When you’re the “hero of the day”, people notice you.
When you’re Furia, the former Praetorian resistance hero-turned Paragon City hero, you can’t help but get brought into some of the bigger challenges.
The title character of “Furia and the Guardians” will be showing up in the pages of “The Crucible” as part of the comic’s “House of Sothis” storyline.
“The Crucible” is a computer-generated comic series by City of Comics Creators member .Ra, who was also behind “The Forever Men” and “Dawn Enterprises”. While it is based in the world of the now-defunct City of Heroes MMO, .Ra was able to get around the MMO shutdown by using 3D rendering of characters.
Furia’s appearance won’t be a “walk-on” role, though. She’ll be bursting on the scene, taking on another Praetorian resident – the sinister android Nightstar. And since it’ll be happening in Atlas Park, just across the park from City Hall, you know that Ms. Liberty won’t just stand by and let that go on without joining in.
Readers may notice something different about Furia’s appearance compared to how she appears in her regular series and even in the recent 3D-rendered covers created for “Furia and the Guardians” with .Ra’s help.
“Furia’s outfit is generated using City of Hero’s costume creator,” said Battlerock Comics author and editor-in-chief David 2. “Unfortunately .Ra’s 3D rendering does have some limits in terms of her hairstyle and available costume pieces. We’ve been able to come close to Furia’s normal appearance by reversing the image to match her MMO hairstyle, and that worked for doing the covers. But once .Ra starts incorporating backgrounds and other characters, you can’t really do that with her, so you just have to let it go and hope the readers understand.”
Furia’s appearance in “The Crucible” is only the latest in a series of guest appearances between the various members of the City of Comic Creators. Battlerock Comics fans may remember that .Ra’s dimension-hopping character Watcher Twelve played a role in issues 6 & 7 of “Furia and the Guardians”, and fans of JK Comics spotted Sin Stalker from “The Justice-Knights” in “The Crucible”.
“One of the great things about the City of Comic Creators is that we can incorporate each other’s characters into a story,” said David 2. “Superheroes are the celebrities in the world of the ‘City of Heroes’, so if you’re on Talos Island, you will probably see Galatea Powers or Furia. If you’re in Kings Row, you might come across Jason Knight. You shouldn’t be surprised to see Sin Stalker in Steel Canyon. If you turn on the TV, you can’t help but see the same news anchors and reporters. So it’s only right to have that consistency carry on through to the various comics that are based in that city.”
And speaking of TV, the next character to cross over from Battlerock Comics to CoX Comics will be Paragon News Network anchor Robin Steed.
The “House of Sothis” storyline starts in “The Crucible” #18. For more information, be sure to check out the CoX Comic website at coxcomics.com.
Battlerock Comics 
I refer to models put together to support the Dawn Enterprise and The Crucible series as analogues. Most often I’ve compared the analogue build effort to the same type of differences you might see when characters are lifted from the pages of comics for television or movies. In this situation, it’s a balance between the meshes and textures available, the cost of new meshes and textures, and last but not least, time.