I think a lot of comic artists used to draw comics featuring certain characters back in elementary or middle school that they look back on with a certain fondness, even if the character was kinda lame. Mine were "Dangerous Dude", a sorta cool secret agent guy, and "shorty", a teen angst version of the same thing I suppose. The very first Dangerous Dude story, drawn in seventh grade, was really just Mechs vs. Combots). My friend Ilja (yes, the same that is featured as an insane cyborg in "Planarians") was a big Mechwarrior/BattleTech fan (neither of which I had actually played myself, mind you--I was still stuck on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups if I remember correctly), but after he played Metal Fatigue he just went on and on about how combots could totally kick the asses of those timberwolfs (called Mad Cats by the Inner Sphere). Anyhow, so I drew a comic about it. The end was basically a cop-out. Dangerous Dude yelled, "I need help from above!", and --splat--an angel falls from the sky (I believed I stole this from Ilja's telling of some movie or other), who throws a Holy Hand Grenade at them (stolen from Worms Armageddon, who unbeknownst to me stole it from Monty Python And The Holy Grail). Damn, I was such a hack! :P

Anyhow, at one point, looking back fondly, I decided to try out drawing a *good* (-ish) Dangerous Dude comic. I spent a lot of time on this (especially at first), but I feel like I didn't watch the big picture very well (I mean, layout? Yuck!), and I didn't think the energy put in was worth the product at all. So, I sat on this awhile...and never continued.

If this were to go on, the next page would have had him landing on the parking lot to a place, peeling out and leaving some cool word or other written on the surface with his squealing tire treads. He'd then crash straight through the store (stolen blatantly from The Blues Brothers).

Jesus, I'm STILL a hack.

--Josh