Randy the rat 1

Randy is a minion who works for the evil super-villain Professor Blackheart, but he doesn't like his job- he's small, very easily frightened and intimidated, mostly defenseless, and shy and self-conscious to a fault.
I've been experimenting with loosening up my style and letting my imagination run more freely and satisfying hitherto underindulged creative urges. The result is the TV-cartoon-in-progress project The Adventures of an Evil Minion, starring Randy here.

While there have been many, many sympathetic villains and perhaps even more sympathetic minions, none so far- as far as I know- are entirely from the perspective from one of the lowly, more jittery minions.
So Randy frequently unwittingly plays a large role in the conflicts between Professor Blackheart and the hero Dark McPlaidshirt, getting into fantastic and sometimes absurd misadventures and causing Blackheart to fail- and yet he stays largely beneath the radar, providing the perspective of the lower ranks of a powerful criminal organization.
So it's kind of like one big Lower Deck Episode. With a Villain Protagonist who happens to be a Minion With An F In Evil.

Randy is inspired by a number of lesser-known minor bad guy characters, all of which I can relate to since I'm shy and nervous around most people- especially dominating authority figures. In particular, there's Nuka from The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride, the skinny, slobbery big bad wolf from Happily N'Ever After, and Creeper from Disney's The Black Cauldron.
Randy basically represents that feeling of insignificance, inferiority, insecurity, helplessness and fear that less assertive types like myself often get.

My brother (Ian) has more of a knack for imitating more refined cartooning styles and drawing teh fanarts, so there a lot more of his drawings are here. But my specialty is drawing original characters of the crazy-looking sort, floating somewhere in between Avery, Clampett, and Bluth.

EDIT: I was poking around reading the online comic Norm & Cory the other day and noticed the rat characters in it, and realized that I had forgotten that they directly influenced Randy's design here.

EDIT 2: Cleaned up this crazy thing a heck of a lot. The messiness was just distracting...
I should also mention that the full-body pose in the middle is out of date and shouldn't be used as a definitive reference. (Such is the fate of very first drawings...)

UPDATE: Added color and shading! I also fixed some errors (digitally) to make these more on-model. So... you can use it as reference now.
The fully-shaded drawing should give you a rough idea of what the show is supposed to look like. Film noir, comic book type of light and shadow...

UPDATE 2: This drawing was STILL covered in grime and full of bad lineart, so I FINALLY got it cleaned up entirely, as well as tidying the colors and redrawing the brick wall. Hopefully this will be the last time I alter it.
The worst part is that I had to do it TWICE, because when I was nearly finished a few months ago, I suddenly lost my progress entirely because the Photoshop file somehow got corrupted. I was so distraught that I decided to wait until we got the tablet to do it again, 'cause I knew it would be easier then. I made sure to make several backups, and even then I had a scare when the file got corrupted AGAIN... Luckily I was able to rescue it this time.