Jeff Moy - Kator and Kon-El

As you can tell, this is last of my Jeff Moy Commissions and actually the first one I ever got.

Jeff drew both characters in costume designs I came up with (with respects to Kurt Schaffenberger for Kator and Alex Ross for Superboy) and a friend of mine named Eric Bennett colored it for me. Although, if you look at Kator's hand, they were meant to be gold instead of flesh tone

In case you're not familiar with each of them, here's a (hopefully) brief history lesson...

Kator was a villain created by Cary Bates and Kurt Schaffenberger in "The New Adventures of Superboy" issues 17, 18. Since this was Pre-Crisis, Superboy was Clark Kent, etc, ETC. Well, due to a speech/rant by Carl 'Moosie' Draper, Superboy gets an idea to create super-powered robot to battle with-- in the hopes that if a real super-powered foe came to town, his battles with this robot he dubbed 'Kator' would give him the necessary experience in order to win. Thus he gave the robot a highly advanced artifical I.Q. and had his own Superboy robots program 'Kator' with various super-powers that Clark would have no knowledge of.

Unfortunately for Clark, the robot was too intelligent... it wasn't content on just being something to fight and then be thrown away. It devised a scheme in order to kill Superboy and replace him... and if not, then he had a successor to take on his mantle, the aformentioned Carl Drapier.

As you can imagine, Kator lost; Carl as Kator II lost and Superboy wiped Carl's memories of the incident... although Carl would later become the Superman foe, the Master Jailer.

The Superboy in the picture is Kon-El, or the version of Superboy created by Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett. This was back before the character was unnecessarily retconned and then killed off by Geoff Johns (yeah, NOT a big Teen Titans fan here...).

Kon-El is a clone of Paul Westfield, Director of Project Cadmus, genetically altered to look like Superman and given a TTK field to simulate Superman-esque powers.

One of my dream projects is to write a Superboy book and one of the characters that would be introduced would be a modernized version of the Kator concept. It would pay a lot of homage to the original idea (won't reveal in what ways, but it does involve someone from the Drapier family and Superman robots) and this is the costume that he'd appear in. And likewise, during my run Kon-El would eventually get that suit you see up above, which is really a pretty damn cool thing in and of itself (the costume is an idea I've had to talk myself out of using in other books, as I just freaking love the concept behind it).

The odds are against it ever happening, but oh well...

At least for a short while, having Jeff draw this back in the day before Superboy went down the proverbial crapper, it seemed like that dream would happen.

In any event, there's the history behind this particular commission!