Hammersuit Zero-X
Hammersuit Zero-X by Mike Becker
31 years ago - Mai Kusanagi is born in Tokyo.
23 years ago - 8-year-old Mai leaves traditional school and starts her own educational program designed to keep up with her.
20 years ago - 11-year-old Mai's uncle uses his fortune to create the Mecha Bukai organization, to build mechs and to recruit & train mech pilots to defend Tokyo after much of it is destroyed by monster attacks. She quickly becomes an expert in mech design and operation.
17 years ago - 14-year-old Mai first unveils her own mech, Hammersuit Zero-X, designed in the foundry workshops of her uncle's Organization. She regularly ignores the rules telling her not to join the professional mech pilots in defending Tokyo.
15 years ago - 16-year-old Mai's mech Hammersuit Zero-X is the only surviving mech in the onslaught of new monsters attacking Tokyo as the Monster Wars begin.
14 years ago - 17-year-old Mai, Grr & Hiro Kunikawa join Dai Yokohama in the final battle of the Monster Wars, saving Japan. She helps to rebuild Neo-Tokyo, and joins the other heroes of the war to build the Halo, founding Big Science Action.
5 years ago - 26-year-old Mai gives birth to her daughter Batya.
All of the members of Big Science Action are references to a specific type of Anime, and Hammersuit Zero-X might be the one that is the most ubiquitous to even someone completely unaware of the tropes of Japanese heroic fiction. EVERYONE knows: Japan loves giant drivable robots. In this case they specifically namedrop Gundam & Gigantor, but I don't know if it even needs to be THAT specific. It simply wouldn't be a Japanese superhero team without a mech.
Hammersuit Zero-X's Comic HistoryHammersuit Zero-X, like the rest of Big Science Action, made a single appearance in a single panel of Final Crisis, but was also described in the pages of the behind the scenes Final Crisis Sketchbook. It's one of the smaller entries; its just a picture of the robot suit, a little sketch of a spunky anime heroine, and the text "Gundam meets Gigantor with huge steam-hammer hands - spunky young girl scientist schoolgirl has created this giant robot suit to run around and right wrongs in." Some concepts really are just that simple, I guess?
Miss Kusanagi was one of the original heroes to appear among the modern-day Big Science Action, although when she opens the suit, it's revealed that she's now much older, implying just how much time has passed. She's also the member of Big Science Action to appear in Doomsday Clock. |
Our Hammersuit Zero-X StoryWe had precious little to work with this time around, just the fact that she started out as a teenager who built her own mech. We needed to fall back on the tropes of the types of anime they seemed to be referencing, and in our experience, there is usually some sort of quasi-military research organization that has poured resources into building the mechs of the series. We'd already established that our version of Japan is regularly attached by giant monsters, which gives us the perfect catalyst. Our Miss Kusanagi (we named her Mai) is a child prodigy who grew up with the program and wound up making her own Mech, and winds up the only survivor of the program.
The age of the character actually became a very interesting question, because it's established in the character concept that she is a teenager when Big Science Action forms, but of course we eventually see that she's been around long into her middle or even old age. We aren't making the team that old, but did want to find a way to emphasize that this formerly teen hero is now an adult, so we decided to say that she becomes a mom in her late twenties, just to make a specific statement about her age. |