The CYA Files: Inspirations
Superhero stories were my biggest inspiration for The CYA Files. I’ve been trying to write superhero stories since high school. I began with a comic script called Lightning Girl, which told of a girl named Coral who gained powers over lightning after being struck by lightning one night in Kensington Gardens. She then joined a group called the Percival House Heroes. This script then led to an apocalyptic-style sequel, set 18 years later, about the children of the original Heroes. But since I couldn’t draw, the comic idea was abandoned and I tried adapting it to fiction, with several failed attempts, though Avalon Jacobs, who was originally a character I conceived as being in an animated series of Lightning Girl, still remains, now as the much different non-superpowered heroine of Darkly Bound. The main superhero inspirations were X-Men, which has a team of young people led by an older mentor character, and the Teen Titans animated series. (X-Men was also a big influence on Lightning Girl).
The technology element of the series came from me just being a techno geek, as well as the futuristic setting. The Armor of God mecha was inspired by the well-known mecha genre of Japanese anime, which dates back to the early days of anime and includes well-known series like Gundam, Macross, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. I was thinking more along the lines of Gundam or Evangelion when I came up with the giant mecha, since the mecha in both series are operated by humans. Robotic combat suits are also common in both regular sci-fi and sci-fi anime series such as Bubblegum Crisis, though I’m not sure if they can do what mine can since I haven’t seen many of them.
I’m not sure who the villains were inspired by. Darien Palmer, the duplicitous record company owner, has been a character in my head for a while; he appeared as the villain character in some of my failed attempts to novelize Lightning Girl. It wasn’t until I began using him for the CYA story that I made him unhuman. I guess in his fake guise he is somewhat inspired by Eliot Carver, the villain of the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, who is a well-loved media mogul in public but in private is actually really evil and is building a stealth ship so he can start a world war. Jade is a new character. I picture her as the sort of attractive exotic woman that men fantasize about from afar but can't have because she's loyal to one man – kind of like Lum in Rumiko Takahashi's series Urusei Yatsura actually. Jade is more of a flirt than Lum though, as she tries to flirt with both Matt and Roger. She also has cute, slightly insulting nicknames for each of the CYA members, such as "Geisha Girl" for Ayumi and "Pretty Boy" for Roger. In short, she's sort of the femme fatale of the story.
Nastasya has been around even longer than Palmer; back when I mulled around the animated series idea, she was a major villain who, aside from her typical soul-stealing, also had a bone to pick with Coral, the main character, over an insult several years before. She ended up being killed by the Percival House Heroes after she took Avalon and Vega’s souls and made them the head of her huge army of soulless people. I hadn’t thought initially of including her in the CYA story, but she is too interesting a character to dump into oblivion. Plus, she kind of reminds me of “Twilight” Suzuka from the anime Outlaw Star, a mercenary who answers to no one but herself. After all, the popularity of Boba Fett has shown that people like bounty hunter characters that have no specific loyalties to either the good or the bad side.
