From day-to-day, you will often find Jim Evans in one of the graduate student cubicles in McDonald Hall, where he juggles complex equations in quantum mechanics as part of his PhD work in the Department of Physics.
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He comes armed, too, with a mystical ruler forged by the famous 17th century thinker Blaise Pascal, as well as a staple gun that fires diamond-tipped staples for immobilizing villains by affixing their clothing to the floor. Nor does he work alone, being regularly flanked by his trusty sidekick Deuterium Boy and his comely ladyfriend Helium Girl.
If this all sounds a bit silly, Evans will not try to persuade you otherwise. Instead, he touts his alter ego and colleagues as “defenders of Truth, Silliness and the Canadian Way, drinking gourmet hot beverages far beyond those of mortal men.”
In fact, Hydrogen Guy is among the latest of a long line of fictional figures conceived by Evans as a way of giving his imagination free rein.
“I've always enjoyed creative writing,” he says, noting that his favourite part of any role-playing game is defining the role in the first place. “I've always liked to create very absurd characters and vast, complex worlds for them to goof around in.”
By that standard, Hydrogen Guy is his most ambitious effort so far. If you visit The Files of Hydrogen Guy at www.unitedheroes.net/hg, you will find a large archive of text files that make up more than 100 episodes of this ongoing tale.
The site is complete with rundown of everyone involved, including good guys, bad guys, and even shadowy organizations such as the one patterned after British Columbia's public automobile insurance agency. Evans has been working on the storyline since his undergraduate days at Simon Fraser University, bringing it to the Web after he started his graduate work at the University of Ottawa in 1998.
He admits he is not sure who reads the stories, beyond a handful of devoted fans who correspond regularly with him and even contribute drawings of various characters. “I would be really surprised if I had more than 100 readers,” he speculates, adding that he does not even know if anyone on campus follows Hydrogen Guy's adventures.
Nevertheless, there is at least one fan on campus: physics professor Denis Rancourt, who is also Evan's thesis supervisor.
“I think this is wonderful,” says Rancourt, who welcomes a similar creativity in all of his students. He points out that Evans is a top-notch student, opening up new avenues in a powerful branch of materials analysis known as Mossbauer Spectroscopy. At the same time, Rancourt enjoys watching a promising young mind nurture ideas that explore creative frontiers, a step he regards as essential to extending the technical bounds of any scientific field.
Hydrogen Guy would probably agree with that assessment.
