I have always written short stories, but recently came up with a story that a friend of mine in the biz(he's done spiderman and superman at different times) agreed to do the art.
I'll give you the general concept.
The world's greatest heroes and villians disappear and are assumed dead during a fight with a huge threat. All thats left to protect the world now is sidekicks and the left behind superheroes who's powers basically suck.
Think Robin, antimatter lad, the heroes villians who didn't hit the lottery powerwise/genetically etc.
The story focuses on these kind of characters stepping outside the shadow of their more impressive counterparts, stepping up to the challenge and dealing with a combo of their own inadequacy as well as the the villains on earth. It's not easy for these guys.
Obviously, they rise to the challenge etc...
Then there's a twist, their counterparts aren't dead, and aren't exactly as Nobel as their sidekicks thought.
Lots of comic banter, humor, violence and overcoming odds in this story. Lots of rethinking what makes a hero and what makes a villain. Overcoming self doubt and feelings of inferiority etc.
Some characters
'Punchbag' - He can absorb the pain of other characters. So if, for example, he was Batman's sidekick. Batman gets kicked in the nuts, he doesn't feel a thing and poor Punchbag watching from the sidelines ends up rolling around on the floor in agony.
Maybe that's been used before, but I can't think of any characters like that off the top of my head.
on of the side kicks is so powerful he can't use his powers and is paralised by fear of hurting others all the time
think about superman and doomsdays fight for example
somehow they're punching each other in the middle of a city despite the fact that superman can punch a planet in half if he wants to
so this superpowerful sidekick can punch someone so hard that the resonding shockwave would tear the earth apart for a mile around them he can fly so fast that the friction of him going through the air causes massive areas around him to spontaneously combust
that sort of shit
He's paralyzed by fear.
Don Wrong -a homosexual dude who is irresistable to women or vice versa.
The downside of his powers is that he's actually ugly as **** and has zero charisma, meaning he can't get laid in a whorehouse with a fist full of 20s when it comes to his actual sexual preference.
Character: a guy who is absolutely invulnerable to physical harm. A nuke wouldn't break his skin.....but, that's all he's got. No super anything and also he feels the pain when he gets hit\thrown out a plane etc, just like a normal person would.
Good and bad idea. Why not just make a genius level character that creates a device that cancels out pain to a certain degree?
Your Punchbag character will likely get as much press as other ersatz failure type characters that have been written in the past.
If you're going to write a comic why not go with an original concept?
John Byrne already did this with his Next Men. It was a great title, but it failed from loss of momentum.
Wish I could give you some of my ideas, but I'm holding onto most.
Cyberpunk action is a genre that is rarely tapped on, and usually done wrong. Why not begin there? You can generally take all of today's concepts, and bug out with them. Think about it. Future sports aided by tech that does not exist today. Then place your heroes in that far flung future setting. The Watchmen was one of my favorite comic book to movie films of all time. Why? because it touched on a reality that Marvel and DC rarely treads in. Heroes get hurt, heroes die, heroes get hooked on drugs, heroes become villains. Well they do touch on some of those subject, but they rarely do it to the point that the Watchmen did.