More of Sam’s heroes

Following up on last week’s group of Sam Superheroes:

THE CHEMICAL TRIO: I asked Sam (6) who the guys in the first drawing were. He said the first guy was “a chemical guy” and the second one was “another chemical guy.” When I said “And the third guy is a cloud guy?” he said “no, he’s another chemical guy. They’re all chemical guys. ‘Cause, you know, sometimes a chemical can be a solid, and sometimes it can be a liquid, and sometimes it can be a gas.” Six years old, people, six years old.

And so The Chemical Trio is born. I feel bad about Liquid Guy, and will probably re-do him, because, while he looks liquidy enough, he looks nothing like Sam’s conception of him. Obviously I’m missing something there. But the “solid” guy I decided to keep with no face, as Sam designed him, and the “gas” guy with no legs. Who says a superhero needs to have a face? Why can’t he have a giant crystal structure for a head?

As for the second drawing, Sam was very clear on those. For the first figure, he shrugged and said “some kind of robot.” Obviously this character is of little importance to him, so I made the robot drawing as classic and clunky as the drawing indicated. This robot is no super-robot, this is a walking trashcan. My guess is that the superheroes don’t even bring this guy out into the field with them, he stays behind to clean up around headquarters, answering the phone, emptying trash cans, maybe maintaining the super-computers. If the robot (who I will call “Robot” for now, even though that’s the robot’s name on Lost in Space) does come out on missions with this team, my guess is that he’s either the comic relief or else the bomb-defuser. Maybe he’d be useful exploring spaces filled with toxic gas.

The second figure Sam described as a person being “made out of hearts,” then said that this was (so far) the only female in the group. The idea of a superhero who is literally “all heart” was too good to pass up, so I decided to take his basic concept and make it literal — a woman made up entirely of hearts. Her head is a giant heart, her chest is an even more-giant heart (with two almost-regular-sized hearts for breasts), her abdomen is a slightly smaller gigantic heart, and a series of linked hearts make up the limbs. Sam was a little baffled by my rendition, because he’s never seen a picture of an actual human heart. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what stem-cell research will eventually lead to.

The third figure Sam only described as a “tiny man,” so I guess I’ll just go ahead and refer to him as “Tiny Man.” He didn’t say he was like The Atom or Ant-Man, that is, he didn’t mention that Tiny Man was a normal man who could become tiny, but rather he was simply a very tiny man. So I drew him like that: a man who happens to be tiny, say, an inch tall, but otherwise completely normal. (Come to think of it, I regret now putting the superhero tunic on him — he should just be dressed in street clothes. Maybe a Superman t-shirt.)

(Then, of course, there is the forth figure in the drawing, the Invisible Tiny Man. This man is either too small to be seen, or else is both tiny and invisible, which is, I’m positive, yet another combination the geniuses at the comic-book companies have yet to come up with. In any case, there is no reason to attempt to draw a version of a man who is both microscopic and cannot be seen.)