Super Tess, Or Tessa Brown in her original incarnation, was a Child Superhero. My earliest drawings of her are actually courtesy a Comic Book course I took in high school. As part of a group project, I wrote a script for a 5-page mini comic about this little hero, which my team worked on together with me. I liked the idea of this little girl who was very alone, but was the strongest person in the world. This page, shown below, was the final version of this group project (The final drawing was done by someone else, but to my sketches and script.)
The best part of this old drawing is that Tessa’s uniform hasn’t changed at all, except in the logo!
Super Tess evolved into a child character who fought child villains, like Nicholas Kyte, a super-genius who loved to fly planes, and the Glueman Twins, who could turn themselves into Glue!
Later, my brother and I developed a short comic series about a slightly older Tessa going to school for superheroes and dealing with some of the not-so-nice parts of a superhero world. In this version, Nick and Tess had been together to some extent, though probably in a kindergarten crush sort-of-way and not anything serious, but had been separated by her leaving Super City. Her empathy, ditzy nature, and habit of hovering instead of standing or sitting is very clear in these old comics. Also, Nick being a genius mechanic was still a plot point.
In 2021, I joined an online community called Storyteller Academy, hoping to learn more about publishing to work on my book “Pandas in Space”, only to have a great idea mid-class… what if Super Tess cleaned up after a hurricane? She could have Nick with her, and the two of them could work together to save a city! She has super powers, he has airplanes and drones, this will be awesome!
To be continued….
