How Sunset and Meteor Came to Life

By Matthew Solberg, Co-creator Sunset and Meteor.

I've known Travis Hanson since 2007, when he first was an exhibitor at Phoenix Comicon (as Fan Fusion was then known).  I did not know him at the time.  I made a mistake during the booth layout that year, and gave him a horrible location near the back of the hall and facing away from the main door.  It was all I had left for booth locations and I made a point to go talk with him near the end of Saturday to take my beating and assure him we'd make it right next year.

The only saving grace was I placed his booth right next to Mike Mignola, legendary and influential comic book artist and creator of Hellboy, multiple Eisner winner, and one of our headlining comic book guests.  

I approached Travis, introduced myself, and apologized for his booth location.

"What?!  Are you kidding?!  You placed me right next to MIKE MIGNOLA!!  We've been talking all weekend and I've been working those in his line to buy my books.  This has been great!"

We have been friends ever since, which when you meet and know Travis, you'll understand that he is an easy person to like.

Travis did some art work for the convention over the years, designs for our flyers and program guide, and the like.  

Around 2014 I grew increasingly concerned over our usage of intellectual property that we did not own, as we were promoting the show using Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and other known characters.  Across the industry there was worry that the corporate parents of those characters would crack down, especially Disney (who purchased Star Wars and Marvel) and is known to be especially litigious. 

I approached and hired Travis to create a series of characters that we could use in the promotion of our show and that I would own (through my own corporation Square Egg Entertainment Inc).  Travis designed around twenty different characters and we commenced with using them on our digital and print materials.  

I envisioned us coming up with names and backstories for them, but never did.

And then COVID hit.  I wasn't sure if the convention would happen again and decided if it did, there were decisions I had put off for years that I was finally going to enact, which included: 

I wanted physical mascots created of these characters!

I just thought it would be cool to see the characters walking around the show.  I didn't know how to do it, so I did what any good leader does and delegated it to one of my employees, AJ Hernandez.

I told AJ to "select one or two of these characters [handing AJ a sheet with all of the character designs] and find a company that can manufacture mascot outfits for us."

AJ selected the pair of robots, taking inspiration from Transformers, and maybe the belief they would be easier to create as physical costumes.  "Great!", I said,  "We should now come up with names for them."

AJ again came through, responding by email:

"I had some thoughts around the robot names.

These are just my very first ideas....and I am open to any others.

Sunset and Meteor...named after the craters that they each created here in AZ. 

Don't worry....I won't have my feelings hurt if these suck....LOL!"

The names didn't suck, we loved his idea, and yes, Arizona has two craters formed by meteors:  Sunset Crater and Meteor Crater.   We don't worry that they aren't anywhere near each other and probably weren't formed at the same exact time.  Meteor Crate is privately owned and open to tours.  

The plan to create physical mascots was underway!  We would create a photo backdrop banner and do photo ops and then, a couple of weeks later, I realized we had a problem: who would care about taking photos with a pair of people dressed in robot costumes when they're at a convention with people dressed up as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and Wolverine? It wasn't simply enough that they were our mascots, we needed to give them a backstory!

Building on AJ's idea of "two robots from a distant planet crash land in Arizona" I had to figure out "Why would these robots be at Fan Fusion taking photos with people?" 

I gave thought to the idea that they crashed here years ago and maybe were celebrities of their time.  What was a historical equivalent to Fan Fusion, an event where people are entertained, dress up, and see cool, mysterious, great people?  A carnival, naturally.  They crashed and joined a traveling carnival, and they were the celebrities of their time!  

I set the story in the mid 1920s (1925 to now be exact) as traveling carnivals were still a thing (though their heyday was probably mid 1880s), it is long enough ago that we can have fun with that time period, and recent enough that it is still relevant to today (Fun fact:  The fighting of The Great War, now known as World War I, ended in 1919.  The war itself didn't end until sometime in the 2010s, when Germany made their final reparation payment to the Allies per the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.  History is weird like that.).

Ok, but how and why do Sunset and Meteor go to Fan Fusion?  Maybe they took a photo with a young girl way back when, and she was inspired by them and grew up and she is now telling her grandkid about the time she met them, and she's told this story hundreds of times before, and he wants to know what happens to them.  "Well, I dunno.  They simply disappeared."   So this kid, her great-grandson, goes online and (conveniently) discovers they were lost in a mine near where he lives.  He goes searching, finds them, tells them how they inspired his great-grandmother and others need this inspiration too, and they should come to the largest gathering in Arizona of cool, amazing people:  Fan Fusion!  

Sunset and Meteor agree, they all blast off with the kid on their back, and the kid calls his great-grandmother telling her she needs to come to Fan Fusion as he has a surprise for her.

I hired Travis to turn this short story into a ten page comic book, which we printed and gave away in our program guide in 2023.  

And I thought this would be the pattern:  We would write a ten page comic book story and give it away each year in our program guide.  No big deal.

But then I started writing the second story, and knew I was in trouble.

...continued in "How Mascot Comics Came to Life".