Dead Duck

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

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

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