As mentioned in the commentary for Descendants #35, I realized that I had room for two more stories at the end of Year 3 than I originally thought. One of these became the Magical World story, “Demonology”, the other became “Let's Go!”, a comedic issue based on a joke a friend and I shared while talking about The Descendants.
The story of how this quirky tale came to be, under the cut.
“Let's Go!” got its start from a conversation I was having with a friend about how no mainstream comic today could ever get away with naming the villain “Magneto” in this day and age. Let's face it, it's such a wonderfully goofy silver age name that no writer trying to be taken seriously would think “Well, his power is magnetics, so let's see... magnet-o? Magneto! Of course!”
We agreed that it's a shame that so many people involved in comics have abandoned the parts that made them the most fun and memorable. In homage, I jokingly suggested a villain that absconds (We both love using older, less used words), with things with the perfectly sensible name of Abscondro.
The moment I said the name, we were both delighted. Ideas and pitches started flying as we fell into our usual spit balling sessions. Abscondro would be an all business, totally unironic character who would be something like a male Carmen Sandiego.
Very wisely, my friend pointed out that making Abscondro so serious sort of defeated the purpose of trying to tell a more fun oriented story. She suggested I give him a sidekick. I took this a step further by giving him a fan-girl seeking to become his sidekick instead.
Originally, the whole story was going to be Abscondro trying to do his thing with Vamanos showing up and ruining everything until he actually got fed up and tried to kill her. Besides the obvious issue of this just being a stock plot that, while funny, is pretty unexciting, it made Vamanos too annoying in my opinion. That and the fact that knowing a lot of fan-girls and being a reader of a lot of fan-fic, I don't think a modern fan-girl would be so passive about the whole thing.
So I went that extra step and actually made the plot about her getting him to act out one of her fan-fics for real with Abscondro being forced to play along if he wanted to get the big payday at the end.
Vamanos of course is the same Callie Krieger from Descendants #34 who we saw as part of Lily's girl posse. At the time, I did intend for her to become part of the supporting cast in a Liz Allan kind of way, but I had no intention of making her into a psionic, let alone Vamanos. That decision came very late in my decisions about “Let's Go!”.
I realized when I was designing Vamanos, that it would be sort of disingenuous for a series that sympathizes with nerds and fan-boys to present this rather shallow fan-girl gone nuts. But inspiration hit me that I actually did have a character in my cast who had ready-made motivations for this kind of desperate cry for attention and who I already intended to make sympathetic. So Callie became Vamanos and will be recurring despite so far only showing up in cameo at the party in “Descendants 2095”.
I have to admit there is on, subtle 'dumb blond' joke in here that some people may have missed: Callie took the name 'Vamanos' for her villainous persona, yet even with a perfect set up, she still says 'let's go' at least three times. Why? Because she doesn't know what Vamanos means, only that it sounds vaguely Spanish like the (not Spanish) Abscondro.
Speaking of Abscondro, he has no real name, race or description in the story, just a history, personality and motivation. This is entirely on purpose and no, I don't know who's under that mask. He's just Abscondro.
Look for both Callie and Abscondro to return in later issues. Until then, I shall continue to create as I speak.
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