Above: The never finished cover to Duck! #4 The Kamikaze Kid was first created for a dream sequence I did for the comic "Official Business". If you think some of the art that follows is crappy, you should see some of the art for that one. Well, no you shouldn't. That's why I'm not posting any of it. We're going to do this in the order in which these comics were written and drawn, NOT in chronological order of the events of the stories. It'll be slightly less confusing this way. Readers of Plastic Farm should note that while there are similarities between some of the characters on this page and characters in PF, DUCK! has NO continuity with Plastic Farm. You'll see what I'm talking about later. The Kid made his first appearance in DUCK! #2 He was a super-hero parody at first, and not the cowboy we all know and love today. You'll notice that he is wearing stupid looking goggles. Goggles are easier to draw than eyes. DUCK! was about Holy-Duck and Devil Duck. Devil Duck had sold his soul to Satan in exchange for superstrength and Holy-Duck was going to help him get it back. So they decided to enlist the aid of The Kid, who they found standing on a New York rooftop. I thought it would be funny to introduce a character and kill him off within the first six pages. I still think it's funny. However, The Kid was a servant of Death and couldn't really die. (Holy-Duck was a servant of God, Devil Duck was an agent of Satan, so The Kid was an agent of Death. This all made sense when I was 14.) Readers of Plastic Farm will recognize the name Jonathan Picanos. I reused the serial killer in PF2, but split him into a seperate character for PF. Anyway, I thought it would be cool to have a superhero be a reincarnated, insane psycho killer. Looking at the above page I realize that I redrew the sixth panel in PF2. Now, while The Kid couldn't die, he could be hurt. After his fall from the roof, the Kid fell into a state of shutdown till his body could heal. Also, The Kid only liked to return to life in dramatic ways. 15 pages later his body got struck by lightning and he rose again. After DUCK! #2, I started doing a weekly single page DUCK! series. The first story arc detailed how Holy-Duck had captured Picanos in the first place. Drawing a page a week was a lot for me back in high school. It was probably too much, as you can tell by the absolute crappiness of the above artwork. Ah, then came DUCK! #3. Preparing for the Roadtrip to Hell, The Kid shaves Devil Duck's head. Devil Duck doesn't like this and starts to beat the shit out of The Kid. The above page is the first time The Kid says "Click" and creates shit out of thin air. I made it up on the spot and it's stuck ever since. Anyway, to keep The Kid from killing Devil Duck, Holy-Duck shoots him up with elephant tranquilizers. For pretty much the rest of the issue, and for the entire cross country road trip to Hell, The Kid is stoned off his ass in the backseat of the Holy Mobile. Then they get to Hell, The Kid recovers, and they make a dramatic entrance. The third series of DUCK! weekly strips focused on the return of Jonathan Picanos from the afterlife. He is now an agent of Death who has been tasked to kill gangster Samual Diego. Picanos gets shot in the head and he goes even crazier than he already was. Meanwhile, Holy-Duck gets a visit from the archangel Michael (who spends his time as a NYPD detective). Mike tells Holy-Duck that Death wants to stop Lucifer's invasion of Heaven and has sent Picanos back to kill the one man who would trigger the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse is part of God's Plan, or something, so Holy-Duck had to go and save the life of The Anti-Christ from this reincarnated Agent of Death. But Holy-Duck isn't much of a fighter, even though he's bigger and stronger than a skinny white guy with a baseball bat. I'm not sure why I gave Picanos a ponytail. Holy-Duck has a Power Halo. Michael has modified it so that it can change shapes. This tranquilizer thing is a reference to the events of DUCK! #3 where we see that The Kid really enjoys drugs. Yup. The Holy guy brainwashes the Bad Man. Above: Drawing a page a week used to be so hard sometimes. And now back to the DUCK! regular series. DUCK! #4 is just a voyage through Hell. It starts off with a horribly illustrated battle with demons. The Kid has blown himself up to help the ducks who have brainwashed him, drugged him, and beaten him up. But, you know he's just waiting to make a dramatic return. Above: The Kid isn't on this page. I just think it's one of the better drawn pages from DUCK! Below: The Final Three Pages from DUCK! I stopped drawing this stupid thing right in the middle of an action sequence, and I doubt that I'll ever go back and finish it. I think it works good as an ending anyway. Here's what's happened up to this point. The Kid is still dead and HD and DD have finally entered Satan's chamber. Satan shoots Devil Duck with his Satan Eye Beams and turns DD back into Bony Duck. (This is how Devil Duck looked before selling his soul for super strength) Holy-Duck is now fighting Satan off using every tool in his arsenal (prayer, his power halo, poorly laid out action drawings) but he's losing. Just when you think the game is up... Yay! Now The Kid is a Cowboy for NO REASON AT ALL! And he's going to KILL THE DEVIL as part of some incomprehesible plotline that I no longer understand. Or something. When it came time to start a new comic, I stole whatever my drunk ass thought was good about DUCK! and threw it into Plastic Farm. I got rid of the goggles, made The Kid and Jonathan Picanos two seperate characters, and amde that dinosaur thing he has with him at the end of DUCK! just a little bit bigger. I like The Kid a lot better now that he has no stupid backstory. The Kamikaze Kid as a figment of someone's addled imagination works a lot better than The Kid as an super-hero parody agent of death off to stop the apocalypse. Please keep reading Plastic Farm. I promise that I won't let it suck this bad. -Rafer Roberts