"Speak her name - for it is Kitra!" (Avalanche - the Snow Maiden, Rocket Girl, Fist of the Machine-Goddess)

"Speak her name - "

"- for it is Kitra!" 

"I know I was writing stories when I was five.  I don't know what I did before that.  Just loafed, I suppose."

     -- P.G. Wodehouse

Have you ever actually had to listen to a five-year-old tell a story?

They're not very good at it.

Now, bear in mind that I, of course, can't speak for the stories P.G. Wodehouse wrote when he was five, but I know that the ones I tried to tell at that stage in my life were absolutely and completely terrible.  They were worthless.  They had no merit whatsoever.  They were, in fact, the worst kind of garbage.  

There's a frightening tendency for people to elevate every childhood experience into something glorious and magical.  Nostalgia has a funny way of doing that to people, changing their perceptions and the way they choose to interpret their own histories.  My last blog post was predominately about this phenomenon.

I spent a great deal of time in it criticizing people who alter their own histories. 

As a result, I've decided that this piece will take a look at my own history with a critical lens, to the extent that I wish to be critical of my younger self - which is to say 'not very much.'  

Nevertheless, I decided to sit down with a drawing program and recreate the characters I invented as a young child, because I still remember them.

For whatever reason, these characters have stuck with me, refusing to go away.  None of them are any good, but they still live on in a corner of my mind, presumably having adventures inside my head in some corner I don't often visit.

The purpose of this piece isn't to try to psychoanalyze myself.  Instead, I'm making this article a change of pace and inviting anyone involved to read and reply in the Comments section about anything they might have to say about it all.  In fact, I'm encouraging this, and openly asking people to comment.

I talk all the time in this blog, but this time I'm inviting the audience to have their say about anything written here in this article.

So let's get started.

First up is a character who started her life as a woman named Kitra, but who would one day become Avalanche - the Snow Maiden.

Kitra was a character who is clearly inspired by MAN-THING, as you can tell from a few basic hints - the origin, the eyes, the hunched back, the made-out-of-local-elements manifestation, her lack of an ability to speak ... and on and on and on with the similarities.

I "wrote" and "drew" notebooks filled with comics about Kitra.  In these stories, the evil wizard mentioned in the image above - who, somehow, managed to live as long as an elemental manifestation - would repeatedly try to recapture the magic inside of the Snow Maiden for the of the Elemental Masters, beings comprised of the Four Elements who saw the maiden's "Crystal" manifestation as an abomination:  a potential fifth Elemental Master who would unseat their authority and the balance they maintained by being a fifth vote in the destiny of the cosmos.

Now, snow is generally made of water, so this would've put the Snow Maiden strictly in the venue of one of those Four Elements' power, but I had an explanation ready for this.

You see, in my childhood imagination, magic wasn't just an energy source.  It was like a life-force, that could grow and develop over time the way a person grew and changed.  Exercising magics worked like exercising muscles - they'd get bigger and stronger the more you used them.

The Snow Maiden used her magic to protect people who were under threat from the manipulations of the Elemental Masters.  The Masters would send demons down to Earth to kill people for the purpose of changing the course of events when things weren't going their way.  These were minions called Electroids - shown in the image above fighting the Snow Maiden.

By the way, the long things sticking out of the arms of the Snow Maiden are basically ice-daggers that were "sharp enough to cut a star in half," whatever that meant.  I think it was just lame childhood hyperbole.

By spending her entire existence protecting people and fighting evil, my brain reasoned, the Snow Maiden had redoubled the magical energy used to create her - over and over again - until by modern times the Maiden was an equal to the Elemental Masters, and even though she looked like she was made of water-based snow, her body was somehow made out of a pure crystal version of snow that moved like the regular material, but wasn't made of water, so it never melted even under conditions of extreme heat.  That crystals can melt under extreme heat was irrelevant to me.

Science is often an enemy to children's stories, as many Hollywood   scriptwriters (and directors) eventually realize once their films are reviewed by critics and audiences.

Let's move on, then.

The next character I created as a child is Rocket Girl.

Yes, Rocket Girl.

As you can see from the text I added to the picture, Rocket Girl exists in the same universe as the Snow Maiden.  Henrietta Hixon was going to be the first woman to reach the outer edge of the galaxy on a manned space-ship with a new FTR - Faster-than-Reality - engine on an experimental space ship.  I don't remember what was significant about the Faster-than-Reality engine specifically, but I remember it threatened to give people access to the home planet of the Elemental Masters, so they arranged an "accident" to send Henrietta through a black hole - which they believed would kill her.

