Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Birdman Returns?


Not the Bridman from the 1960's Saturday morning cartoon series that Cartoon Network and Boomerang now run. This is my Birdman. this post got me tothinking about my attempt at creating a comedy/adventure strip when I was in high school. None of the strips have survived the years. The above is a recent doodle of the main character. As you can see as an artist I make a great writer. He had the typical powers of flight and superstrength as well as he could communicate with the birds. I don't remember the plots but his arch enemies were the Hummingbird and the Sparrow. It seems I was going for campy humor.
My cousin Randy also had a character that he did at the time he called Turtle Parrot. Of course these two titans teamed up once to defeat an earth shattering foe.
Later in College my buddy Chuck and I were like always goofing around. A friend of ours had a name for his car and Chuck wanted to know what he should call his. As we got in the car I saw all the "improvements" that had been done to the car over the years. I said it should be called a miracle if it gets us anywhere. Thus was christened the Miraclemobile. Our goofing continued as we remembered the old Batman TV show. Chuck was driving and since I was the passenger he called me Wonder Boy and I called him Miracle Man. We were broadcasting majors and soon we had written scripts for Miracle Man as a radio show. Episode one was taped with our fellow classmates and DJ's from the student radio station. The wind was taken out of our creative sails when one day we were at Comic Book World and noticed a new book on the stands. Issue #1 of Miracleman by Alan Moore. We had not copyrighted the name yet so we tried to change it but none of them fit. The fun that we had and felt fueled Miracle Man was not there with Captain Miracle or any of the other names. Miracle Man and Wonder Boy only fought two villains on paper. Wing Wong and Col. Collection. Now Col. Collection was a thief who stole to keep his collections up to date. One day he was bored as they were all complete. So he started a new collection. He started collecting collectors. He would kidnap people who had world famous collections. Wing Wong was my favorite. Again it came out of us joking around. While it is the funnest it is also the most politically incorrect of the two. This was in the days when it was ok to do that. Wing Wong was of Asian decent and he wanted to corner the market in door to door cosmetic sales. He did this by wiring his doorbell so that it would kill anyone who rang it. So when a salesperson rang the bell that was one less competator he had to deal with. He thought he would use it to defeat Miracle Man. Our hero had the best dumb luck in the world. Not knowing he was at the villains house & how the crimes were being committed once he saw the doorbell he...knocked on the door. Wing Wong answers wondering why he didn't ring the bell. Now he has to invite MM into his home. MM is kidnapped and Wonder Boy saves the day but all credit is given to Miracle Man.
One day I may revive one of these heros but with a different non-copyrighted name. I just hope it fits the character. Posted by Picasa

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