Nineteen Ninety Five. I was 13.
So the idea here was, The Serpent was a teenage skater kid looking for a fix of drugs. He broke into a science lab and kinda knew how to make something that would give him a high, but he included some wrong ingredients, and instead of getting high, the concoction turned him into a reptile-man.
The whole idea is a little too close to the Spider-Man villain, The Lizard. And then during the “Brand New Day” era of Amazing Spider-Man around 2008 or 09, the character known as “Freak,” (a name Todd McFarlane was already using for a different character in Spawn, so I dunno how Marvel got away with that) was EXACTLY my story. Except Freak turned into some weird monster thing, instead of a reptile-man.
Anyways, I re-drew this guy in 1997 to much better effect:
Still definitely not up to any sort of professional artistic standards, but it’s interesting how big of a difference a year and a half of drawing every day can make, isn’t it?
And, yeah, for a little while, I was experimenting with making my signature like the Anarchy symbol of an A with a circle around it, but it was “AC” for “Andy Costello,” so the circle was open on the side. At the same time, I was playing around with going by “N.D. Costello,” since it would be pronounced similar to “Andy.” After doing that signature a few times, someone pointed out that it just looks like it says “NAD.” So that experiment came to a pretty quick end.
Anyways, The Serpent! He’s a cool design that I never did anything with. But he may pop up again someday.