Program Note: The home PC has a bad motivator. Er, I mean the power supply has crapped out. At the moment, I can get maybe 5 minutes from it before it shuts itself off again. This may very well interrupt the scanning-and-posting of drawings. Also, of other at-home computing pastimes. Just so you know.

In response to my solicitation for requests for my challenge, Annie suggested Val Kilmer. She was thinking one of his The Saint personnas, but since I just watched Willow with the girls last weekend, I decided to do Madmartigan instead.

Ah, Madmartigan! He was probably my first swordsman crush (if you don’t count Luke Skywalker, who wasn’t technically a swordsman). My college friends and I could recite every witty line from Willow, once upon a time.

Of course, in retrospect, there aren’t that many witty lines in that movie.

You young folk don’t know how lucky you are when it comes to fantasy films. My children, who have cut their teeth on the cinematic splendour of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings will never understand how, once a long, long time ago, movies like Willow were the best we could hope for when it came to seeing epic fantasy on screen.

As for the picture, while it looks reasonably human and male (unless you ask my daughters, who judge gender almost wholly on the basis of hair length), I don’t think it captures any real resemblance to Val himself. His face is so distinctive, I’m not sure how I missed it.

Endnote: In college, I named one of my two goldfish Kilmer. The other was Elwes. When they died, we held Viking funerals for them on the lake. No, really. We did.