In this post, I'll talk a bit about the creation of Christina Carlyle and how it related to the development of the Metal X storyline. It all begins under the cut.
Descendants #15: Never Simple was a cheap-shot at Valentine's Day issues where I teased a dating storyline and then blindsided the readers with a story about cyborgs nerds. It was also to be the second act of a three part romance storyline for Warrick and Cyn.
Yes, at the time, my intention was still to get Warrick and Cyn together again romantically. The first step in this was the Elizabeth Von Stoker storyline where Warrick dated and lost a girl because of both his and her personal ideas about heroism. Back at the end of Ladies of Ragnarok (Descendants #9), I had a very sweet moment of Cyn comforting Warrick over this.
The love interest in Never Simple was going to be a greater 'threat' to that relationship, namely the fact that the new love interest would actually have a good relationship with Warrick, at least for a while. TVTropes readers will recognize this trope as The Paolo. The original plan was for Warrick to fall for Tink, Tink to fall for Warrick and then in the Metal X Saga, a few issues later, Tink would be hurt, learn who Warrick was, and they would break up, leaving Tink a grave security risk for the Descendants.
Essentially, the trick was making the audience and Cyn believe that Tink could really be the one. So I designed her in grand superhero girlfriend fashion (Heroes Want Redheads) and introduced her in the tradition of superhero loved ones; the non-romantic date. She was also very geeky to get along well with Warrick and her techno-wizard tendencies made Cyn's line in Ladies of Ragnarok (about Warrick needing to find a girl with powers) seem like foreshadowing.
The thing is though, that I did a great job selling myself on the relationship too. The weird, geeky dates cooked up by two teens that didn't really know how to date were adorable and hit kind of close to home for me, and it wasn't long before I was thinking about more ways to develop Tink and possibly use her on her own in the same way I do Whitecoat.
In short, I sort of fell in love with their being in love, which in turn spurred me to develop Cyn in a different direction, making her issue not so much that she had a crush on Warrick, but that she was very possessive of all the people close to her. Given her past and personality, I feel this actually makes more sense for the character and made for good stories.
But what to do with the Metal X story? Originally, it was turning the 'evil guy with identical powers' trope in a slightly different direction where the powers weren't so similar as it first appeared. Metal X was going to be a brutal and relentless Enforcer from Tome, trying to capture Warrick.
The featured fight wouldn't' have been so much of a fight as a cross-city chase with an implacable enemy dogging Warrick and destroying everything in his path to do so. Tink and Warrick wouldn't have separated during the chase and instead, Tink would have been subjected to an utter horror show of villainous strength.
In the end, she would have been so frightened that she couldn't bear to even be near Warrick for fear of something like that happening again and their break up and the subsequent issue of her knowing his secret would have weighed heavily in the future. (A twisted version of this, with Warrick being the one afraid, readers might recognize as being part of Warrick's vision in Descendants #39: 2095)
But by the time I was writing the junior prom, I no longer wanted to pull the trigger and no long felt that I even could, thematically. By then, Tink had already proven to be brave and resourceful enough to stand up against Alloy in a building made of nothing but exposed metal and having her be afraid or Metal after that was against character. Besides that, I was leading into A Magitech Crisis and Metal X would certainly be overshadowed by that. The entire story went on the shelf, but I continued to think hard on it.
Somewhere along the way, and I don't recall when, I hit upon the idea of Metal X as a Whitecoat villain instead of a Descendants rogue. I had a very complicated rhyme and reason why the Type VII nanites were so dangerous that Alan Roschard felt he needed to risk his life to destroy them, but no plans at the time to write his origin story in anything but flashback, so having Metal X's metal control being nanite based instead of psionic allowed me to have Type VII come back to haunt him.
From there it got a big hairier. I had a villain with great visuals (When he sends out those tendrils think about it in terms of a silvery Macross Missile Massacre), but I had just finished The Whitecoat: Networked and didn't feel like doing another involved miniseries to introduce Metal X.
The idea got shelved again and in that time, I just kept flashing back to my original idea and a particular sequence that I really loved: the scene where Warrick and Tink are knocked from the roof and Warrick must reveal his identity to Tink or else let them both die.
To me, that moment was so perfect and felt so iconic that I couldn't let it go. Finally, I found my back to the wall with several game changing plots coming up around Descendants #50 and I felt I really had to move on this plot if I wanted to do it at all in the next few years.
The reworking is exactly what you read in Descendants #42, with the attack and reveal now serving to cement the bond between Warrick and Tink instead of breaking them apart. Metal X also managed to be 'handed off' as a rogue from Whitecoat to Warrick (and as I've already shown in Descendants #39, he becomes a nemesis for Warrick in much the same way Shine is to Cyn.). The entire story now also ties into the Game of Kings with Talbot being revealed to have recruited Metal X shortly after the Siege storyline.
And that should just about do it for this post. Until next time, I will continue to create as I speak.
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