English teachers love to find new ways to stimulate student writing. One of the most popular books here in the school library is a beautiful, visual collection of characters like Superman, Spiderman, Batman entitled Sixty Years of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes by Les Daniels. The other is Ultimate X-Men by Peter Sanderson. I used to get students to visually create some characters before beginning to write. Junior students always love to enter a fantasy world that is filled with heroic characters. So, when a Year 10 student showed me Hero Machine I could see the potentiality. It takes a little patience but you can design your own Superhero, save the screen, use your photo program to select the figure and then bring them to life in text. Why not make some characters and begin writing today?