| Revision as of 14:10, 14 July 2011 editBobby london1 (talk | contribs)104 edits Undid revision 439325771 by MikeWazowski (talk)← Previous edit | Revision as of 14:23, 14 July 2011 edit undoBobby london1 (talk | contribs)104 edits I am the artist, the creator of this character. First version flirts with libel.Next edit → | ||
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| '''Dirty Duck''' is a cartoon character created by ] artist ]. After being censored from an appearance in London's first underground series, "Merton", for the Berkeley Tribe in 1970, the cigar-chomping, backwards baseball-hatted Duck with the Coney Island necktie made his first published appearance on the cover of ''Sky River Funnies'', out of Oregon, in the summer of the same year. | '''Dirty Duck''' is a fictional cartoon character created by ] artist ]. After being censored from an appearance in London's first underground series, "Merton", for the Berkeley Tribe in 1970, the cigar-chomping, backwards baseball-hatted Duck with the Coney Island necktie made his first published appearance on the cover of ''Sky River Funnies'', out of Oregon, in the summer of the same year. | ||
| ==Publication history== | ==Publication history== | ||
Revision as of 14:23, 14 July 2011
Dirty Duck is a fictional cartoon character created by underground comix artist Bobby London. After being censored from an appearance in London's first underground series, "Merton", for the Berkeley Tribe in 1970, the cigar-chomping, backwards baseball-hatted Duck with the Coney Island necktie made his first published appearance on the cover of Sky River Funnies, out of Oregon, in the summer of the same year.
Publication history
Bobby London's professional roots are in the Manhattan underground scene of the 1960s and he created Dirty Duck while attending Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. in late 1969, after a summer stint of cartooning on the Lower East Side. He never apprenticed with syndicated Bay Area cartoonist Dan O'Neill in late 1970, but he did draw two weeks of a small gag strip featuring the character which were printed underneath the Odd Bodkins story, leaving the strip unsigned to conceal from the San Francisco Chronicle the fact that it was not the work of O'Neill. The newspaper cancelled Odd Bodkins, and the strips never saw print. A half page was subsequently run by Gilbert Shelton under "Fat Freddy's Cat" in a 1971 issue of the Los Angeles Free Press. Dirty Duck appeared in his first full-length story in the infamous first issue of Air Pirates Funnies. As stated, the strip also ran earlier in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1971. Contrary to myth, comic book publishers would not touch Dirty Duck// after the Air Pirates incident until London was contacted in 1972 by National Lampoon, where the strip ran monthly for four years, sometimes alongside the work of London's then-wife Shary Flenniken, creator of Trots and Bonnie. The couple divorced in 1976 and London moved the strip to Playboy magazine in 1977, where it could still be seen as late as 1992. That same year, the Duck appeared on the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times congratulating Bill Clinton on his election! The strip even ran in the New York Daily News Sunday magazine during the 1980s while London was writing and drawing Popeye for King Features. Dirty Duck returned to Playboy on a monthly basis in 1999 and has been there ever since.
Characters
The main characters are two anthropomorphic animals, a cigar-smoking duck (usually referred to as "Mr. Duck") and his hunchbacked, insect assistant, Weevil. They live in a funny animal, fur-less, flesh-colored, mostly canine world (the strip's only, but respectable, nod to Disney's Carl Barks) and, even before Playboy, were periodically in the company of ladies of the night of an indeterminate species, sometimes canine, sometimes feline. National Lampoon sometimes saw them homeless but from the beginning, Mr. Duck was always an elderly gentleman of questionable wealth and even more questionable taste, with an unrequited lecherous streak and a merciless wit. "The Weevil" is his long-suffering personal assistant, but it's not clear who is the foil in this relationship. In their earliest underground days, their usual, if somewhat reluctant, female companion was a hippie runaway named Annie Rat, inspired by the cartoonist's girlfriend during his days on New York's RAT Subterranean News underground paper (poet Ann Petrie-Sauter, author of "A Plastic Bag Of Red Cells"). Dirty Duck and Weevil always lusted after Annie Rat from afar (as in, across the room). In the Playboy years of the 1980s, Mr. Duck acquired a french maid named Fifi, and, around 2006, an Anita Ekberg-style maid from Sweden named Ulla. The Duck makes sure the two maids never get along and they often battle it out au naturel. Quite naturally, Duck and Weevil rarely leave their apartment, unless Mr. Duck substitutes for the master of ceremonies at the local strip club, but they have occasionally had adventures on Hollywood's Sunset Strip, in Las Vegas and Tijuana. The cartoonist often cited the inhabitants of New York's Chelsea Hotel as a principal source of inspiration. .
References
- ^ Grandinetti, Fred M. (2004). Popeye: An Illustrated Cultural History. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. p. 16. ISBN 078641605X. Retrieved 2008-11-22.
- London, Bobby (March 2011). "Dirty Duck". Playboy. p. 100.
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