I think it’s time for another dip into the childhood character pool. This time, it’s a bad guy. As I’ve said previously, most of my characters– like the characters that MOST kids come up with– are derivative of what were my favorite characters from the comics I read at the time. So, THE BUZZARD is an obvious knock-off of one of my favorite SPIDER-MAN villains, THE VULTURE. I think that looking back at THE BUZZARD, the thing that impresses me the most about my work on this guy is that it looks as though I actually may have done some research on what buzzards look like. Hence his black body and wings, with an orange helmet, gloves and boots. A buzzard’s head is really red (I think…), but looking at all my drawings from that time that are colored, the red is really dark and usually covers up the line work, and maybe I was trying to avoid this. Maybe I just thought that blue black and orange looked cool together as costume colors (which I still do…).

I really don’t have that clear a memory of my thought processes from back then anyway. After all, it was 30 years ago….! So anyway, here’s the original drawing followed by my new sketch.

This continues to be a lot of fun. I’ve had more than a few folks in the comments section encourage me to actually do some comics with these characters– and though it might be fun as an exercise… and a wonderful way to reconnect with my childhood and maybe bring things full circle– A big part of me can’t help but think these guys are really lame. It would be very hard to resist redesigning them to make them more contemporary and modern. I couldn’t really see these characters as is exciting enough folks to actually buy them as a comic. But then, by redesigning them, what’s the point…?

I might give it some thought.

Mike