Last issue was an interesting one in the way that it came about and it was a little break from the time-traveling story that has been going on, even though it was part of the Time-Tossed story line. It is the only part of the story where we went to different dimensions instead of going through time. I guess that might be a hint about the final part (yes, Cat is traveling through time).
Each of the three different dimensions that Titan went to came about in a very interesting way, and I promise you, all of them will be seen again in the future!
The first one introduced the Ultimate Team, originally that was the name of my comic and the team, but as I mentioned before, I changed the name so as not to have any confusion with the Ultimate Line done by Marvel Comics. The team, as they appear in this issue, is how each of the characters originally looked - I used the original costumes for about three years, then over time they got into the costumes that we see them in now. This was super fun for me to draw as I hadn't drawn them like this in over 20 years. The interesting thing is that when I was first writing this issue, I hadn't planned for this section, it was just going to be the other two parts, but then the idea came to me to make the original designs for the characters their own separate dimension and here we are. Of course, this might be a bit of foreshadowing too as all of the characters from this section will eventually appear in the regular comic as well, in their updated costumes.
The next section features Commander Foofoo, now this one is a bit interesting for me and the way he came about. I have a much younger brother and when he was very young we told him the Rabbit Foofoo nursery rhyme. I expanded on that in turning Rabbit Foofoo into more of a hand puppet that would pay him surprise visits from time to time, this went on for years. Then when he was in elementary school, for one Easter our mother made arts and crafts rabbits for the kids. Well, I took one of them and put a G.I. Joe action figure backpack on it and that became Commander Foo. Of course sometimes when my brother was playing G.I. Joe I would have Foo join in, perhaps to his amusement or annoyance - I'm not sure which, maybe a little of both, and Foo would take over the mission. When I was writing the issue, I just pulled from the characters we created years ago and tried to capture the attitude that Foofoo had in the stories; my brother feels I captured it perfectly. Here is the original Commander Foofoo:
The final part features the Terminators of Evil, this was never actually a separate set of characters when I originally created them in the 1990's. They were originally from a story that I wrote that was more of a what if/imaginary story posing the question "What if the heroes grew to resent having to protect the people?" and I came up with this group. Way back then the membership was Titan, Cat, Throttle and Crossbow, but when I was writing this issue, I decided to take Crossbow out of it for now and bring Magno in. Of course this is not to say that this dimension's Crossbow won't appear in the future, but for now it worked better this way. Here's the original drawing I did of this Titan back in 1992:
