The Brunei Superhero story continues…
Chapter 4 – Ali
As a new type of drugs begin to seep into the black market, Adam and Ridzuan makes their debut as costumed heroes.
This new chapter also marks the end of Volume I of the story which is the basically the Origin story of the main characters.
You can read the latest Chapter HERE.
I’m open to any comments or suggestions.
When you’re done reading, you can head off to the commentary below.
CHAPTER 4 COMMENTARY
OK, first things first, we FINALLY get to the point where these characters suit up and adopt their superhero moniker. You have:
- Adam as Captain Brunei, obviously inspired by Marvel’s Captain America.
- Ridzuan as Balau Man, the ‘Batman’ of the story.
- Liza takes her social media username, Dayang Dynamite and starting to turn it into a brand. Although she has yet to don a superhero costume, I can safely say that she will eventually.
CAPTAIN BRUNEI or KAPTEN BRUNEI
I’m not gonna pretend that I was the first one to toy with the concept of ‘Captain Brunei’. There are many fan artworks of ‘Captain Brunei’ out there if you bother to search them. But what I can tell you that for me, I had the idea back in 2010 (you can find my original Tumblr post HERE). I’ll write more about the history/evolution of my version of Captain Brunei in a future post.
Despite the name, Adam’s story owes more to Spiderman and Superman than Captain America.
BALAU MAN
In this chapter, Ridzuan finally suit up as the Batman-esque superhero, Balau Man based on ‘Hantu Balau’, a demonic all black entity. He is described looking like a cross between The Predator and Marvel’s Blackheart (with armor and eskrima sticks). I’m not much of an artist so I’ll just leave you with these two images and you can use your imagination Hahaha
Why Balau Man? Simply because Balau and Bat both starts with the letter B. And also as an excuse for me to make a tribute to the wonderful Catatan Misteri.
In 2000, RTB aired this horror series called Catatan Misteri. I wouldn’t say it was high quality production but they made it up with an enjoyable plot. It was an anthology series with each episode telling different horror story (that are most likely to be based on true story). The series has a sort of a cult following for a generation of Bruneians and like many others, I want to see the full episodes released on DVD or online.
One of the more memorable episode was the first one involving a demonic entity known as ‘Balau’ or ‘Hantu Balau’ that haunted this family who just moved into their new house. I’ve never heard of ‘Hantu Balau’ before and it seems that the term never had any previous basis. I guess Catatan Misteri did contribute a new terminology into our everyday language!
DAYANG DYNAMITE
I wanted the female superhero to have the word ‘Dayang’ on her name. In a spirit of the alliteration in ‘Wonder Woman’, I decided on ‘Dayang Dynamite’. Liza has yet to suit up as a superhero in this chapter but she will in the next volume. She will play a bigger role especially in this particular future story arc.
Again, you can read the latest Chapter HERE.
I’m open to any comments or suggestions.
Enjoy!
Guardians Of Darussalam 
Reblogged this on Trylobyte's Corner and commented:
It’s a new chapter to my Brunei Superhero Story.
This time the characters finally suit up as superheroes thus ending Volume I (or the Origin stories).
As mentioned previously, I’m re-editing and re-publishing the story online one chapter per week. But I realized that it wasn’t realistic and I needed more time because I wasn’t just re-editing them but I had to re-arrange or add new plot elements or I simply just need to pause and figure out how to lay the seeds for future plot lines. And also because of my day job as well LOL
So now I have decided to try to publish one chapter every two weeks.
Hope you’ve enjoyed them so far!