Archive for ‘April, 2012’

9 results.

Toy Soldier 6

by JayFosgitt on April 30, 2012 at 12:01 am
Toy Soldier 6

Hey, all you necrofowliacs! Welcome to the latest “Dead Duck” episode, “ONE TOY SOLDIER RIDES AWAY”! Here’s your trivia fix for this installment:

  • When I first began drawing my “Dead Duck” stories, the clipboard Dead Duck carries never had anything on it but squiggly lines. When I drew the cover for the graphic novel, it was the first time I established that his forms bear the masthead, “I AM DEAD” (or in some cases, “I’m dead”). I’ve since gone back and slipped in “I am dead” on any visible form that I see, prior to posting those pages here. With this story, I’m happy to note that the only times you see the clipboard, the front is either facing away towards Zombie chick, or it’s partially eaten, saving me the trouble of going back in and adding the masthead.
  • I’m sure the term “jonesing” was out of style by the time I had Zombie chick used it. I typically pick up on slang well after it is past its freshness date.
  • I LOVE how the three panels where Tequila indicates…well…something…turned out. I think it’s some of my best sequential art I’ve ever done, and I wish I had this stroke of inspiration more often. I especially love the slinky, wonky look to the “throbbing” word balloon. To quote John Travolta in “Pulp Fiction”, I got my moments.”
  • I think that having Man-Without-Pants be a shameless exhibitionist is hilarious. I suppose I could have gone another way with it, and had it so the character didn’t realize it wasn’t wearing pants. But then we wouldn’t have had all those great lines from him where he refers to (and defends) his junk. I think I made the right decision.
  • I kinda feel like I was channeling cartoonist Jim Borgman again (I do it a lot) in my design of Man-Without-Pants, particularly in the way he draws Jeremy Duncan from his comic strip, “Zits”.
  • I can’t recall if I intended it as a gag, or if she was just abbreviating his name, but Tequila calling Big Man on Campus BM is hilarious either way. (FYI: A BM is a bowel movement. Score one for subliminal poop humor).
  • The Ravenous Thrash Hazard was based on a creature I’d designed years ago for a homecoming float. I always liked the basic look for the monster, and used it here and there for many different drawings. On this story, I worked the design a bit more, giving him beady eyes and a pointy head. I liked the look so much that I was ready to recycle the character (and rename him Gadzooks) for another “Dead Duck” story where giant monsters would be attacking Rigormortitropolis. While that idea collected dust in my sketchbook (it might still happen), I’ve since reappropriated Gadzooks for a whole new comic I’m developing. As for the name Ravenous Thrash Hazard, at the time I was trying to come up with something as ridiculous sounding as the creature names used in the He-Man cartoon. Actually, I hate the name I came up with. It’s good enough for this story, but my monster is forevermore known as Gadzooks.
  • He-Man would always resort to imprisoning a foe in a pile of boulders, miraculously avoiding crush his target, but penning him in none the less. It was comedy gold that needed mining, in my opinion.

See you on the next page!

–Jay

4 Comments

Toy Soldier 5

by JayFosgitt on April 26, 2012 at 12:01 am
Toy Soldier 5

Hey, all you necrofowliacs! Welcome to the latest “Dead Duck” episode, “ONE TOY SOLDIER RIDES AWAY”! Here’s your trivia fix for this installment:

