Steve-o's Childhood Fan Art

When I was a little boy, I loved drawing. I drew Transformers, Ninja Turtles, Robotech, Ghostbusters... basically, all the toys and cartoons I liked. I practically never draw anymore. Don't know why, exactly. I just gradually got out of the habit. But I still have large quantities of the stuff I drew back then, and have scanned some of it here for your entertainment. All the thumbnails below link to larger images.

One thing to note -- a lot of these drawings were done on the backs of "kids programs" from my family church. Even among the pictures that aren't on those kid programs, many were drawn during church. Usually the backs of these programs were just titled "drawing page", but sometimes they say something like, "in this space draw something the pastor talked about in the sermon", which makes things like my rendering of Jetfire's three modes pretty amusing in retrospect. When LiquidVelcro! was looking through my pictures he came across that one and said, "Boy, you must have gone to the coolest church ever."

The Robots

So, my friend Tim had taken some little "class" for kids at the local university about drawing comic strips and/or comic books, and he told me about it. I got all excitied, and decided to try to make my own comic book. The subject was obvious: the greatest mega-crossover story of all time, featuring characters from every toyline I could think of. (That's how I played with my toys anyway, so why not?) Below is the sum total of The Robots materials which were produced before I lost interest and moved on to other projects.

Here is the exciting set-up for the story to come. It's sort of like that little blurb that Marvel often ran at the top of the splash page summarizing the scenerio.

This drawing is a teaser / character preview, with two portraits: Transformer Powerglide and Convertor Nofka. Yes, that's a picture of the SDF-1. But his name in the Convertors line was Nofka. (The same name was also applied to an Orguss-based toy, apparently.) Of course, neither of these characters shows up in the comics I got around to writing.

A cover mockup for The Robots. The little orange thingies are some sort of labels that I put on to represent Cy-Kill's blaster shots. LV! had trouble figuring out what was going on here, so I'll explain: Prowl and Scooter are shaking hands on their alliance. But, suddenly, Soundwave orders Cy-Kill to fire, so he does, startling the good guys. Meanwhile, in the back, a Veritech is shooting at a Zentradi battle pod.

The epic begins! Our first story is called "Renegade Attack". Shockwave signals the Decepticons on Earth, calling for reinforcements against unknown attackers. Rumble sends Devastator through the space bridge, where he is intimidating enough to scare off Spay-C, but is fired upon by Leader-1 and blinded, rendering him unable to continue the fight.

Part 2 of Renegade Attack! Back on Earth, Scooter and Bumblebee watch helplessly as Puzzler and other Renegades wreak havoc on a human town. Bumblebee calls in Omega Supreme, but before help can get there Bumblebee is critically injured in the onslaught. Omega arrives with Jetfire and they able to subdue Puzzler, Cop-Tur, and Bad Boy. But Bumblebee may be lost for good...

Renegade Attack, Part 3 is the final portion of the story which was produced, although it is not the end of the story. Most of the plot threads remain unresolved. It begins with the appearance of a mysterious spacecraft entering Earth's atmosphere. It crash-lands near the Ark, where Gears is sent out to investigate. To everyone's surprise, emerging from the ship is Bumblebee's long-lost brother, Hornet! (My name for the red BB toy.)

Miscellaneous Art

Fitor was, and is, one of my favorite GoBots. This may be the only drawing of him I ever did, though.

Voltron 4 is my own creation. He is comprised of five medium-sized space vehicles. They're a pretty generic design, but I often drew ships of this sort as a kid. It was sort of like "my" spaceship design. Also, as LV! pointed out, one of the ships is conveniently pink so that a girl can pilot it. Note some of the careful design elements, like putting red octagonal connector pieces on the arm-ship wingtips to allow them to lock in place for Voltron. And on either side, of course.

More Voltrons! Voltron 5 is comprised of gigantic capital ships. Only three in this set. But that's okay -- Voltron 2 only had three components, after all. Like Voltron 4, and the originals, this Voltron has his very own blazing sword with a unique design.

Come on. Why on Earth did you think I invented two more Voltrons if not for this purpose? Where's your inner eight year old?

Portraits Notebook

My main fan art project as a child was a spiral-bound notebook (the one with Jazz and Thundercracker on the cover) in which I did character portraits, one per page, in the order that the toys appeared in the cross-sell catalogs. I'll scan more of these in time, although probably not all, in order to show a cross section of the funny, interesting, or occasionally even artistically-promising.

For now, this is the only notebook page, and it's only up because I already had it scanned months ago. Most of the notebook portraints are not colored. In fact, only four are: Buzzsaw, Laserbeak, Rumble, and Frenzy. They're obviously all early toys, and I probably colored them just to make them distinct and later decided not to bother with other similar toys.

The interesting thing about this picture is that I labelled Buzzsaw as "Soundwave's creation". I think that probably I declared Buzzsaw to be Soundwave's creation by nature of them being sold together. I extended this to Laserbeak, who I say is Buzzsaw's brother, simply because they're so nearly identical. If Soundwave created Buzzsaw, then it stands to reason he built Laserbeak as well. The other cassettes, however, I made no such claims about. (Although Raksha believes they are all basically his "children".)