More Old Art

Tucked away in the corner of my closet was a box full of the really old drawings I did as a child and a young teen, including almost 50 small comics I drew. As much as I liked to draw as a child, I was never very good at it, and by the time I finally started improving, I discovered writing, and drawing fell to the wayside. Since then, I would occasionally do doodles, and finally, I just don't draw any more. To be frank, nearly all the drawings, and all of the comics, are too terrible to post even with the understanding that these were drawn by a kid.

Still, it was an interesting trip down memory lane, and I did find a couple of pieces that weren't any worse than I've already posted here. So, in lieu of any other content at the moment, here's some more blasts from the past:

This is Rayman, one of my earliest superheroes, and the teen member of my first superhero team, the Fabulous Five. As may be apparent, Rayman was inspired by the likes of the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, who in hindsight, were a pretty huge influence on my creativity when I was young. The Power Universe, my first big superhero setting, is filled with animal mutant hero and villain characters right alongside more traditional capes-n-spandex heroes and living robots.

Here's some ugly, scruffy, pissed-off guy. I have no idea who he is or what his story is.

I actually very rarely ever colored my drawings, but when I actually bothered, I was not-too-shabby at doing fruit portraits with colored pencils. This is unfortunately the only sample that survived.

This was actually a doodle I drew in college, after being long out of practice. Unfortunately, I never got any better at drawing than this, just due to never practicing. Shit, this is better than anything I can do now, and it's just a basic head shot. This is Arcana from the Intrepid storyline.

This is a devil-fied version of Swan, also from the Intrepid story. This is a non-canon depiction. Swan is supposed to have angel wings, but here, I opted to go with the bat-wing route and for some reason gave her an overly decorative great sword. Funnily enough, I had a habit of usually drawing Swan wielding a scythe, even though she never does in the story. I dunno why, it always just looked good on her. But, of course, this doesn't apply here, and I can't find any of my scythe-wielder drawings of her. Oh, well.

Fly Soldier was another Power Universe character, one of the strongest heroes on the planet, and member of the powerhouse trio known as the Three Team. He was also blatantly ripped off from a friend of mine in elementary school, and as such, was scrapped when I got old enough to realize I probably shouldn't just steal characters from friends. I tried to change him up to make him more of his own character, but he never really grew beyond the rip-off. Otherwise, he was yet another animal-themed hero, made in a time when drawing Animal-themed characters didn't immediately make everyone think you were some kind of degenerate pervert.

This is a normal giraffe, drawn free hand using a zoo magazine as a reference.

No idea who this is, but he might have been one of my many, many attempts at doing some kind of "wandering hero in a modern fantasy Earth" characters.

No idea who this character is supposed to be, either. This was just a random sketch of a cat girl. This is an example of how I used to draw with a ball-point pen, with the challenge being that you couldn't just erase your mistakes, so you had to find a way to cover them up, or incorporate them into the final image; the reason she's wielding some kind of dual-blade-thing is I think I screwed up drawing the leg pose initially, and so had to convert those lines into the bottom blade configuration.

This was the cover I drew to a short story I wrote for a school assignment. We were supposed to make an essay about what we thought Hell was like. I wrote a whole short story about it instead! Believe it or not, this was an assignment for a religion class.

Here's a shitty sketch of my old pet Scottie, whom I eventually based a superhero off of.

Ro-Torr was a Transformers Triple-Changer style robot, with a helicopter, humanoid, and wolf modes. Never used him for anything, just sort of a TF OC, I guess. I was attempting to replicate the style of the clunkier G1 toys.

Various characters from the more cartoony world of "Krazy Komix." Yeah, I had a whole multiverse of worlds, even back then.

Totally forgot about this guy, but Lazor was the big bad guy of my Dream Wars mythology.

The guy with the spear is Mythos, from the Intrepid. The alien on his shoulder is Tentacle, from the Not Exactly Invaders From Mars comic strip I drew as a kid.

When I was a teen, crossovers between different comic universes was the coolest thing ever. So, naturally, with my multiple worlds and kajillion characters, I was going to do the same thing! S.T.A.R. Corps is a teen hero series set in it's own world that deserves its own entire article, what with the huge number of reboots. The New Force was the primary teen hero team of the Power Universe. This was another cover drawn for a story I wrote.

So, because I have a metric fuckton of characters just floating around that I don't do anything with, one of my many ideas is to try and toss a bunch of random characters together to form a team. This has rarely ever worked, although I have successfully done stories that update old characters.

This team was apparently supposed to be one of my many, many groups of adventurers going on an adventure concepts. The characters are, from left to right: Triango-Man, Stencil, Stretcho, Mr. Mechanical-Man, and Power-Bat. These were all old Krazy Komix characters, being revamped into this project. Unlike most of my previous "form a group from a random jumble of back-loggers", I deliberately went with the easy-to-doodle cartoon characters, because they were characters I could actually draw consistently. Yes, I was in college at this point, but I was very out of practice with drawing, and I had convinced myself I wanted to try doing comics again. I'm pretty sure this was never a serious project, but one of my many "practice comics" ideas. I honestly don't even remember what the premise of getting this group together was. Heck, I don't even remember what the title name "Project: Xenn" is supposed to mean.

 

I never did actually draw the comic, but I did make some fake covers. Haha, they're so badly drawn, but there is some sense of action going on here, enough that I wish I knew what was supposed to happen in each comic. Triango-Man's clearly in deep shit on the first cover, backed into an alley by some big dude. In the second, I think the team is about to be ensnared by a giant clam!

Here's another scruffy dude.

No idea who the kid is supposed to be, although I think that's supposed to be some kind of super-speedster alien he's embracing. I like the completely impractical magic-wand-battle-axe he's hefting. This was clearly influenced by anime or JRPGs or something.

Ah, yes, this classic. Victory Transformer was a comic I drew when I was a really little kid, in which a normal guy is walking down the street, gets attacked by a ghost demon, and instead of dying, he spontaneously turns into a superhero of his own creation, and proceeds to get into one massive extended fight scene with said demon, and numerous other super monsters that join in at random. This coined the now famous phrase among my friends, "Holy crap, I just became a guy I made up!"

This image is (thankfully) not from the original comic, but a single-page re-creation I did years later, to more fully capture the glory of a moment that could only have come from the random creativity of an eight-year old.