In the world of Stumpy, there are trees with roots and trees without. It's a lifestyle choice, like religion, except regrowing roots is impossible. I play on circumcision here. And no, I'm not Jewish.
I've incorporated the stuffed squirrel here as a tribute to the Acorn King, Captain Cardinal's sworn nemesis and, later, alter ego in my two-year "Captain Cardinal" comic strip. Unfortunately, no one got the reference. Because no one read "Captain Cardinal." Sigh.
I don't know where the dead possum idea came from. It may have been part of a bet or something ("I dare you to put a dead possum in your comic strip!"), but more likely I just found the idea of a dead possum being someone's sole worldly possession hysterical… Okay, maybe it was a bet.
A tree in a tie makes me laugh. In fact, I love the adult trees in this strip in general, how we never see their heads, because they're so tall. How high are these ceilings, anyway? Unfortunately, no one got the "give-a-fake-name-to-the-substitute" thing; I guess it was just the evil kids at my school who did that. These kids have pretty bad names already. Stumpy? Sounds like an amputee. Twiggy? A 1960s fashion model. Willow? Actually, I like that name. Better than Hortense, anyway.
This was my attempt to bring in the massive pot-smoking population of my school. Unfortunately, I was trying to establish social patterns on an alien world, which made for less-than-hilarious results, and my knowledge of marijuana was limited at best, which made my drawing of "Mary Jane" less than inspired. This was the first and only time I drew Needles with actual needles.
Comic book parodies overused? Say it ain't so! Nonetheless, I went ahead with this strip about the Punisher of the tree world, who even shared a costume (sort of) with the Marvel Comics vigilante. Stumpy's dad asks about Super Spruce, that world's Superman, only to find that, like our world's hero, Spruce had been killed years before. (Fortunately -- or unfortunately, depending on your views -- ours came back.) Notice that in comic books, all trees have arms. Hmm…
Coach Saguero isn't as tall as an adult tree, being merely a cactus, but he still towers over the squat Mr. Shrubbins, grumpy history teacher and, apparently, the manager of the school's mail room. Saguero is also probably the only teacher with arms.
Needles is either the Eddie Haskell or the Milhouse of Stumpy's world. He is very polite, but he is also totally clueless of right and wrong sometimes, and can often get Stumpy in trouble. As you can see, though, Stumpy needs no encouragement when it comes to rebelling against his parents.
This crossover was done in the great tradition of the Captain Cardinal/Feeble Frog crossovers of 1996 and 1997. After coming up with a plot, and a general panel-to-panel breakdown, I would draw and letter my characters and Jon would draw and letter his. The first two crossovers were just general super-heroing, but the presence of a small tree-person and the introduction of Feeble's rude friend Demented Duck led the whole thing to go in a bizarre direction. Das FX did play our "Spring Fling" concert the year before and was well-received, although most of us were under the impression that the band had broken up in 1992. The ice cream man is based on The Ice Cream Man, who was a fixture on campus for most of my time at Wes. He always parked in just the right place to cater to a class on break or an ultimate frisbee team with the munchies. The skeleton in line is one of Feeble Frog's villains, an Irish skeleton whose name eludes me. Acapellypse was a character I created for Captain Cardinal, megaphone and all, and he's singing "Take on Me," by A-Ha, a song my acappella group used to do. The kid getting the bat early in the strip is a freshman named Nicky, who wrote an obnoxious column called "I'm Da Man," that managed to annoy pretty much everyone on campus. Guest Appearances: Captain America in panel two, a werewolf in panel three (Jon likes werewolves), Jon's Larry the Ladybug in panel five, actor Robert Loggia (as a backup singer) in panels nine and eleven, and my creation, Poor Jim, in panel one, getting brained by a frisbee, as always.
