The Santa Cruz Cycle - Prelude

 (originally published on 30th November, 2018)

    It’s all Steve Purcell’s fault. Or so I appear to be misremembering it. Well over a decade ago, I stumbled across the first issue of a comic. It was about a university professor at UCSC who had an after school group who investigated weird mysteries around Santa Cruz. I read it and it seemed like fun. In the back few pages, there was a written article about how SC really was this kind of hot-point for weird phenomena (and a one page article on the Banana Slug). I recall it being by Steve Purcell (of ‘Sam & Max’ fame) but that would appear to have been a brainfart... so I don’t know the name of the comic, who did it, or what happened in it... but other than that, it’s lodged itself squarely in my forebrain for over a decade.

    In my head, Santa Cruz isn’t anything like it is in real life. It’s a weird surfside mix of Twin Peaks, Gravity Falls and Eerie Indiana. James Blaylock’s Northern Californian Fishing Villages are in there somewhere. And the eccentrics and oddballs of Jim Steinbeck’s ‘Cannery Row’. The hipsters bring with them a mix of tattoo artists, hot rodders and burly-q houses, while the boardwalk is a mix of Lost Boys menace and Scooby Doo weirdness, with maybe a touch of Vincent Price’s Dr.Phibes in there on the pipe organ. It’s a place where I can shove all the oddball fascinations that grip me and a suitable setting for a thousand stories.

(Clockwise from Top Left) 'Gravity Falls', 'Twin Peaks', 'Eerie, Indiana' and 'Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated'.

    It’s all come together really slowly, but over years, it’s accumulated a host of characters, including, but not limited to teenage superhero, The Lifeguard; Silver Age oceanic adventurers, The Deep Six; crimefighting werewolf turned late-nite TV host, Mike ‘Moondog’ Mendez and his partner, the psychic mystery woman known as Moonchild; Professor Finneas, the Merman of Monterey Bay; Johnny Tao, Kung-Fu Fighting Superspy; Swinging 60’s Supervillain, The Freaky Tiki; The Breakers, the world’s greatest kung fu surf guitar band (and Johnny Tao’s kids); Professor Odd, the world’s maddest scientist and his magnificent and terrifying Odditoreum; at least two generations of two-fisted luchadores named El Aguila Azul; biker werewolves, a monster-hunting priest, a secret cabal of mystery scientists, a time-travelling burlesque dancer and a Vampire Truck.

    The problem of course being that, because it’s kind of grown organically, it’s hard to know where to start. It’s all wound up like the world’s largest ball of yarn, with threads intersecting and crossing all over the shop. But I’m gonna give it a try anyway, because otherwise, it’s just going to sit in my head bubbling away and making weird smells and noises.

    A lot of the elements came which would later make up the Santa Cruz Cycle were created separately and folded in, including the Lifeguard (a short-lived ‘Heroes Unlimited’ game), Professor Odd (who was an off-the-cuff name pulled out of the air by a GM), and El Aguila Azul (who came from the first, aborted game of ‘Mutants & Masterminds’), but with those (and of course, the original mystery comic not by Steve Purcell)...

    But the thing that brought it altogether was The Benson Academy. During one very long Mutants & Masterminds campaign, we would frequently create new characters and play different settings in the same world, to try and get a better view of how the universe fit together. One of these sub-campaigns, which we referred to as ‘Meanwhiles...’ (as in ‘Meanwhile... in Europe’, ‘Meanwhile... in Hong Kong’, or ‘Meanwhile... in Deep Space’) was based around a school for superpowered teenagers.

    Because I never throw anything away, I dug up Lifeguard, an old character I’d played years earlier but felt I hadn’t got everything I could out of him. In the original Heroes Unlimited game, he was an Australian adult with a lanky, Plastic Man-esque build and attitude, but I re-wrote him as a stocky Hispanic Teenager. As part of playing teenagers, we had two sides to our characters. The first was our superhero side, and the second was what we referred to as the ‘Breakfast Club’ side, where we also dealt with day-to-day teenage traumas and issues. As a result, I had to create a slightly more detailed backstory for Lifeguard. In the original version, he was diving around shipwrecks off the Barrier Reef when he discovered a mysterious substance which affected him in a strange way. When he awoke in Cairns base hospital, he had been transformed into his heroic form and became an aquatic hero based on Queensland’s Gold Coast, but a more fully-rounded character (in more ways than one) needed more than that.

The Evolution of 'Lifeguard' (2009, 2012 and 2019)

    Inspired by Kim Newman and Kurt Busiek’s ‘Astro City’, both of whom build rich worlds by mining pulp fiction and comic books for characters or character archetypes to flesh out complex and detailed worlds, I threw in a whole mess of disparate ingredients into Lifeguard’s new backstory, including DC Comics of the Silver Age (esp.’The Sea Devils’ and similar teams of non-powered adventurers), Jack Kirby Kid Gangs, the superheroic creations of Steve Ditko with their wild, flailing combat styles, short-lived DC comics series from the late 80’s (esp.’Booster Gold’, ‘Blue Beetle’ and ‘El Diablo’) and somewhere, deep in the back of my head, slowly bubbling to the surface, was a comic which was almost certainly not written by Steve Purcell, and which was set in a weird little town called Santa Cruz.

    Since then, the whole thing has turned into a kind of perpetual gumbo, and every time something new pops up, *sploosh!* in it goes! To be continued here...

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This is Entry #1 in ‘The Santa Cruz Cycle’ - ‘Prelude’. For Entry #2, ‘Chapter 1. History’, click here. For Entry #3, ‘Chapter 2. The Life and Times of ‘Moondog’ Mendez’, click here.
Other Posts relating to the Game-World can be found under the 'World of SC' Label: