Gear
19 years ago - Richie Foley is born.
8 years ago - 11-year-old Richie discovers that he is trans.
6 years ago - 13-year-old Richie's parents divorce. He moves to Dakota City with his mother, and takes the opportunity to transition socially, He first meets Virgil Hawkins, and they become best friends.
4 years ago - 15-year-old Richie goes with Virgil Hawkins to the Big Bang street brawl. When the experimental gene-bomb is detonated, he believes himself to be unaffected, but helps Virgil hide his new electrical powers, and later helps him build the equipment he uses as Static.
3 years ago - 16-year-old Richie discovers his own Bang Baby powers, using his technopathy to start developing his own superhero identity, Gear, to support Virgil Hawkins. When his father moves to Dakota City, Richie is forced to come out publicly as trans.
2 years ago - 17-year-old Richie & Virgil Hawkins meet Jefferson Pierce, and are able to help update his costume technology. He stops Francis Stone from attacking a pride parade, demanding for Virgil to come fight him. He begins Hormone Replacement Therapy.
1 year ago - 18-year-old Richie, Virgil Hawkins & Adam Evans work to stop Ivan Evans & the Meta-Breed from setting off another big bang when they steal a tanker of unfinished Alva Technologies mutagenic compound that was scheduled to be destroyed. They finally defeat Ebon so he can be imprisoned. Richie begins attending college, studying engineering.
now - 19-year-old Richie invents a new form of data compression & encryption network, and contacts Oracle to share it with the superhero community. He undergoes top surgery.
The story of Static's best friend and eventual sidekick/supporting hero Richie is a really interesting one. Static, as you know, started out as one of the first Milestone Comics, an independent comic company owned and operated by black creators, telling incredibly compelling stories featuring black heroes. Static was a great comic, but he really became a household name with the animated series Static Shock. Richie is a character from the cartoon, but there are some major elements of his character that come from the comic, so we need to make sure we look at both.
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Rick Stone's Comic History1993's Static #1 followed our hero Virgil to school, where we met his extended supporting cast. Among them was Rick Stone, a blonde kid with long hair and glasses who, even as he's first introduced, is subjected to a bunch of gay jokes by his peers, who are making fun of his performance in a school presentation. As the series continues, Rick is part of a close circle of Virgil's friends as they all work together on a comic, but he continues to be subjected to occasional gay jokes, which he sems to just deflect as best he can.
Eventually, in issue #16, Static finds Rick and another boy beaten up on the street, and Rick confides that it was because they were gay. Later, when Rick returns to school with his face bandaged, he comes out to everyone, and tries to recruit his friends to form a gay teen support group. This is a really big deal, because part of what made Static such a great comic and a great character is that Virgil was not a perfect person. He was often confronted by his own prejudices, and watching him come to realize that his preconcieved ideas about gay people were actually hurtful to his friend was a wonderful bit of storytelling. |
Richie's Animation HistoryWhen the animated series Static Shock begain in 2000 it introduced a few small updates to his supporting cast. In the comic, his main confidant was Frieda, his best friend who he also openly had a crush on. The cartoon bypassed that complication for a younger audience by giving him a male best friend, Richie, who was clearly based on Rick Stone from the comic.
Richie knew Virgil's secret, and provided him with support for the entire series. Eventually, he would even discover his own powers and start suiting up as the hero Gear, working alongside his friend. The show aired on Fox Kids in the 2000s, so they obviously weren't able to actually depict Richie as gay, but any fan of the show would be able to tell you that they did a fantastic job of coding the character as queer, even if they couldn't specifically say so. |
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Our Richie StoryIn Static's return to comics in 2021, We were quickly introduced to his two best friends Richie & Frieda, both of whom already knew his secret. This version of Richie, if he does have the technopathy powers of his animated counterpart, hasn't discovered them yet, but he is already working with his friend, helping him hide his secret and undertake his missions.
Our version of Richie is going to be based on the animated version as much as we can. We want him to know, right away, that Virgil is Static and be helping him build his cool tech from day one. We even introduced the idea that Virgil eventually gets to meet his predecessor Black Lightning, and Richie should help him with his costume technology as well. We did want a few cool minor adventures for Gear, and tapped an exchange with Hotstreak from the comics, which brings us to perhaps the biggest change we implemented for this character. |
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In the comics, Hotstreak attacked a gay rights demonstration. We do, of course, think that Richie being LGBTQ+ is a huge part of his character, but we ALSO agreed that what made this so important was that we want to see Virgil have to confront his own prejudices in support of his friend. Of course, we're telling this story NOW, not in 1993. It just didn't sit well with any of us to suggest that a modern-day version of Static would have to struggle through his own homophobia.
What did feel more appropriate for a modern character was for Richie to be trans. Trans representation is still very much a new thing in the world, and even a modern-day Virgil could struggle with how to support his friend or perhaps even feel, immaturely and selfishly, lied to. It would be a chance to show our hero overcoming his own prejudices, and we all agreed that this was a vital part of what made Static such an important, groundbreaking story. |
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Gear's FutureAs we leave our timeline, Virgil is just starting college, and of course Richie would be right there with him. Virgil is of course venturing out into the world in a big way, joining the Titans and later becoming a member of the new Young Justice, but you always get the strong sense that he and Richie would be thick as thieves no matter what.
Given that they're both studying some pretty heavy STEM subjects, I think it stands to reason that the two of them might actually room together while they attend classes, either in the dorms or perhaps even getting their own place. It just seems like such a natural evolution of their working relationship as Dakota City heroes. For his own part, I imagine Richie is going to continue to to develop the tech he uses as Gear, always with an eye toward focusing his attention of Dakota City specifically. The animated series always managed to do a great job of showing how Richie loved being Virgil's support system and even built his own heroic identity around that concept, and I think that's always going to be his main focus even as he grows as a hero in his own right. |