Instead, the engine interacted with the black hole and sent Henrietta hurtling to home planet of creatures that never appeared on the page.  They were called Mandalinians.  I had them always concealed behind opaque windows and that sort of thing.  Since the audience consisting of my girlfriends who read the comics at the time never learned the secret of their appearance, I will reveal it for the first time here.  However, I won't be drawing them because I'm only drawing what I created at the time the way it looked at the time.

The Mandalinians hid themselves behind glass because, by "human standards," they looked like ghouls.  They were rail-thin and had wide mouths full of vicious teeth.  In fact, they all sort of almost-exactly resembled the "Niña Medeiros" character from the horror movie REC.  While they, themselves, weren't ashamed of their appearance, they worried about frightening Henrietta.  This was meant to be a tragic situation in my childhood literary aspirations, as Henrietta would not have found them horrifying, and it was meant I recall to challenge the audience to see them by their kindness when they were eventually to be revealed.

Of course, my alien versions didn't have blue jeans.

In typical Marvel fashion, of course, Henrietta, the Rocket Girl, had been tricked into thinking on more than one occasion that the Snow Maiden was just another Elemental creature and therefore just as evil as the Electroids and their Elemental Masters.

By story's end, though, they'd team up.  Surprise.

Moving on to the last character I'm going to profile - the delicately named Fist of the Machine-Goddess.  Ahem.  Yeah.

So, here's the Machine Goddess.

The Machine Goddess was a massive robot that was created to protect the planet - what else? - Mandalinia.  It was built by the precursors to the Mandalinians, so I was already rocking the plot of MASS EFFECT before Bioware created and then totally ruined the story (FEMSHEP FOREVER!  Ahem again).  

The Machine Goddess was meant to serve as a testament to the promise of the ability of living mortal beings to eventually overthrow the predestinations of the Elemental Masters.  Big enough to house the population of an entire planet, the Machine Goddess could single-handedly fight against entire armadas of Electroids and was strong enough when fully functional and intact to kill an Elemental Master.

And, as you can possibly see from my horrible drawing above, single-handedly is exactly how the Machine Goddess had to fight.  You see, the four Elemental Masters (them, again!) had used their ability to travel by black hole in conjunction with some traitorous Mandalinians to cause one of the "escape hatch" ejection points on the Machine Goddess - designed to segment the Goddess into pieces for purpose of escape if a fight went badly - to sever off the left hand of the Goddess.  As a lefty myself, I chose the left hand for that very reason and, as far as I'm aware, no other.  

So long as the Machine Goddess remained one-handed, or so the prophecies said, the Elemental Masters' reign could never be stopped, because the hand was needed for the Goddess to be strong enough to defeat even one Elemental Master, let alone all four of them.

The Elemental Masters, who threw the hand of the Machine Goddess into a black hole, believed they had destroyed it, just as they believed they had destroyed Rocket Girl.  But they were wrong, of course.  The hand survived, and because of the size of the Machine Goddess the hand was so large it was basically its own spaceship with functioning crew.  Since I'm a lefty, I decided this portion of the crew as made up of a collection of Amazonian archetypes who were the fiercest footsoldiers of the Mandalinian army - and who just happened to be transformed by a benevolent Earth wizard into humans for a variety of plotty reasons I won't get into at this point.

So, the ship traveled the spaceways, knowing they had to keep the Fist of the Machine Goddess (ah, there's the title!) safe and protected despite constant attack from various villains and from the Elemental Masters and Electroids.  The ship looked like this.

TRIVIA:  In one of the only adventures I can actually record the plot for, the Snow Maiden was transported to Mandalinia and was put on board the Machine Goddess.  

In the end, the Elemental Masters plotted an invasion of the planet, but were thwarted when the Snow Maiden shaped herself into a functional left hand for the Machine Goddess.

The Elemental Masters retreated, even more devoted to crushing the Snow Maiden.

So, there's my piece on my childhood imagination, such that it was.  I'm really curious what people think of all this nonsense, if they read some kind of weird psychology into it that I don't see because of my proximity.

There are the comments, below - go for it.  

I'll just say I had fun on this trip down memory lane.  I hope it teaches you something about me, even though I don't know what that might be.