Red Ryan
69 years ago - Matthew Ryan is born in Southern California.
65 years ago - 4-year-old Matthew Ryan learns to surf.
62 years ago - 7-year-old Matthew Ryan begins skateboarding competitively, getting his first sponsors. He gets the nickname ‘Red’.
59 years ago - 10-year-old Red Ryan becomes a junior motocross champion.
55 years ago - 14-year-old Red Ryan sets several new street luge speed records.
53 years ago - 16-year-old Red Ryan creates a new extreme sport combining free climbing, wingsuit basejumping, and cave diving.
52 years ago - 17-year-old Red Ryan is the first civilian to perform a HALO jump.
50 years ago - 19-year-old Red Ryan, June Robbins, Ace Morgan, Rocky Davis, and Professor Walter Haley survive a plane crash on a volcanic island when their B-47 Stratojet transpacific flight encounters an unexplained spatial phenomenon. They bond over the belief that they had escaped death and felt driven to make something of their borrowed time. Upon returning to civilization, they begin an Adventure Club, The Challengers of the Unknown.
40 years ago - 29-year-old Red Ryan &The Challengers of the Unknown agree to help free the imprisoned leader of a native resistance movement. Red & Rocky Davis are intentionally arrested as part of the breakout.
36 years ago - 33-year-old Red Ryan & The Challengers of the Unknown race against time to stop the eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera. They ultimately have to choose one of them to sacrifice their life... Red knocks the others out, taking the task himself, dying in the explosion that vents the pressure in the volcano into the ionosphere.
The individual members of the Challengers do have their own personalities and specialties, but what they don't really have is their own STORY. They all exist, more or less, just as a function of the whole. So it follows that we're going to need to take the fairly bare-bones idea of each of these characters and see what we can build from them.
Red Ryan's StoryAll the Challengers were defined, from the first appearance, by their specialties. Red was originally described as a Circus Daredevil, but later comics would often say that his specialty was mountain climbing, which seems like it would be a more situationally useful skill. In practice, he was basically just always diving headlong into danger, but of course that also describes ALL the Challengers. In later comics Red had a few more dramatic changes in his story. He was actually killed in issue #55, a move that was absolutely meant to be permanent, but the move was walked back in response to reader response. In his absence, his brother briefly adventured with the Challengers in his stead. He would later lose an eye and would also have a quick romance with Corrina Stark, an occult specialist who briefly joined the team.
To create our version of Red, the idea of him being a daredevil adventurer actually immediately evokes the idea of him being a sportsman and adrenaline junky, which to me suggests that he's the youngest of the Challengers. We built his backstory with references to all sorts of high-speed, high-danger sports, even combining a few in ways that we're not attempting to explain. As of this year, all of those different sports COULD have existed as far back as we're suggesting... even the idea that he could have been a sponsored skateboarder 62 years ago. Red was the first Challenger to die in the comics, and while they walked that back, we don't have to. It feels correct that some of the Challengers might not make it, as long as they all get the chance to go out doing what they all promised they would do; make the most of their borrowed time. |
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