  • One of the things that always perplexes me is how the more buff a guy gets, the bigger boobs he develops. You’d think it would be a case against getting in shape. At any rate, it seemed like a good solution to Prince Andy’s desire to view a nice rack.
  • It’s a small detail, but I’m really proud of how I drew Smokin’ Hot Bird lady’s wings in this first panel. animal anatomy (heck, HUMAN anatomy) has always been a challenge for me to draw, and it felt like I accomplished something in the way her wing curves in. Like I said, small detail. But it does it for me.
  • It always confused me as to why He-Man didn’t have an insignia on his chest that was representative of his name. Instead, they had him wearing something akin to the iron cross that the German’s employed in WWI. Weird. At any rate, that’s what lead me to create a more identifiable (and purposefully cluttered) insignia for Big Man on Campus.
  • I really enjoyed drawing those big balloony purple and blue trees in this story. Normally I’m struggling to do recognizable cartoon representations of real trees. But in this case, because it was a fantasy world they were on, I knew I could cut loose with the design of the trees.
  • When I was a kid, and every other family I knew were purchasing cutting edge VHS players for their home video viewing, my dad got us a second hand Betamax with a remote that had a long wire attached to the player. You’d go to a video store, lined wall to wall with the latest VHS movies, and in the middle of the store on one small rack were less than a dozen Beta tapes you could rent, and usually the crappiest movies from ten years past that no one would want to rent anyway. That said, I made great use of our sturdy Betamax (it lasted longer than any of the pile of VHS players I owned over the years), and taped a lot of great specials and movies off TV. And I’m sure the He-Man Christmas special found its way into my collection at some point. It’s those memories that inform the humor of the third panel.
  • E-Hockmycrap.com is my version of E-bay. It’s a running gag in “Dead Duck”, having figured into at least two or three stories.
  • Legos are a stock gag in my comics. They were a great toy, and these days, people treat them with the reverence that they once did baseball cards, record albums and comic books (sigh). But Lego is such a funny word and a funny shaped object that I slip it into a gag whenever I can.
  • Though it was never established in the cartoon that Teela was Prince Adam/He-Man’s girlfriend, it seemed pretty obvious that, without the confines of parental watch groups and network standards and practices for children’s programming, they’d be sweethearts. I decided I’d make it official in my parody, with the drunken Tequila being the best gal of Big Man on Campus.

See you on the next page!

–Jay

8 Comments

Toy Soldier 4

by JayFosgitt on April 23, 2012 at 12:01 am
Toy Soldier 4

Hey, all you necrofowliacs! Welcome to the latest “Dead Duck” episode, “ONE TOY SOLDIER RIDES AWAY”! Here’s your trivia fix for this installment:

  • I have my own traumatic childhood recollections of trying to sell crap door to door for school or cub scout-related purposes (I barely lasted a month as a scout). I should have been so lucky to encounter a patron like Smokin’ Hot Bird lady along my route.
  • I like the transition from Smokin’ Hot Bird lady’s thought bubble into the stone wall of her castle. As I’ve mentioned before, I rarely plan out what each scene will look like before I draw it, so this layout was just a spark of inspiration as I put pen to paper.
  • For those who don’t know, a bidet is basically a toilet that shoots water up your butt for better cleaning. It’s also a goldmine for comedy writing.
  • It always bothered me that we were never really told He-man’s origin. We knew he had a secret identity, we knew that Man at Arms and The Sorceress knew his secret, and that he could summon his super strength by yelling “By the power of Grayskull…”. But how did it all happen? I decided my parody would explain it, and in the funniest and naughtiest way I could manage. Would you expect any less of me?
  • The way I drew prince Andy here was partly inspired by the cartooning style of Sergio Aragones. Whenever Sergio drew his barbarian character, Groo, you would just see these two thin stalks of legs jutting down from a bulky torso, with no waist, butt or crotch to speak of. I loved that unique design, and worked it into Andy’s own tiny frame.
  • I love that, even though Prince Andy is the royal heir to the Dysenterian throne, he still belongs to the scouts, and still feels like he needs to introduce himself, just like any other normal kid.
  • My friend and Canadian comrade, Chad Porter, actually made me a “Peeked at Boobies” merit badge after reading this story. If anyone out there wants to make me a replica of the Rocket Scouts helmet, I sure wouldn’t try to stop you.
  • For this last panel, I was trying to evoke the image of Chernobog, the demon from the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in Disney’s “Fantasia” (1940), as animated by the great Vlad “Bill” Tytla.

See you on the next page!

–Jay

4 Comments

Toy Soldier 3

by JayFosgitt on April 19, 2012 at 12:01 am
Toy Soldier 3

Hey, all you necrofowliacs! Welcome to the latest “Dead Duck” episode, “ONE TOY SOLDIER RIDES AWAY”! Here’s your trivia fix for this installment:

