Influenced by the "Super Friends" saturday morning cartoon, by 1985 I came to believe that all the really good super heroes (like Superman and Batman) had to be part of a super team, too. So before Halogen (pictured above, from 1985) had even had his first adventure, I had him join the "Guardians of America," whose headquarters was located, imaginatively if impractically, inside the Statue of Liberty. I still have a two paragraph summary of the organization, which reflects a school-age boy's priorities. "There are certain guidelines which they must all abide by. The first is that they get no real vacation." (With great power comes great responsibility, I suppose.)
But as it turned out those rules were the least of Halogen's concerns. He quickly became embroiled in a love triangle with the two other members pictured above: Saberclaw and Grizzly. Saberclaw, as some may recognize, was basically a female Wolverine (right down to his early 1980s blue and yellow costume), though her back story (a former Soviet agent who fell in love with Halogen) was more or less pulled directly from the character Black Widow in Frank Miller's "Daredevil" of the time. (When I did that drawing in 1985, I thought that Saberclaw looked sexy and voluptuous. Now she looks, maybe, peeved at the results of a gay marriage initiative.)
The "bizarre" part of the love triangle, though, was the Grizzly. In human form, Lee Weather was in love with Saberclaw. But when he turned into a bear, he became female. (I had read that female grizzlys were bigger and more ferocious than males.) And in that incarnation, Grizzly was hopelessly infatuated with Halogen.
I'm sure this was all totally unrelated to the fact that, at the time, I had a crush on a girl with exactly Saberclaw's haircut, who herself had eyes for a guy who I was pretty sure didn't like her (type)....
Next time: From the "Villains & Vigilantes" Game, Comes the Villain
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