Xavin in City of Heroes

So City of Heroes free weekend just ended, which sadly is responsible for my blogging absenteeism.

Some friends of mine who play the game more than I do and I got into a conversation about which archetype and powerset available in City of Heroes various comic characters would be. We got very excited about what we came up with for the Runaways, so we decided to make them as avatars. (Yes, yes, I know you're not supposed to do that, I won't tell if you won't.)

It was a hard choice (being that all the characters are so freakin' awesome) but I decided to go with Xavin, Karolina's alien fiance/Super-Skrull-in-training. He looks like this:


And this:


but he actually looks like this:

Pictures from Runaways V2 #20

For anyone who doesn't know/care, Skrulls are a shapechanging alien race from the Marvel Universe. The whole boy/girl aspect of Xavin's character and his relationship with his/her bride-to-be is a story for another post. Also the pretty shiny one next to him is Karolina, again for the uninitiated.

I thought I would have it easy, as Xavin's the only Runaways character who actually wears superhero tights! And his clothes were very easy to replicate. Unfortunately it was his face that was the trouble. No, I wasn't trying to recreate the ribbed chin thing the skrulls have going for them, I was trying to make him in his "first" form, of a young African-American boy (That is, it's the first form he appears in, I suppose technically his Skrull form came first, but I'm doing the numbering here.) I should have remembered, especially from this essay that I read way back in the day (about a year ago), about (among other issues) the lack of African-American features in the character creation section. Since then there's been more choices added, but there's still very few options.



I'm gonna skip the hairdo issue, as the males in this game just have way to few hairstyles to choose from, especially compared to the women, and this one's not too bad. It's neutral and looks good for Xavin.

The big issue is with the face. The one I found works well, i guess. It appears to be the default African-American face. However, I had found another face that worked even better for Xavin: It looked youthful and the expression was more "I am so not amused by you." But when i tried it on him, it looked bizzare. The eyelids were colored in light, directly contrasting with his dark skin color and making it look like he was wearing frosted eyeshadow! WTH? I was very disappointed.


I'm sorry, I have to wait til I reactivate my account for a month (probably tomorrow) to post pictures of the AV i ended up with.

So here's Xavin getting his butt kicked! (From Young Avengers/Runaways #2)

An interesting 'racial' exchange with Xavin and Teddy, a character who is Half-Skrull himself

edit: to add pictures of the avatar I ended up with, and the face I'm talking about. Also, a picture of my friends and I with the characters we've made so far.

Xavin, Victor, and Nico in CoH form!