Trading Card Tuesday: Hecate

This October, the villains are taking over...

Y’all—

Welcome to Trading Card Tuesday! I hope your October is off to a spooky start. But you best gird yourselves, New Futurists, because the Omniverse is about to be invaded by villains!

Luis Valero-Suarez and I both love Halloween. So we wanted to use the ghastliest time of the year to share some of our favorite fiends from across the Omniverse with you.

This October we will unleash four different villains onto Substack! Stay vigilant on Tuesday 10/3, 10/10, 10/24 and then join us on Halloween (10/31) for an extra insidious installment of Trading Card Tuesday! We won’t be posting on Tuesday, 10/17 because the next entry of Southern Gothic’s The Purloined Letters will be coming at you on Wednesday, 10/18 and I ain’t trying to overwhelm your inboxes!

Now before we wriggle and writhe our way into today’s feature, we have a question for you. Luis and I left one spot open in our first set of trading cards for a character chosen by YOU, our readers! Based on our most popular posts, we’d like to hear which character you’d like to learn more about. Vote in the poll below by Tuesday, October 10 to cheer on your favorite hero or villain!

Finally, I’m excited to introduce a new component to the ever-expanding Omniverse. “WorldBuilding” is a new feature where I’ll post documents created from the “rules and systems” of our fictional world. These are the kinds of documents that I make for myself and share among collaborators as we construct the Omniverse. We hope you enjoy learning more about the mechanics of our storyworld as we build it from the ground up!

So without further ado, let’s dive in! Get ready to meet one of my favorite characters Luis Valero-Suarez has EVER drawn: the villainous vixen, the winsome witch, the supreme sorceress of New Cawkaigne— Hecate!

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1955 – HECATE

Morganna Marlow is the immortal sorceress Hecate whom the legendary Morgan le Fay was based on. As Ben had described, Hecate “oozes Old Hollywood sexiness.” Not only was this about designing her costume but also her attitude. Beautiful, curled hair, cat-like eyes, a beauty mark to top it all off and a look that could kill. She needed to look like someone with class, composure, beauty, yet someone with an ace up their sleeve. Actresses I used as muses for Hecate included Ava Garden, Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth, Sophia Loren, and even Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin. I also looked to classic fictional characters such as Scarlet Witch, Poison Ivy, and Maleficent. Maleficent inspired mostly the purple and green color scheme and the dragon motif whereas Scarlet Witch and Poison Ivy were used as reference for the ol’ bathing suit look. Since she’s from the legend of King Arthur, I wanted to incorporate some dragon scales to visually represent her connection to mythologies of the past, so I incorporated it as part of her cape design. The crown is also meant to resemble dragon horns that I designed to fit with her brow line.

- Luis Valero-Suarez

As I said in my introduction, Hecate may just be my favorite design Luis has done for the Omniverse. I remember gasping when I first received his “front of card” art. “Old Hollywood” was my guiding aesthetic note and boy HOWDY, did Luis knock it out of the park!

I just needed you to see this image in black and white. Tell me you wouldn’t watch Lauren Bacall chew the scenery in this role! Luis’s nods to Hecate’s mythic background are perfect in that they blend seamlessly with the late Golden Age superhero aesthetics like the classic bathing suit and long gloves combo. Honestly, I don’t think of Hecate as a straight-up villain. She’s more of an anti-hero with staunch principles that sometimes chafe against the goody-two-shoes of this world. Somehow Luis was able to capture that moral complexity in the superior attitude she exudes.

—Ben Bolling

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