  • Dead Duck having little girly legs and being bad at math are reoccurring gags in “Dead Duck”. In fact, several characters in “Dead Duck” have professed to be lousy at math, an affliction I’ve suffered my whole life. Write about what you know, as they say.
  • This was the first time I drew a grade school-age Dead Duck, and it proved to be so fun that I’ve since created a couple more stories set in that period. Many readers claimed to love kid Dead Duck, and I could probably do well with a series based exclusively on that period of his life. The problem is, that period has no Zombie Chick in it, and I’m not sure how readers would handle that. I know I wouldn’t want to do a “Dead Duck” series without her.
  • The “Badasses of the Big Blue Yonder” movie poster behind Dead Duck is a riff on the 1987 “Masters of The Universe” Movie (starring Dolph Lundgren as He-Man), which was a huge, stinky turd. As such, you couldn’t possibly do better for parodying a huge stinky turd than by making David Hasselhoff the star.
  • Created the Big Man on Campus logo was a lot of fun, because I didn’t try to put too much thought into it. The character’s name is so long, that the gag would just be cramming all those letters in there.
  • The character of Danny Johnson is based on my best friend from 6th grade through high school. I can’t recall if Danny had very many (if any) He-Man toys, but he had a lot of Transformers, and butt loads of G.I. Joe action figures, and either owned or built his own play sets for them. Danny and I never competed for any kind of presidency, but we certainly had our own little gang of friends that reveled in toys and comics throughout the last years of our childhood. Danny and two of my other close friends from those years (Ray Peters and Bill Goetgeluck) appear in another story from Dead Duck’s childhood later on–one that has yet to see print!
  • 3rd grade seemed like a good point to place Dead Duck’s fandom, since that was around the time of my own He-Man viewership.
  • This story is interesting in that Dead Duck is little more than a narrator in it, while Zombie Chick has her own little sub-plot where she tries to get snacks and “funeral swag” (as if there were such a thing. There should be). It was definitely the beginning of Zombie Chick becoming more than just a sidekick, making her a well rounded character on her own (I know what you’re thinking. Clean it up, ya pervs). I almost equate this story with some of the Will Eisner “Spirit” stories from the 50′s, where The Spirit is barely a background player, and it’s the people he encounters who really carry the story along.

See you on the next page!

–Jay

8 Comments

Toy Soldier 2

by JayFosgitt on April 16, 2012 at 12:01 am
Toy Soldier 2

Hey, all you necrofowliacs! Welcome to the latest “Dead Duck” episode, “ONE TOY SOLDIER RIDES AWAY”! Here’s your trivia fix for this installment:

  • Castle Rock Noggin is a parody of He-Man’s Castle Greyskull.
  • The design for Big-Man on Campus was partly inspired by my character Stoutheart, whom I created in 1998 for my comic strip, “The Epic of Cholly”. Stoutheart has shown up in many of my comics over the years, either as himself or as a model for another character. As of this typing, there are plans for Stoutheart to be a character in my “Bodie Troll” comic that I’m developing.
  • Dystenteria is a parody of He-Man’s home world, Eternia. I chose the name Dysenteria because it was derivative of dysentery, which is an inflammatory disorder of the intestine that results in severe diarrhea. Need I remind you all again of the prominence of poop humor in “Dead Duck”? I think not.
  • The way I wrote the Big Man on Campus song was, I thought of the theme to “He-Man and The Masters of the Universe” cartoon, hummed it to myself (it had no lyrics), then wrote out the humming to the best of my descriptive ability. I don’t think there’s any legal precedent to sue a man for using a hum.
  • Each of The Badasses of the Big Blue Yonder that I drew here are loose parodies of specific He-Man characters: Pizza Face=Man-E-Faces (A multi-faced character who was actually a villain in the He-Man canon), Big Prick=Buzz Off (A giant bee-man), and Hand Jive=Fisto (A bearded warrior with a large, metal hand).
  • When I first designed Hand Jive, he was black. I soon worried that drawing a funky black 70′s character could be racist, so I switched him to a goofy white 70′s swinger with a perm. On one hand, I think the way I drew him here is very funny, and follows the comedy tradition of smarmy white swingers in pop culture like Disco Stu (The Simpsons) and Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd as The Festrunk Brothers (Saturday Night Live). On the other hand, is it more racist to deny black characters the right to be goofy and funny? The debate rages on, I guess.
  • Monolith Toys is my parody of Mattel, the company that produced the He-Man toys, as well as Barbie.
  • “One Toy Soldier Rides Away” is a parody of the 1960′s anti-war song, “One Tin Soldier”, which was the theme for one of my favorite (and blissfully cheesy) movies, “Billy Jack”(1971). I loved being able to reference the song in “Dead Duck”, and felt it was so perfect a title for a story about a dead toy icon.

See you on the next page!

