#FreeWillyFriday: 3 Willies

 Welcome back to #FreeWillyFriday, where I take repurposing old content to a new level by sharing with you some of my artwork from way back when – specifically, my original posters for sequels to everyone's favorite whale-escaping-not-SeaWorld movie, “Free Willy.”

Either I got a positive response from my junior high friends to my “Willy 2: A New Freedom” design or even then, I simply couldn't let a joke go. Whatever the case, next came this:

I love crossovers. Even when it involves a franchise – or two – that I don't normally follow, I'm intrigued by mixing previously separate properties.

In 1994, I bought the Frank Miller-Todd McFarlane “Spawn/Batman” crossover, even though I wasn't regularly reading any Batman comics. I mean, I liked Batman. Doesn't everybody enjoy at least some version of the Caped Crusader? Spawn I was only passingly familiar with, as McFarlane was the regular artist on the first comic I ever regularly collected, “Incredible Hulk,” at the dawn of the Peter David run.

I own multiple Image crossovers, despite only reading a handful of Image comics at the time. All four issues of X-Men-WildC.A.T.s, both iterations of X-Force-Youngblood, a Wolverine-Badrock team-up.

The first Archie comic I ever bought was “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles meet Archie.” I was collecting the former but probably wouldn't have been caught dead reading the latter. Mark Waid, Ryan North and others would later show me the error of my ways, but in my youth, I didn't understand the point of comics without superheroes.

I never did track down that Archie-Punisher crossover, at least not for a price I was willing to pay. But I did have the Batman-Punisher one-shot, featuring the Azrael version of the Bat. I picked up the follow-up with Bruce Wayne back under the cowl and art by John Romita Jr. fairly recently and I'll read it one of these days.

It's not just comics where this appeals to me. I loved the way characters from Elmore Leaonard's books popped up in other stories, plus movies and TV shows based on his work. I thought it was cool when Richard Belzer's “Homicide” character showed up on “The X-Files,” even though I never watched “Homicide” and couldn't tell you then or now what the character's name is.

As for the characters I teamed Willy with here, Shamu sprung from fond memories of SeaWorld visits (I know that hasn't aged well, but I didn't understand there were problems with the animals' treatment as a kid). Orca, I think I caught a few minutes of the movie on TBS, but it was mainly images of the movie poster I found in old comic book ads (check it out here) that stuck in my mind. As for Flipper, I'm sure I caught episodes in endless rotation on TBS or USA or some channel like that.