Toolz

darth_paul on May 31, 2016

Toolz rounds out the original trio that I had created many years ago as the first concepts of what has now become the E2DJF. The other two were Jack Rabbit and Grasshopper, with the rest such as Shielda and Beach Bunny, to come much later but to be added into their roles on the team a I saw fit in my behind-the-scenes writings while fleshing them out. As with many of my characters, my ideas for them come from a lot of different influences that I like to throw into a blender and see what mixes. This guy gets the youthful idealism and idolization of his older peers as a hero from the classic teen hero template, the ability to transform his arms into tools from any number of stretchy or mechanized shape-shifters, and lastly his inability to speak in any language but his own, yet be able to be understood by and understand others speaking to him in their language, from how this kind of thing always goes on in the Star Wars Universe with no problems. I usually just write his dialog in English though, but just in brackets, and make a notation somewhere to the side of the comics that it's been translated for the reader, but he really only speaks in his native Zith tongue. Also, the part in the bio above where it says that he is trying to learn how to speak universal English and learn more about human culture, but gets a little confused due to his unfamiliarity and attempts to look cool, should not be taken as me trying to make fun of anyone like that. It's purely, me setting a background for a character. The part about him changing his name from “Tool” to “Toolz” is however, a bit of self-depreciating humor on my part because I did have his name originally be “Tool,” and knew that it was a bit unflattering, but I had always wanted the character to be kind of awkward and not really realizing why his chosen codename was so bad, because to him it just meant that he could make tools, or that he was a valuable tool for others, and not really ever get the other negative connotations of the word. Therefore, I decided to make it into an “extreme misspelling” so that it would be plural, in a sense, and still exemplify the awkwardness of a character trying too hard to be a cool super-hero, but couldn't really help it because he's an alien in a strange world that he's not familiar with, but doing his best to fit in.