–Jay

7 Comments

Toy Soldier 1

by JayFosgitt on April 12, 2012 at 12:01 am
Toy Soldier 1

Hey, all you necrofowliacs! Welcome to the latest “Dead Duck” episode, “ONE TOY SOLDIER RIDES AWAY”! Here’s your trivia fix for this installment:

  • I consider this to be one of my two favorite “Dead Duck” stories. Many friends and fans have cited this as their most favorite in the graphic novel. It’s also the longest “Dead Duck” story I’ve ever created, coming in at 19 pages.
  • As a child of the 80′s, I was into several popular toy lines of the day–Transformers, My Pet Monster, Muscle Men,  Mad balls, Care Bears (yes, I said Care Bears. Screw you for judging me)–and He-Man and The Masters of The Universe was a big favorite. Around 2007, I started reminiscing about those cheesy old toys, and nostalgia overtook me. The idea struck me then to do a He-Man parody within “Dead Duck”. The idea to have Dead Duck be a HUGE fan of the character, and how he’d contend with picking up a character he loved from his childhood, seemed like a great concept for s story, and it all came together pretty rapidly from that original spark of nostalgia.
  • I miss weekday afternoon cartoons on local network TV with all my heart. Rushing home from school to catch Woody Woodpecker on TV 66, and He-Man and Inspector Gadget on TV 25 made all the trauma of the prior school day all the more bearable.
  • While I did watch the He-Man cartoon, and I owned several of the action figures, I was far from being a voracious collector of his merchandise. I drew inspiration for Dead Duck’s fandom and compulsory collecting on my own collecting of Jim Henson/Muppets-related products. As a kid, I owned just about every Muppet product you could imagine, and even today, I have managed to hold on to almost all of it. My vintage Fraggle dolls from 1983 hang above my work station as I type this trivia.
  • When I began coloring my Dead Duck pages back in 2007, I didn’t try for a lot of fancy shading or color variations, sticking instead to bold block coloring. This was partly a time consideration, and partly because my digital coloring skills weren’t what they are now. For the most part, I regret the color on those early stories. But for this story, which is all about garish and gaudy toy designs, I think my coloring works perfectly.
  • In the summer of 2007, I was working a hellacious caricaturing gig in Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi, MI. I was stuck at a tiny table in the middle of a department store, hidden by circular racks of clothes, and barely did any business for the several hours I was booked to draw mall patrons. So I used the time to design all the characters for this story.
  • “Big Man on Campus” was an old expression used to describe the top sports hero on a high school or college campus. It seemed a befitting name of the hero of a fictitious world, and also sounded kinda similar–but not TOO similar–to He-Man, which was another outdated term for a rugged, athletic man.
  • “The Bad Asses of the Big Blue Yonder” was meant as a riff on “Masters of the Universe”. The He-man cartoon never really specified who the “Masters” were, since the show’s heroes never referred to themselves as such, nor did they ever refer to their collective as a team. So I made a point to establish my characters as a legitimate team, albeit a ridiculous one.
  • Tequila is a parody of Teela, the warrior woman from the TV show who rarely did any warring, and was mostly used a damsel for He-Man to save. Writing slurred speech and drawing stumbling-drunk characters is always fun, and in this case, it provided a nice juxtaposition to the original bland character I parodied.
  • The tattoo on the fella’s arm in the second panel reads “Dooley”. It’s a shout out to my college friend Pat Dooley who was (and probably still is) a big He-Man/Masters of The Universe fan. Pat also served as the model for Fort, one of the trio of rednecks who harass Dead Duck in his first story, “The Soul-Taker’s Apprentice”.
  • Man-Without-Pants is a parody of Man-At-Arms, and he’s the character who cracked me up the most when I first created this story. He still cracks me up when I re-read this story today. I love his dialogue throughout the story (here, it’s a riff on Robert Duvall’s famous line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” from the 1979 movie “Apocalypse Now”), and his stubbly bare butt is, in my opinion, a hilarious visual.
  • Hokum is a parody of He-Man’s magical sidekick, Orko. The character’s look is similar to Orko’s, but the hat I gave him is an homage to Dumb Donald, from the old “Fat Albert cartoon. Coincidentally, the animation studio Filmation produced both the “Fat Albert” and “He-Man” cartoons.
  • The name Hokum has a long history with me, creatively. In college, I was friends with a girl named Michelle Holcomb, who I nicknamed Hokum. Not long after, I began developing my comic strip, “The Epic of Cholly”, and when I needed a name for the strip’s goth character, I chose Hokum, after my friend. Hokum the character has appeared in many of my comics in one form or another over the past fourteen years. When it came time to name my character in this story, I felt the name just fit. I don’t think my original Hokum (my friend and the character) would mind me lending out her name in the least.
  • Smokin’ Hot Bird Lady is a parody of He-Man’s magical advisor, The Sorceress. I felt that, since the character dressed like a bird, I’d come up with the most literal name possible. It made for a great gag, and I’ve had some very favorable responses to Smokin’ Hot Bird lady–almost exclusively from dudes.
  • “Quit staring at my books or I’ll poop on your windshield” is highly ranked among readers’ favorite non-Zombie Chick quotes from “Dead Duck”.

