Last year my friend and fellow cartoonist Jeff Knurek reached out to me to see if I could do some character designs for a comic book project he was involved with. Jeff normally writes and draws the Jumble comic strip/puzzle that appears in newspapers and online, and he invents games (anyone ever hear of Slammo/Spikeball?), but he was developing this comic book that was taking on the world of electrical science with an adventure featuring twin teenagers getting involved in something over their heads.
Since it was a tech story, I got to thinking that maybe the villain should take after one of the big tech bosses from the real world. So, I sketched out these three potential villains purely based on (not actual caricatures of) Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Steve Jobs (Apple), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). They all seemed like plausible villains, right? Which one do you think Jeff chose to draw in his comic book? If you guessed the one inspired by Jeff Bezos, you would be correct.
Incidentally, back in my early days of working in animation, I was in a meeting with Steve Jobs who was not very villainous in person. But that’s a story for another time.