Here's a doodle of mine that was nearly lost to time:

I drew this back in 2006, when I first started dating Justique. She dug the Harry Potter books, and I wanted to sketch something that'd be familiar to her.

So I fused my love of antiquated, macho, gun-toting action heroes with her love of magical, modern, sensitive teen heroes... and voila! Arnold meets Radcliffe to birth a "Badass Bloodbath."

Justique unearthed this gem the other day when she was flipping through one of her old journals. And, as you can see, the ink from my Paper Mate Flair pen has bled a little bit, giving the drawing a nice extra sloppy effect in places.

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I've been cartooning since I was a little kid, but I didn't really start scanning my work until the mid-00s. In fact, I rarely scanned my art even in college. I used to fill up notebook after notebook with sketches, but it never occurred to me that I could be sharing my work online!

Anyway, in early 2005, I decided to print out a portfolio. So I went to Kinko's and scanned eight of my favorite drawings. And this Havok sketch made the cut:

Havok is one of my favorite comic book characters. I love the themes at work with him, especially how he tends to struggle with unwanted power and responsibility. I'm a bit of a Havok fanatic, having followed the character from Uncanny X-Men to X-Factor to Mutant X back to Uncanny X-Men, and, soon, back to X-Factor!

Visually, few characters can hold a candle to his original design by Neal Adams. It's gorgeous in its simplicity and complexity, especially under the pencil of Jim Lee. I also like his 90s redesigns by Joe Quesada, Jeff Matsuda, and Tom Raney.

My visual rendition is a mix between Havok's classic look and Sunspot's silhouette form. Also, I decided to try out a more tactile representation of Havok's concentric circle plasma blasts (which, if you notice here, appear to be made of the same material as the bands on his head).

I wish I was the type of artist that could eloquently capture the negative image effect of his powers and the perfect overlapping circles of his blasts. But neither of those effects are in my bag of tricks, so instead you get this version!

Regardless, to this day I have a special place in my heart for this sketch, and that's why I've dredged it up... FROM THE VAULTS!!!

Before there was Zombie Palin, there was Evil Dick:

In fact, before there was Evil Dick, there was Evil Andy. But, see, I went to Carnegie Mellon University -- and while I did manage to publish some heinous and offensive comic strips in the school newspaper -- I just couldn't get The Tartan to approve a comic strip starring a bigoted and misogynistic zombie Andrew Carnegie (same goes for another satire strip I came up with about CMU's Dean, Jared Cohon).

But after my graduation, the idea for Evil Andy came back to me. I decided to switch out Carnegie for Richard Nixon and voila! Evil Dick was born!!!

The plot followed Dick Cheney as he resurrected Nixon to be his undead mastermind, leading readers to believe Cheney was "Evil Dick." But then BLAM! I'd hit 'em with the ol' switcharoo in #4 as Nixon kills Cheney AND Bush, and takes over as the President of the United States!

But alas, after two installments, I abandoned the strip. I wanted to run it on SquareMag.com, a site for which I'd written a couple of prose pieces. But there was no interest from them, and in turn, I began to lose interest myself.

Years later, I adapted the core concept of Evil Andy/Evil Dick into the idea for Zombie Palin, a comic strip by myself and my co-writer, Pete. It follows a similar premise, only Palin isn't resurrected -- she's bitten by zombies and becomes the first undead President.

The only remnants of Evil Dick are these two photo collage comic strips and my massive set of 30+ scripts, making Evil Dick another of my secret past projects... FROM THE VAULTS!!!