I came up with a lot of silly superhero/villain concepts when I was a kid. One hero I created was "Wham Jam", whose costume was literally a spring-loaded boxing glove. Another was "The Cut-Off Arm of the Good Goblin", which was exactly that — a dismembered goblin arm, complete with gory stump, capable of autonomic thought and flight.

A rainbow or psychedelic (tie-dyed?) colored Power Ranger reminds me somewhat of the old '60s X-Men character The Mimic.

I think a lot of what should've been throwaway ideas found there way into actual 'real' comics from the mid-'80s onward... looking at a Fantastic Four annual for 2000 and a 'Marvel Girl' with bits of FF, Doctor Doom and Silver Surfer on her. Then again there were also nice surprises like 'Mazing Man and Rocket Raccoon in the Hulk and then a mini-series... Ch'p in the Green Lantern Corps... these are sort of the antithesis of the earnest young fan turned pro's Darksteeldeadbloodhood character that he thought was super rad when he was 11 joining The X-Men.

Well, here's another idea I had way back... The Human Screwdriver... the hero with inter-changable heads! I may've run into copyright issues though because his civilian ID was going to be Blacky Decker. I had a sort of sidekick lined-up... Pineapple Woman. She would head to the nearest open bar and order drinks. The main hero's battle cry would be "Screw You!" And after winning the good fight there would be Pineapple Woman with a couple of martinis or pina coladas.

For years, ever since I was a kid of about 13 I've wanted to write one of those dreadful gung-ho British WW2 war comics I grew up with. You know the sort of thing. Unlikely bunch of misfits wreck havoc on endless bucktoothed glasses-wearing 'Japs' who scream "BANZAI!!" as they run into our heroes' relentless machine-gun fire.

My bunch were going to be a group of escaped sexual deviants forced to cycle through the Burmese jungle under the guidance of their prisoner escort Private James Parts. It was going to be called Private Parts and his Peddling Perverts.

I think on the whole it was a good idea I haven't - every episode was going to end in failure as the guys were always more interested in sniffing each other's bicycle seats than fighting the enemy.

I was a strange kid.

This morning's throw away idea:

The Justice Leg of America

Mild-mannered reporter Brent Newson's left leg is really a superheroic defender of justice and, at night, unbeknownst to the sleeping Brent, patrols the city rooftops looking for wrongs to right and malfeasance to thwart. Not that it takes long for action to turn up because Brent's right leg is evil (it wears a disguise so The Leg of Justice has no idea who he really is.) Should be fun drawing the climactic fight sequence.


I may just do this one.

I think maybe there was one of Berni Wrightson's Captain Stern somewhat like that. There was Scott McCloud's Destroy! where a lot of the dialogue was a yelled "Destroy!" Being as I loved Plop! as a kid anything along those lines would work for me.

This triggered a memory of my older brother having drawn a character he called 'Paperboy'. It was pretty much just a human body with a newspaper where the head would be, but I remember some speech balloons!

Meanwhile I had an entire cast of cartoon characters, a '50s biker chipmunk modeled on the Fonz was one, a frog in a football helmet, a crow that wore jeans. They're all on a Mother's Day card I drew that my Mom still has and I wish I had it scanned in when I last briefly had my old computer and scanner up working. I remember I did a bunch of strips with them in school art class but not the names, probably Chester, Froggy and Blackie or somesuch. Then later I did a comic strip with Gremlin cars in place of the vipers in Battlestar Galactica. I named that Bucketstar Galactic co. I loved drawing the cyclons. It was the 'one, two, punchline' approach repeated several times. These were all done with one of those pend that had switches at the top for various colours... but I had a deluxe one brought from Holland with purple and orange and colors the usual Bic version which only had three or four had.

Is it a sign of approaching mid-life crisis to remember these things? I used to love Garfield and anything like stickers with him on, I remember buying stuff like that at a Hallmark shop, I think they replaced all the Snoopy and Peanuts things with him... and I also bought the B. Kliban cat books and would copy from them as I would with Garfield (and his pooky bear or pan of lasagna).