The Crime Crushers

I have been creating superheroes and superheroes stories for years. The first original superheroes I worked on were with a friend I made in fifth grade - Harley Jebens. For two years, he and I cranked out several comic books starring ourselves and our friends as superheroes. We started with the 'Platteville Protectors." We quickly came up with more global superhero group the 'Crime Crushers.' We even had our own imprint ' Jadz and Kops,' coming from the names of our little 'gang' of nuts. Harley was a much better artist than I was, and he patiently allowed me to scrawl my characters into the comics, too. I still have quite a number of the comics that we did, and I found out (through facebook), that he still has the others.

Our featured characters were:

• Aquatic Boy (Harley Jebens) who has the ability to turn into any non-fish creature who is connected to water (waterfowl, mollusks, dolphins, whales)
• The Eagle (Scott Zierath) who has feathered wings, sharp talons on his feet, a regeneration power, and hollow, but very tough, bones
• Computo (Karland Kilian) super intelligent boy who created a powerful suit of armor
• Strong Man (Kenneth Ambrosius) super strong (obviously)
• Stretch (Nick Dykstra) with the ability to stretch, squash, bounce, and squeeze
• Vision 2 (Mike Olds) with the ability to shoot ice out of his left eye and fire out of his right eye.
• Changer (Gian Pagnucci) who could change into an inanimate object
• Invinco (Shamik Bafna) who was completely invulnerable to damage, unless he was 'hugged' by a human being
• Ape (Dan Wang) extremely agile with a tail that could shoot lightning
• Kid Lightning (Scott Kindschi) who was our speedster

We also had female teammates, but they were girls I had a crush on as a middle schooler, so they never knew they were in my comic books.

• The Kingfisher (Julie King) very strong, high durability, superior fighter
• The Witch (Kris Karrman) with magical spells
• The Teleporter (Linda DiMeglio) whose name rather covers it...
  

As time went by, we added friends who were older or younger than we were, or some based on action figures we owned, including our brothers. In fact, my brother drew some of his friends as heroes in our books, too.

• Flying Fish (Mark Zierath) water breathing, gliding fins, sonic scream
• Matter Muncher (Brett Jebens) with the ability to eat anything non-organic
• Gator (Phil Sens) a superstrong gator-man
• Lion Man (can't remember)- claws, lion-man, regeneration
• Warlock (Brad Gottschalk) - wizard with a magic shield and a magic sword
• Archer (David Osterholtz) - archer with trick arrows
  

I still play with ideas of trying to re-do these comics; update, re-tell the stories. Going back to that age of 5th and 6th grade when we thought we were so grown up...

The picture is one that I drew just a couple years ago while at a conference. I started to ink it as well, but didn't get far. As I said, still playing with ideas. I'll probably be coming back to talk about these characters again...