The name “Anvil” should serve as a reminder to me not to give my characters temporary names. They tend to stick. Luckily Maxima’s original nickname, “Gold Babe” was eventually replaced. Anvil isn’t a bad name necessarily, but in the realm of superheroing, it’s hardly original. Granted, neither is Maxima, but at least that name really feels like it fits her. After spending a year or more as “Gold Babe” there was another good year where she was called Ultima. I knew then that she was going to be riding the top of my power scale, and the name Maxima went to a skinny weed of a girl who had a combination of zero range telekinesis and zero range gravity control, giving her essentially unlimited lifting strength. She could lift an aircraft carrier with one arm, the only challenge for her would be the size and inertia of the thing, its weight was irrelevant. The problem was I kept coming up with scenarios where “Ultima” was thinking “I need to max out my strength/speed/armor” (if you didn’t know, Maxima has a power pool that she can use to drastically boost her power.) Eventually I decided to swap their names, Max got the first name Maximillia and started coming together as a character a bit more, and Skinny-but-can-lift-anything-Ultima got retired into the vault with all the rest of the heroes who didn’t quite make it. Don’t worry, she’s not lonely. At its height, my own personal superteam had something like 20 members, and no one who appears in this comic was on it. I imagine some of them will show up though, in radically updated forms.

Unrelated but impressive, Fred Perry, who does the comic Gold Digger that I’ve cited several times as my favorite comic and one of the inspirations for my comic, has achieved what may be a first. He’s done 200 comics over the last 20 years. There are a few of the early color issues that he had someone else doing the coloring, but other than that, he’s written, inked, penciled and colored them all by himself. One of the things I like about Gold Digger is the consistency. Unlike mainstream comics where the creative teams swap out every dozen issues and it suddenly feels like you’re reading a different title. He’s got a special signed edition he’s putting out… obviously jumping in at issue 200 is not ideal if you’ve never read it but I’m assuming there are a few fans of the comic here that may not know about this special issue.