See you on the next page!

–Jay

10 Comments

Gangs 6

by JayFosgitt on April 9, 2012 at 12:01 am
Gangs 6

:Hey, all you necrofowliacs! Welcome to the final installment of the “Dead Duck” episode, “Gangs of New Scotland” or “Quebec to the Future”! Here’s your trivia fix for this installment.

  • I chose Sarnia for the top panel’s location because it borders Michigan–right across the river from Port Huron–and is my preferred border into Canada.
  • I had several years experience as an editorial cartoonist on various college newspapers. But when college was done, I no longer wanted to be political in my work. Dead Duck was supposed to be my weird, wacky escape from fighting causes in cartoons. But it was inevitable that my personal politics would pop up in some fashion. And given my feelings on some of Canadian’s political policies versus the U.S.’s, this story was a good fit to make my point, and in the most extreme and silly way possible.
  • The doctor I drew in the top panel is a loose caricature of Joan Ramm, my college English/journalism professor, and the faculty advisor on our college paper who gave me my first experience at having my work published. I worked with Joan for six years on the Collegiate, and she became a close friend and mentor. I don’t believe I’d be where I am in my career without Joan’s direction and encouragement.
  • Moose pile: a euphemism for poop. I warned you guys way back that toilet humor was prominent in “Dead Duck”. No one’s gonna call Jay P. Fosgitt a liar.
  • While I felt like I HAD to do a gag about Canadian dialect (aboot, eh), I can’t imagine it’s something Canadians particularly enjoy being teased about. To my Canadian readers, fans and friends, I’d like to reaffirm that this story is truly a love letter to Canada, and no malice or insult is intended.
  • It has to be slap-you-in-the-face-with-a-pound-of-back bacon-obvious that the thugs I drew on this page are caricatures of Bob and Doug McKenzie (who themselves were Canadian caricatures), the characters created by actors Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas for “SCTV”, and later, the movie “Strange Brew” (1984). In retrospect, I wish I would have drawn more accurate caricatures, replicating their hat designs and such, rather than the looser, generalized interpretations I did here.
  • I just realized that I misspelled “Molson”, the Canadian beer, in the last panel. If I’d been more on the ball, I would had Dead Duck give them a case of Elsinor Beer, the fictional brand the McKenzie brothers drank in “Strange Brew”. Man, I’m such a hoser.

See you on the next page!

–Jay

2 Comments

Gangs 5

by JayFosgitt on April 5, 2012 at 12:01 am
Gangs 5

Hey, all you necrofowliacs! Welcome to the latest installment of the “Dead Duck” episode, “Gangs of New Scotland” or “Quebec to the Future”! Here’s your trivia fix for this installment:

  • Yet another example of my signature “haircut gag”. As I mentioned in previous posts, this was a stock gag used by many of my favorite childhood shows (“Rocky and Bullwinkle/Fractured Fairytales”, “Sesame Street”), and it’s with loving tribute that I continue the tradition in my own work.
  • When I first penciled this page, the barber I drew was Caucasian. For some reason though, I began feeling that it was somehow racist to have the hippie’s assailant be white, so I made the barber black when I inked and colored it. Maybe I was over thinking it, but in the end, I felt better about it after the change, and also felt like I was keeping focus on the gag by taking the racial differences out of it.
  • When I was in high school, I’d created a character named Nimbus the cloud boy, who looked like a cross between Charlie Brown and Tintin, and who had the power to create clouds with his mind. I always think of him when I reference nimbus clouds, which happens more often than you might imagine.
  • I’ll state publicly that the bottom panel is a loving tribute to Jason Voorhees and the “Friday the 13th” movies, though it should be obvious to anyone with even the slightest grasp of pop culture from the past 30 years. For copyright purposes, I kept his face in shadow and only refer to him by his last name. But seriously, it’s pretty obvious.
  • When I first drew this story, I placed Crystal Lake in southern Ohio, as I was positive that that’s where the very first “Friday the 13th” film mentioned the camp was located. It wasn’t until after “Dead Duck” saw print that I read on some “Friday the 13th” fan site that Crystal Lake was located in Connecticut. So I made the change to the page, and printed the correction in this posting. However, I’ve since read that Crystal Lake is supposed to reside in New Jersey. My official position on the matter as of this writing is that I no longer give a shit.
  • I accept that I may be off in my accounting of Jason’s various incarnations. If you take into account that (SPOILER ALERT) Jason’s mom was the killer in the first movie and that Jason only appears in a fever dream of the film’s heroine, in the 5th movie the killer is actually one of Jason’s victims who survived, but went nuts and adopted Jason’s persona, and that some fans don’t consider “Jason Goes To Hell” (my personal favorite in the series) to be part of the mythology, it’s almost impossible and probably pointless to try for a specific resurrection count. For the sake of the gag, though, I think eleven works just fine.

