The Flying Fox Home Page An Introduction to the Fabulous Flying Fox Episode 1 "The Birth of a Heroine" Episode 2 "Pele, Goddess of Fire" Episode 3a "The Challenge of the Mental Master" Episode 3b "The Inner Circle" Episode 4a "The Mystery of Raven Gold" Episode 4b "Flashback" Episode 5 "Pajama Party" Episode 6 "The Last Vampire" Episode 7 "Showdown With Sylph" Episode 8 "Revelations"

The Story Behind the Untold Tales An Introduction to the Fabulous Flying Fox If you ever have the opportunity to sit down and read the comic books we published between 1986 and 1994, you'll notice that there are a few differences between what you'll see on the printed page and what you see here on the Heroic website. One of those differences has to do with the Flying Fox, who in the printed version of these stories was originally known as Foxbat. The underlying reason for the change in the name is that it has always been the policy here at Heroic Publishing to ensure that the creators of the various characters we use maintain their rights of ownership. So when Bruce Harlick, the creator of Foxbat, informed us that he had other plans for his character and would prefer that he not continue to appear in our comic books, we prepared to oblige him. From the creative standpoint, the major question facing us was the question of what to do about the fact that Foxbat had been a major recurring villain for Flare and the League of Champions. Obviously, if those stories were not to be completely invalidated, a new character had to be created who would take Foxbat's place. Moreover, in order to play fair with Bruce, the new character ultimately had to be someone other than Foxbat under a different name. The hook we grabbed came out of a storyline we hadn't actually used. At the conclusion of The Curse of the Hellfire Crown, we'd seen Foxbat slip away from the League of Champions, but space limitations had prevented us from seeing precisely how he'd managed to make good his escape. We knew, because we'd plotted the story, that he'd done it by having his shape-shifting friend Sylph disguise him as a pretty girl. We knew he'd had some trouble thereafter persuading Sylph to change him back into a guy. Now, it seemed to us, the fact that those stories had thus far gone untold could be turned to our advantage. What if we told those stories in such a way that our new character, the one who would replace Foxbat, would end up being a beautiful young woman? We decided she would keep a bat motif, but would take a name with a double meaning. She would be the Flying Fox. She would be swift, strong, and have the ability to fly. She would also have a subtle, mostly unrecognized power over men. While in female form, she would enjoy being female, and under normal circumstances only dimly recall that she'd started out life as a male. Occasionally a circumstance would arise in which the Fox would get herself changed back (either physically or psychologically) into a guy, at which point her memories would come flooding back, and her male side would take over and bend every effort to find himself a permanent cure. But the cure wouldn't last. Eventually, the girl Flying Fox would come back, even more in control than before. The more we thought about what we might do with this concept of the Flying Fox, the more we liked it. In the context of an ongoing storyline, we would be presenting our readers with an interesting moral dilemma. In her girl form, we'd be presenting the Flying Fox as a gorgeous costumed heroine who'd be out there fighting super-villains and doing good deeds. In his male form, we'd be presenting the Flying Fox as a lunatic costumed villain who'd be out only for himself and trying very hard to figure out a way to get rid of his female side forever. On the face of it, readers might well find themselves favoring the cute girl over the guy. But should they? When you get past the good girl/bad guy thing, just whose body is it, anyway? And could there by some chance be a little bit more to the girl Flying Fox's peculiar power over men than at first meets the eye? When it came time to sit down and plot the transition from using Foxbat to using the Flying Fox, we divided the history of our new character into several stages. Stage One would parallel the early history of Foxbat as it had already been revealed in the comics, and we would thereby validate the earliest appearances of our new character. In Stage Two, in the immediate aftermath of events of The Curse of the Hellfire Crown, the amnesiac girl Flying Fox would move to Hawaii and spend several months establishing herself as a genuine costumed heroine. In Stage Three, the girl Flying Fox would somehow regain her memory of having been a man, her male personality would take over, and she would return to California to resume her life as a costumed villain and start seeking a cure for the curse that made her into a girl. In Stage Four, a temporary cure would indeed be found, and we would validate later appearances of the character as a man. Finally, in Stage Five, the female Flying Fox would reassert herself in a manner designed to destroy her male side forever. The end result would have been a character very different from Bruce Harlick's Foxbat. Our new Flying Fox would have been a gorgeous, well-meaning, but inherently wicked costumed heroine. She would in truth have been something of a psychic vampire, whose instinctive desire to cause and feed off of the intense emotional experiences of her men would have led her down some treacherous roads. Had we been able to continue publishing comics in the face of the mid-1990s collapse of the direct-market distribution system, Untold Tales of the Flying Fox would have been a several-issue series revealing events that occurred in Stages Two and Three above. As you'll see when you read the details of the plot that would have been used for issue #1, not all is immediately revealed. At first, the reader is presented only with clues that not everything about the lovely Raven Gold is as it appears to be. The story begins a full six weeks after our heroine first arrives in Hawaii. She's settled quite nicely into new life as a sultry nightclub singer at the Pineapple Palace in Honolulu. She has no memory that she's ever been anything other than a woman, she's started sleeping with her employer, hoping he'll ask her to marry him and start a family, and she's perfectly happy with her life the way it is. Problem is, Raven's been having these very strange dreams . . . Next: The Birth of a Heroine It's our fondest hope that the stories you see here on the Heroic website will someday be presented in a comic book format. But before we move back into the comic book market, we need to be certain we have the resources we lacked the first time around. Bottom line: If we're going to do it, this time we'll do it right. If you're interested in the prospects of Heroic Publishing's return to comic book publishing, please drop an e-mail note to: heroicinc@heroicpub.com The Flying Fox, Raven Gold, Freddy Goldman, related characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks of Heroic Publishing, Inc. For information regarding the availability of these and other Heroic characters for media licensing, contact The Daniel Ostroff Agency, 9200 Sunset Blvd, Suite 402, Los Angeles CA 90069. For other inquiries direct E-mail to dmallonee@heroicpub.com