Making DAEMON

    It all started when I was drawing aimlessly in my sketchpad while riding along in the family van on a vacation. I drew a superhero version of myself. I named him Fox.

    Fox was a mixture of Wolverine from the X-Men, Batman a ninja and the Punisher. I gave him Wolverine's claws, Batman's style, tools and and lair, a ninja's proficiency with different weapons like katanas and such, and the Punisher's affinity for guns. He was modeled after me and in a way when I drew my Fox comics I making Fox do things I wish I could. I realized shortly into making the comics that in order to keep things interesting I would need to come up with an interesting villain. My inspiration for this villain was the end boss of Zelda II: Link's Awakening, which is Link's shadow. I also named him simply Dr. Evil (this was long before Austin Powers), and always kept him in the darkness a la Dr. Claw from Inspector gadget. So this almost completely black figure with glowing eyes eventually became more interesting to me than the hero and I decided to explore this figure more.

    I'm not sure how he made the leap to being the shadow of Fox to a completely independent character but I do know how he got his name. After deciding to make him an independent character I realized I needed a new name, and I couldn't think of one. I searched every text I could find including dictionaries and even video game booklets. I found a suitable name in the booklet for Warcraft II. Besides all the orc and human characters there were also NPCs and one of the NPCs was a winged red creature called a daemon. I thought the name was cool and the way it was spelled made me think that there was more to this creature than simply being and evil "demon". So the name stuck.

    Now that I had a character with a good name I drew him constantly. Whenever I was bored in class I would draw him, and since he was all black, and his exact proportions aren't important due to his constantly shifting state I enjoyed drawing him because it was so easy. I would also draw him whenever I wanted to depict myself but not be too personal.

    He's still the focus of many of my artistic endeavors. This is due to a few reasons, the most predominate of which is how he is just about as original as you can get nowadays (maybe it's just me but everything seems to have been done before), he's still very simple and pleasing to draw and I've bonded with the character so strongly over the years that he has realistically become a part of my personality. I often wish I could live like him but that would mean losing more than I am prepared to lose.