At the time I was a big fan of Walt Simonson's Thor comic, and one day I joked about making a heavy metal version of the Norse god and using Mike as his human identity, and it wasn't long before I whipped up a doodle of said character. I was soon inspired to make a comic out of it, and what followed was 75 pages of poorly-drawn artwork telling a story that made little sense and was laden with inside jokes and tasteless humor, but my floormates got a kick out of it; probably because most of them were supporting characters. I ended up drawing a 120 page second issue, but after that the joke was done and I moved on.

Flash forward to 2003, when my mom sent me all the old crap I left in her basement when I moved out. I picked through it and came across the Mean Mike comics, and for some reason I felt inspired to give it a facelift and add a cohesive storyline.

What's with the jacked-up artwork?
This little project began as a minor facelift, so I tried to leave as much of the original artwork intact as possible; but as I got deeper into it I wanted to fix it up more than I originally intended. Some original bits remain here and there (such as the people in the elevator), but a good deal of it has been redone.

Why does Mike look like Hank Hill?
Mike's original design had that long head, short hair, and glasses and, oddly enough, when I started on King of the Hill and drew Hank for the first time, I used the same construction lines for him as I did for Mike. So, when I went back to draw Mike a couple months ago, the influence was reversed and Mike looked alarmingly like Hank. In short, any future Mean Mike stuff will have a redesigned Mike Bernard so that Fox doesn't clobber me.

One last note: The character Mike Bernard, aside from his love of heavy metal and affinity toward technology, acts nothing like the guy he's based on, so anyone reading this that happens to know him in real life can rest easy knowing that he has not, in fact, killed anyone or had sex with demons.