complete girlie girl:
….but also looks great in the shadows too:
In combat, she clearly knows her stuff:
…and in flight would make an inspiring streak of red across the sky:
In short, Mercury rocks! I’ll post up her full Mutants & Masterminds stats another time. It’s the turn of Lead next, the hyper-strong brick of the team.
