Wednesday 7 December 2011

The Not So Secret Origin of Bullzerk

Bullzerk actually predates Cowman by more than 10 years, I was 13 or 14 at the time and this is what he looked like.

Pretty bad, huh?  I know.  I know.  Here's the deal.  One of the first characters I ever created was a superhero named Fireball...I don't know how old I was at the time but I'm sure I was barely in Elementary school.  The character was a composite of a few different things and wasn't terribly original.  Then a few years later I decided I was gonna try to revamp him and make him into something cool.  I'm not sure I succeeded but there was definitely an improvement and Bullzerk became a member of his rogues gallery.  The drawing above was the first incarnation of him.  Then came this...


 I think the storyline was that he was on steroids or something.  I bulked him up, made him darker and gave him a cigar to chomp on.  It's hard to believe I used to get compliments on drawings like these, they make me cringe now.  His proportions are purposefully exaggerated but they still don't work.  Gah.

And then there was Cowman....
I really doubt I'll ever bring back Fireball...not without a massive overhaul anyway...but I always thought Bullzerk was kinda neat looking and he made sense as a Cowman villain so I resurrected him into the slightly more cartoony, better proportioned individual you see here.  Bullzerk's Fireball origin was essentially a rip off of the Lizard from Spider-Man...something to do with experiments on bovine DNA.  Bad, right?  Which is why I make a point of being sketchy about his origin in Cowman...I figured I now had a chance to poke fun at the situation.  Who knows, maybe one day I'll write a decent backstory for him and reveal it in a Cowman adventure.  But for right now he's just a cool looking character with not a lot of story.

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