Malco and Beak'd

8 years ago, I created my own Bugs Bunny/Mickey Mouse character named "Malco J. Hawkingfisher". After that, I didn't know what to do with him. I would usually just doodle him with copyrighted characters and non-copyrighted characters created by other artists on Deviantart. Which is probably why I haven't found his personality yet.

In 2005, I decided to give him a group of "friends". Looking back at it now, I realize that doing that would only expand on the fact that he had no personality. The show was going to be called unsurprisingly, "Malco and friends" Yeah, I know, I hated it too. Anyway I tried to give him some supporting characters to see how he would carry out as a series. The only problem was coming up with a basic plot.

• One plot involved him being an orphan and the last of his kind. Yeah, like WE NEVER HEARD THAT PLOT BEFORE!
• Another idea was to put him in high school and see it would go from there. Hey! It worked for these guys. Right?
• The only original idea I had was that he was raised by genies...Genies...I was fourteen, what did you expect from me!?

After that two year long mental breakdown, I decided to go with the standard "life in the big city" plot, territory that had not been penetrated in the animation community for a long time. While, in the process, renaming the show. The new title was called "Beak'd" and still revolved around Malco. Only difference is, I had to cut a few characters and replaced them with two new characters for the sake of storyline or in this case lack there of.

Beak'd cast (l to r): Malco, Melissa Swann, Roberto Lequack, Randall Goosewell, Chelsea Duckwood, Darko

To add a little bit of "breaking the fourth wall" I based the two new characters on people I knew from high school. They broke up after that and stopped talking to me. Here's the main plot of this story: Malco has to try to stop a lab experiment gone horribly wrong (Darko) from destroying the earth because it was really his responsibility. Gee..does THAT SOUND FAMILIAR?

Eventually, I gave up on the whole idea of making a series and focused my attention on Malco's design. Apparently, the notion broke through that Malco looked too much like Woody Woodpecker. So, I thought I'd do some fiddilin' and the final concept was "eeeh.."

Wow! How delightfully generic.

It wasn't too long before my 'ol pal, Kyle Carrozza a.k.a Captain Awesome, gave me his own view on the Malco redesign. Unfortunately, I don't have his original drawing. Here's my version of it, just to give you an idea.

This is crap compared to the original.

Kyle was also kind enough to do a redesign of Malco's love interest turned land lady, Melissa Swann.

After getting some help from Kyle, I thought I had the series all figured out. I did not. While the designs were nice, I still had problems finding an original personality for Malco. So, ever since then I decided to take a break from Beak'd and tried creating and revamping other show ideas.

I'm not sure if I'm ever going to use Malco for anything again, but I'm still hoping to find a way to make him stand out.