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daisy-butler-deactivated2015072 asked: Are Debbie and the boy by any chance based on Daisy and Gladstone?
No. I read Disney comics obsessively as a child and all through my teenage years. I collected almost all of both series of Gladstone-published comics. I was completely obsessed with the comics and they informed every aspect of my life and personality. I have a decade’s worth of embarrassing Disney Comics Mailing Lists posts rotting in some online archive somewhere, to prove it. Carl Barks and Don Rosa were my special gods. When I was or 15 or 16, I discovered Gary Panter and Jim Woodring and Doug Allen and Victor Moscosco and Ron Rege and Chris Ware and Kevin Huizenga and Tony Millionaire and Ben Jones, etc., and there was no possible way my mind could be put back together after discovering those cartoonists and hundreds of others like them. My own comics gradually became less like bad Carl Barks and more like bad Jim Woodring. Now they are somewhere in-between bad Carl Barks and bad Jim Woodring. To answer your question, I think Debbie and the boy (usually known as “The Wise Old Bird”) are most certainly, in some deep and permanent yet vague way, certainly based on Daisy and Gladstone. I hope that Debbie is a more fully realized and less offensive character than Daisy, but I guess on some level (that I really can’t think about) she is a comment on the generic, soulless unfortunate cartoon girl character that Daisy is. But Debbie is real to me. I think the Carl Barks language comes out most in my character Chancellor Dog. I still love the comics of Carl Barks and Floyd Gottfredson and William Van Horn and Romano Scarpa and others, and I think about so many aspects of those comics all the time. I could never, in a thousand years, draw as proper and slick as even the worst and most obscure random Danish Egmont artist, but a lot of the Barks layout and composition has seeped into my brain and I rip it off every day, in some broken and dumbly distilled form. The way Barks flawlessly and intelligently always had a clearly defined ”hook” in his stories while still leaving breathing room for madness and nonsense and tangents is completely fascinating to me. And the way he drew those eyes… those haunted, tortured, living eyes. I hope this helps clear things up… a lot of people seem to think I am doing some kind of wacky Disney commentary. I am in no way trying to do comics that are directly informed by or parodying Disney, but Disney comics are a part of my blood and they won’t ever go away.