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The old filecards

Many of my original characters on this site are old. Really, really old. The earliest, including M-Wave, the Entity and Twofold, were made in the summer of 1983 when I was 10 years old. I would just draw them fighting each other or established comic characters but never really kept track of them until I started making profile notebooks when I was in Junior High School. They weren't the only things that I drew then because I also had what I now call the "Random Bug-out characters" that I started drawing in High School. For reasons I don't remember, I started drawing the Bug-Outs on these six by four inch sheets of note paper. The early filecards were just pencil drawings and had the names drawn with a stencil. My friends liked to flip through the stack of small pics so I started putting the my other characters on filecards too. Thanks to my art teacher Mr. Perunko pushing me to do more color work, I started inking and coloring them with Berol Prismacolor markers. Then I started adding short biographies and making logos for each one since I liked how that worked in DC Comics' Who's Who character profile books. Now you know how long I've been obsessed with character logos.

Why did I post this eye horror on the internet? For one thing, it shows that if I can turn out to be a halfway thirdway decent artist after drawing crap like this, there's hope for everybody. I was moving away from drawing with a cartoonier style to make a more serious comic book style and it really shows in the early cards. Another reason is that most of these cards have things that I've referred to before and then said, "I'm gonna have to show you that one day." Finally, typing these things out force me to remember things that I'm forgetting in my old age. As a bonus, it pads out the site a bit and that always helps.

