Spooktober 2025: Sting

Sting was one of the members of Blood Red, the team at the center of the comic book I published as a teenager. Sadly, that comic ran for only five issues and left more than its share of unanswered questions. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how I’m feeling on a given day—I’ve given lots of thought to Sting and his backstory in the years since.

Way back when, I knew that one of his teammates was a time-displaced future version of Sting. In the years since, as I’ve written more and more about time travel and developed the rules of that phenomenon in my little shared universe, it’s occurred to me more than once that Sting’s “stinging”powers might be related to unsticking people in time—something which he might eventually develop into more full-fledged time-slipping abilities.

Then, today, as I was thinking about what I might put together for this prompt, I got to thinking: what if the time-displaced future version of Sting was one of the Riverbenders—those select few who have tried to change the past in my universe, succeeded, and then destroyed their iteration of reality as a result?

This led to all sorts of interesting ideas about which version of reality he might have brought to an end, but I’ll save that for another ramble. For now, I’ll just end by saying how thankful I am for the excellent amount of inspiration that Spooktober is giving me this year.