Old Convention Sketch: Predator/Bill And Ted (1991)

I'm not sure if I've posted this before, something seems awfully familiar to me about this old drawing.

Thanks to Juan Ruvalcaba for sending this along. I just dropped him a line and am including my response to his asking if I was asked often to draw the Predator.

He also commented that it seemed a difficult character to draw, which, for me, was true of most of what I drew back in 1991 (excluding Milk & Cheese, but even they looked pretty crappy at the time due to my amateur hour grace period extending well into my twenties) but it went double when it came to anything "realistic" and quadruple when it went to something like the goddamned Predator costumes.

Anyway, for extra background and chatter on the subject, here's what I wrote to Juan:

I used to get a lot of Predator requests back when Big Game came out, and occasionally afterwards. I would  often draw a cartoony "baby" Predator rather than deal with the "on-model" character, especially because I could never really get close to on-model. I sucked at drawing the character, I just couldn't figure out how it worked, and my cartoonier leanings didn't lend itself to drawing the damned thing. I was very green art-wise in general, I managed to get work in a then-smaller industry on projects that didn't really matter much, the Predator book being an exception and an outlier. Someone had ghosted DHC and they needed pages asap. People there knew me from SDCC and gave me a shot because my tryout pages were halfway decent (mostly because I placed them at a club and drew a lot of punks and mobsters getting wiped out). For years, the writer, John Arcudi, would give me a look when I'd see him at cons and the Predator book came up, we'd both start laughing because we tacitly agreed I did a sub-par gig. At the same time, the goddamned thing sold over two hundred thousand copies and made money throughout the years in royalties. And I sold all my art. A lot can be said for my art absolutely not meshing with the inker's work or the coloring, but coloring was always pretty rough back then. My pencils aren't anything to brag about, but they were better than the inked pages, a thin, spidery line without much variation didn't mesh with my detailed, admittedly rough work. The thing is, I worked my ass off on those pages, I really did. And I had limited reference material for the Predators as well as the military equipment and locations. Everything "real" was book-referenced and I could barely find reference for some things. John provided me with some reference for the native American material. It was the hardest thing I ever worked on, art-wise, and it was a wash, unfortunately. I should have been writing stuff like that rather than drawing it. Of course, by the time I did script a Predator series, the shine was off the apple and sales across the board were flat. I only received royalties on Bad Blood because of later collections, including the recent Marvel Omnibus. The most ironic thing of all is probably that I am not a fan of the Predator films, by and large. And now there's action figures, statues and web pages based on the characters Derek Thompson and I created in Bad Blood. There's fandom lore built around the serial killer Predator (I forget what they call him now, or what the term is describing wayward Predators that came after him in different media). Derek told me that the Predators movie (or one of the newer ones) has a lot in common with Bad Blood, and when I recently watched the first Alien vs Predator movie I was surprised how the ending matched up to our series in several ways. Anyway, the comics are fair game to pilfer, if that was what actually happened to any degree. IP cannibalizes itself all the time. And now I'm rambling about friggin' Predators!

Also weird, I've been asked to appear on a Predator-related podcast to talk about Predator: Bad Blood. haven't been able to set a date because life's been so messy, especially after the plumbing nonsense threw everything off. But I am up for doing the podcast, I just hope they don't get mad if I say I'm not much of a fan of the franchise. I mean, besides the movies being mostly junky, the friggin' Predators are not only invisible and using heat tracing to target victims, they also shoot people in the back! They're cheaters, not bold warriors. At least not in those first movies. A bunch of retconned goofballs, if you ask me. And why they mimic ironic dialog from their victims is still way beyond me. Anyway, they're just monster movies, if you ever check out deep Predator fandom it' gets pretty intense. I never got the appeal beyond the "they're just monster movies" part. But I'm glad some folks liked the comics I worked on, even the one I drew pretty badly.