Main Universe Characters
Ace of Clubs
Besides being really ugly, this was from back when she had the silver outfit that I only changed so people wouldn't think she was supposed to look like Marvel's Silver Sable character. She also had the tall boots influenced by a lot of female costumes that Dave Cockrum designed.
Beatdown
I have odd gaps in my memory, even when it comes to my own characters. Her old origin and outfit were scrapped and forgotten a few years after I drew this, but that didn't stop me from unknowingly giving her a very similar origin two decades later. Where did I get this outfit idea from? You'll see the inspiration for that outfit starting at 3:15 in this video.
Big Red/Batterram
This one cracks me up. For one thing, you can tell that I eventually figured out that I probably couldn't call him Big Red and tried to squeeze McKenzie in there. I was just too attached to seeing the letters BR on the outfit. I figured out years later that Batterram, a name I was using for another character, would fit. This is when I was throwing my own random traits and addictions into my characters so he's eating a hamburger. To top it off, there's a huge, stupid error that I'll let you figure out on your own. I drew a better filecard for him later but I'm posting this for the unintentional comedy.
Blackfist
I know it looks like one of the S1W's from Public Enemy stole Kool Moe Dee's sunglasses but that's what Blackfist used to look like. He was definitely inspired by P.E. and the first Hip-Hop inspired character I made. I like how the transparent energy looks but the way it blends into the rest of his outfit shows why I had to change the energy to a dark red color. But that Kirby Dot outline? That's there forever.
Chill
I just wanted there to be a cold-powered villain named Chill. This also reminds me of how I had this thing about how hand positions would have an effect on powers. He started off as a member of Negator's group, but I moved him to the Ransackers group.
the Entity
I used to call him the Mystic but started calling him the Entity even before I turned him into a cosmic guy. This is probably the only time I've ever drawn him with that pattern on his outfit. So, yeah, I've been indecisive about his outfit for decades now.
Fisticuffs
I wanted a big rampaging villain who was an expert at destroying things and was much smarter than he appeared to be. He's one of the first characters I built the Ransackers villain group around.
Micro Man/M-Wave
Yeah, M-Wave was white at first. I completely forgot the fact that I was calling his waves "M-Waves" before I changed his name to M-Wave. I'm pretty sure that I drew this in 1990 instead of 1991 because of the thick felt-tip I used to ink it along with the still-cartoony style. Maybe I didn't get around to writing the bio and copyright thing until '91.
Negator/Negater
Everything about this filecard is horrible but this is just to show that Negator has always been the last super criminal that you wanted to mess with. It's also more proof that his outfit has looked almost the same for nearly two decades. Hell, if you mirror the arm poses, open up the energy hand and give him a crazy, toothy grimace, it's the same profile pic pose that I've drawn him in at least three times now. I guess it's more proof that I haven't grown as an artist.
Nubia
So here's Nubia, a character who got that name back when the word was thrown around a lot with very little context. Yeah, that'd make this character another example of that. I also forgot that there was a character from one of the major companies named that. For reasons I don't remember, I split Nubia's concept into two characters. Her personality and mental powers became the Mindsight character while the Nubia name and most of the look became the character now called Syuniris.
Nutroll
This was when Nutroll was fighting his way out of the grimdark side. He dropped the guns and weird weapons by this point and gained his current powers. He still killed back then because I was 18 years old and stupidly thought that made characters more impressive. Yes, Nutroll always had a weird logo made of random stuff.
Omniton
Here's the superpowerful archetype hero in his old outfit with his old name. The idea was to have Superman's powers with Captain America's strategic skill. Yeah, like an amalgam that ended up happening later. He has a spoiler on his card so I had to censor that. The last bio bit hints at a big part of the backstory for the upcoming comics and I forgot that I've been thinking of that since '92. I've grown so little.
Raw
Usual 1991 file card. Less cartoony than 1990 but the proportions were still off. This is one of the few full-color pics of Raw in his superhero outfit. I thought throwing a baseball cap over the superhero cowl would look cool but knew I'd have to change it after Milestone's Static came out in 1993. The logo is based on that little symbol on his chest which is the letters R-A-W mixed together. The placement of that symbol works even better on his current jogging/track suit so the costume change was probably destiny. He's using his power to crush that soft drink can even though I didn't use any fancy coloring effects to show that. That's a really dumb waste of cola either way so it doesn't really matter.
Stiletto/Sever
Stiletto was, and still is, one of Negater's main associates. He was one of my earliest villains and I'm almost sure that the blade launcher idea came from seeing one of those little plastic boxes that dispense razor blades. I thought it'd be cool if there was a bad guy that shot blades at people and it had to be a wrist launcher because those are also cool. It turned out that there was already a comic character with that same name AND similar wrist launchers. I gave him a different name later on but kept everything else. Stiletto and Twofold were enemies back then until Twofold got his own group of bad guys to kick in the face.
Trick or Treat
Here's another "... and I never drew this outfit again" filecard but twice as hard since it's a duo. For one thing, the outfits were bland except for the ridiculous pocket abuse. Seriously, I don't remember why I gave them so many pockets except that I really liked G.I. JOE. My other artist friends who added pockets to their characters really liked G.I. JOE and they're known for rockin' mad pockets. I wonder if this happened with the professional artists in the 1990's because some of those characters were all pockets that they never used. The pockets were the first thing to go when I redesigned them a few years later.
Twofold
This was from from when I was trying to add more detail to Twofold's outfit for some weird reason. He had a floppy part on the top of his mask that didn't get removed until recently. I moved the main pockets when I added smaller pockets on the front and the outfit no longer looked like the taijitu symbol his outfit was based on. Maybe that's why I added a redundant little yin and yang symbol on the top of the hood. It's not as bad as the classic "Ninja headband with a silhouette of a ninja on it just in case you can't read" but it's not better by all that much. I think this is the only time I ever drew that version of the outfit.
The "Bug-Out" Characters
the Abdominal Snowman
Here's one of those Bug-Out characters I was talking about. He actually goes back to about 1988. I though it'd be funny to have an overly muscled character with a chick pea-sized head before serious comics started doing it in the 1990's. The main reason I posted this is because it took me a while after designing the Ice Cream to realize that I mostly drew them with the same proportions.
Arsenal
Arsenal was a Bug-Out character from 1988 and the goal was to figure out how many guns I could draw one character with. I think his head was originally a tank turret but I changed that by the time I drew this (probably 1990). Action movies had just fallen in love with spent shell casings and I thought it'd be funny to have a character stuck in a pile of them. Then a movie parody ends up doing that a few years later. After digging this up, I've decided that I'm going to redesign (and rename) this guy to be a serious character since supposedly-serious characters are now walking around with more guns than this.
Monty Carlo
I started making a group of horrible pun gangsters because I really liked The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (with Daffy Duck as Duck Tracy). Most of these creations were stupid, but Monty Carlo is easily my favorite. I have NO idea what he'd show up in, but I'd like to draw him again. Like all of the pencil-shaded bug-outs, this one was drawn 1990 or earlier.