ART IMITATING LIFE [?]

Ryan K, adopted son of John and heir to the Ren and Stimpy empire [all speculation], is currently making a cartoon based on his comic strip character Up Chuk Duck, which he created as a child. This reminded me of a character I devised for a comic book when I was younger. The basic premiss was a guy who would, on his normal daily travels, run into some random good luck. What joy he would have, for a moment at least. Because this good luck will always be followed by some near equal bad luck. He was a duck. It rhymes with luck so it made sense. I think I named him Lucky the Unlucky Ducky. Or something equally as vile. Unfortunately I got carried away with the scenario in his debut, concluding with him finding a lottery ticket, by which time he had caught on to the luck situation, then getting hit with a falling piano [I went with a classic]. Subsequently, he couldn't have further adventures due to his suspicion of any luck based opportunities [he was unlucky, but not an idiot!]. The fractured skull was a hindrance also.

The above character is Doofy Duck [no relation].
Unlucky looked more like Count Duckula, shown here. With that Donald duck type bill, Chuck Jones eyes but not that Frankenstein head shape. There was no colour, as I used to just do pencil and paper stuff with no thought to colorisation.



I came up with Doofy a few short days ago as I was testing better ways to use the Wacom tablet. He had green 'skin', which probably came from all that Count Duckula viewing, but I wasn't drawing him to look like any particular cartoon duck that was out there. But when I finished, something was bothering me about the green scheme. Ofcourse I found this JohnK duck. Hrmpf! Now I had to do a re-colour just to avoid being accused of plagiarism from my anonymous fans! His colours are more 'realistic', too complex for an animated cartoon, but I loves it more than the plain green.

Anyway, back to the point of this post. Which is that often I find myself in the situation of Unlucky, wherein if there's anything remotely good coming my way, it'll be swiftly followed by some catch or the other. Examples include, getting a job which is fairly easy, and quite fun, but then finding out I have to do four hours a day in travel just to get there and back. Then when I come to terms with the travel, it turns out that a Sunday service of trains don't run at schedule times to allow me to get to my destination with enough time to walk to the building which is about 25 minutes walk from the station. So I try one Sunday to use my new folding bike to get from the station to work. What luck, I make it on time! But that very same day, on the way home from work, my [now stationary and folded in the train cabin] bike breaks off the front reflector, because the brake wires were not set in the right place when I got it. Which was annoying, but not as inconvenient as about a minute later the front brake, er, broke. ARGHH! So back to being late [and sweaty from running to work] on Sundays. Final kick in the nuts is that something's gone horribly wrong with the contracts and I haven't had the word to come in on a new contract. I.e. I have a job, but not really [if your idea of a job, like mine, is being paid]. Oh, and that fold up bike is about 4 kg too heavy for me to cart around comfortably, with less possibility of seriously injuring other passengers. Fun and laughter. Trust me, there are more situations like this.