Boss Bosozuko
Boss Bosozuko by Mike Becker
33 years ago - Hiro Kunikawa is born in Osaka
28 years ago - 5-year-old Hiro's mother is killed in a mugging.
24 years ago - 9-year-old Hiro starts racing motorcycles
18 years ago - 15-year-old Hiro's father moves them to Tokyo to work the construction crews rebuilding the city. Hiro quickly makes a name for himself among the city's motorcycle gangs.
15 years ago - 18-year-old Hiro's motorcycle gang is taken by a covert research project as test subjects, exposed to the energy of an artificial portal into the monster dimension. When the reactor collapses it threatens to destroy Tokyo, but Hiro is able to ride his motorcycle up the vortex to collapse it. Both his body and his motorcycle become alien energy reactors.
14 years ago - 19-year-old Hiro, Grr & Mai Kusanagi join Dai Yokohama in the final battle of the Monster Wars, saving Japan. He helps to rebuild Neo-Tokyo, and joins the other heroes of the war to build the Halo, founding Big Science Action.
11 years ago - 22-year-old Hiro's friend from his motorcycle gang, Tensai Hitori, awakens from his coma. He develops similar powers to Hiro, channeling monster energy, but it soon consumes him as he grows and rampages through Neo-Tokyo. Big Science Action is forced to stop him.
4 years ago - 29-year-old Hiro is struck by the feedback wave of a discharging quantum device as he is saving rockstar Egao Yamamoto, who develops a version of his powers and becomes Bishonen.
While all the members of Big Science Action are all built to reference a specific style of anime, I think Boss Bosozuku might be unique in that he's a reference to one SPECIFIC Anime. There are quite a few American superheroes in the mix here, like the Human Torch, Firestorm and Ghost Rider, but the anime influence is clearly Akira, one of the only anime to transcend their genre and regularly be counted among the best movies of all time, period. It's a clever concoction of a character, but it does create a few problems, because Akira isn't really a story about characters you'd call Japanese superheroes. We have to get creative here to find ways to blend that narrative into our superhero project, but often those are the most fun characters. I would love to hear what you think of this one!
Boss Bosozuko's Comic HistoryJust like the rest of the original members of Big Science Action, Boss Bosozuku appears in the single flashback panel of Final Crisis. His entry in the Final Crisis sketchbook is probably the most vague among the characters detailed there, saying more about his attitude and style that giving any description of how his origins or his superpowers work; ""Boss Bosozuko is a young, hot-headed, nuclear Human Torch. He has a cool-as-hell nuclear-powered future motorcycle with radioactive galactic spiral wheels. He's passionate, angry, tender, emotional, always yelling and acting out, always emoting, like the boys in AKIRA."
Interestingly, Bosozuko actually doesn't appear in Final Crisis Aftermath: The Dance. Instead we meet Boss Bishonen, his modern-day successor, implying that the original hero must have a) had a sidekick and b) either retired or been killed at some point. I should point out... while Bosozuko refers to a Japanese subculture of customized motorcycles, Bishonen is just a popular aesthetic of androgynous male beauty, so a character using that as their name should have a VERY different vibe. |
|
|
Our Boss Bosozuko StoryThe first thing we needed to do here is come up with just how exactly we're translating these style ideas into a functional superhero. We really like the idea of his powers working sort of like Firestorm, in that he's a living fusion reactor, but we also really want to lean into him operating as much like Ghost Rider as we can, as he's one of the best superhero-on-motorcycle concepts available. To that end, we want both he AND his cycle to be reactors that are bonded. We want him to wield that energy, but also be able to manipulate material around him to create weapons (a chain wreathed in nuclear flame, maybe?). He could probably also actually start to warp objects around him into, say, ramps? Like Iceman? What's fun here is that these powers don't actually feel that far from the sort on display in Akira.
Which brings us to the next idea; we need to take the events of Akira and somehow make them a superhero origin. We've already established that Japan is regularly targeted by monster attacks, so we can imagine that our Tokyo is largely decimated, a place where high tech motorcycle gangs might roam. They can be taken as subjects as an experiment, exposed to the energy of the monster dimension, resulting in a perfect power-granting accident. From there we can create a whole history of the character that use the drama of Akira but reimagines it as the events of a superhero. I hope that, in reading this timeline, you are able to get the sense of the character as we've imagined him, because he is very cool. |
Allies & Teams
