Not Their Cup of Tea

First Beastie This is the first completed drawing of Beastie. It was done in 1993 for a company called Majestic Comics. At the time, trading card sets were doing good business and a variety of companies were trying to cash in. They were doing a set of cards featuring new superheroes. My former Brave New Words publisher got me a gig doing one of the cards.

This version of Beastie was a punkish superhero who had been saddled with a trio of demonic sidekicks. They were constantly trying to be evil and she was constantly forcing them to work on the side of angels. Majestic, a Christian oriented company, objected to the inclusion of demons in any of their products.  Perhaps they thought it was common knowledge that they were a Christian company. Nonetheless, that seemed like something a company should mention before they contracted for work. Even better, they might have provided guidelines as to what they did and didn’t want to publish. If I’d known ahead of time I’d have made the sidekicks aliens or scientific experiments gone wrong or something.

Because of the demons the Beastie card didn’t make it into Majestic’s first set of cards – Comic Future Stars. I was promised that it would be part of their second set. The illustration was paid for but, so far as I know, no second set of cards was published.

I’ve tried to find a site that lists the characters that appeared in and the artists that worked on that set but all I come up with are ebay listings. Those aren’t links that I can count on being available for the long term.

If you’ve read this blog for long you’ve seen later sketches and illustrations of Beastie. The demons lost their appeal for me pretty quickly. She became a solo act.