The characters CARDINAL and BLUE JAY are dredged up from my childhood today. They were, I suppose, looking at them now, a combination of my affection for both BATMAN and ROBIN combined with HAWK and DOVE. When I was VERY young, I was into mostly DC characters– mainly because my father, who was buying comics at the time, bought mostly DC comics, and not having any money of my own at around age 10 or so, I had to read what he bought. But I still have wonderful memories of all those great old DC books, and still love those characters to this day.

Anyway– here’s the original character drawing from my childhood, followed by a modern interpretation. Note that I left everything the same except for the huge letters on the characters’ chests. I changed those to bird symbols. Even though while I was doing the drawing it felt as though I was drawing some very old, cheesy golden age characters, I STILL couldn’t bring myself to draw the letters on their chests. Giving my old characters a good look shows me that my sense of design as a child was….. well, let’s be kind and say LACKING.

The original from childhood….

And the “modern” version drawn now…

This one’s for you, Matt….!

Mike