See you on the next page!

–Jay

5 Comments

Gangs 4

by JayFosgitt on April 2, 2012 at 12:01 am
Gangs 4

Hey, all you necrofowliacs! Welcome to the latest installment of the “Dead Duck” episode, “Gangs of New Scotland” or “Quebec to the Future”! Here’s your trivia fix for this installment:

  • I’d wanted to do a sea monster story in “Dead Duck” from the very beginning of his creation. I had made a rough outline for one that drew inspiration from a “Kid’s in the Hall” comedy sketch (“Skora, the gentle shark”) and “The Red Green Show” (Along with “Kids in the Hall”, one of my two favorite Canadian TV shows). The concept never managed to come together, so I wound up scrapping it. But when writing “Gangs of New Scotland”, I saw the opportunity to slip in a sea monster without needing a fully realized story behind it. I researched Canadian sea monsters, and learned of the Ogopogo–a sea monster rumored to inhabit Lake Okanagan in British Columbia. The creature was  a perfect fit for this story, and I did my best to draw him as close to the descriptions and interpretations that I had available to me. The rest of the plot came from stories I heard in my college Michigan history class, which told of German U-boats patrolling the great lakes around Michigan’s upper peninsula in the 1940′s.
  • “Das Bootie” is a riff on the German book “Das Boot”, written by Lothar-Gunther Buchheim in 1973, and the Wolfgang Petersen-directed film from 1981. I was only familiar with the title and that Nazis were involved when I wrote this bit, and only recently found out the original story took place in a U-Boat.
  • There was no way I was going to do a Canada-themed “Dead Duck” story and not have Toronto be represented. As all my followers should know about me, Toronto is my favorite city in the whole world. Entertainment-wise, Toronto is Canada’s New York, with most of its earliest and most popular TV series/movies/radio shows/theater coming from there. So it was a natural choice to have my Canadian rock and roll show broadcast from the great city.
  • “Canuck Around the Clock” is a riff on the classic 1955 song, “Rock Around the Clock”, written by Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers and most famously sung by Bill Haley and The Comets. “Canuck” is slang for a Canadian.
  • The bottom panel is a great example of the wonky perspective I typically imbue my comics with. I model this style off the idea of a rainbow as seen in extreme perspective–all arching lines that advance toward a common point. I take this method to greater extremes in later stories.
  • 1955 was actually the year after rock and roll officially hit the social consciousness. I chose 1955 partly because I felt rock and roll would have spread outside the U.S. by then. It was also a tribute to Jim Henson, who, in 1955, first broadcast his TV show “Sam & Friends” (the precursor to The Muppet Show) while he was still a college student in Maryland.
  • The bottom panel was loosely based on a short story I wrote in college. It was similarly set in the 50′s, and was about a Scottish rock star performing on U.S. network TV.
  • The show’s producer (seen between Dead Duck and Zombie Chick) is a stock character type that I often draw when I need an incidental character. His look is heavily inspired by the artwork of cartoonist Jim Borgman, co-creator of the comic strip “Zits”.
  • This was the first time I referenced “Journey” (one of my top five favorite bands) in the pages of “Dead Duck”. And it’s far from the last.
  • One of my proudest accomplishments in this story was researching what TV cameras from the mid 50′s looked like, and replicating it in the bottom panel. Drawing machinery is always a challenge, but I find technology from the 50′s to have the coolest designs, and to be particularly fun to draw.

See you on the next page!

–Jay

6 Comments