Villains of New York

"Sometimes my powers kick on when I'm not expecting them to. Like, I'll be minding my own business- on the bus or at the mall- and I'll just kind of zone out. I'll start day-dreaming or whatever, and then the next thing I know the guy standing next to me is all goggle-eyed and drooling and awaiting my commands. But all I really want is to be left alone..."

Right around the time I started my second run at the #IllustrationADay challenge, I also started working for Hoodline.com. It's a local news website based out of SF that sorts and covers the news from each neighborhood's perspective. It's a really great site, you should check it out if you live in the Bay Area, or if you live in some shitty place and prefer to keep up with the news from the World's Greatest city (I don't blame ya).

I drew this guy to resolve day 6, and to flush out a concept I'd had kicking around for awhile:

An illustrated feature that evokes Humans Of New York, wherein I ask people on the street what kind of a super-villain they would be, then explore the mundane daily challenges of living with that set of circumstances. I would take a snapshot of the subject, then convert them into the super-villain they described via the magic of the illustrated medium.

To play with the concept, I drew a kid that I found on HONY. I wish I saved the original blog, because I can't find it now. If I do, I'll share it with you guys. I turned the kid into HypnoSpecs. He enjoys his powers because he can use them to control people, but it's a bummer because the neuropathic mechanics of his abilities cause a lot of people around him to have seizures and stuff.

I never got around to pitching the feature to Hoodline and I'm no longer currently writing for them, so VONY still lingers in the purgatory of good ideas, for now...