If this were a short film, I think it’d be fun to go into these guys’ heads to show their brains rebooting from a crash. Also if this were a film, that gag would probably end up on the cutting room floor. :p

• Drawing proper perspective isn’t one of my favorite things, and neither are environments.  Fortunately, drawing digitally means I can measure my lines with vectors, and can easily work with vanishing points that are way outside the canvas.  Still, I may end up modeling the interior of diner in 3D, just to save me from drawing it in future comics.

And so this comic diverges further from the original… In “Wilson Says…”, Daisy didn’t appear until the third page, standing behind a podium. It was only when she hopped out from behind it at the very end these two guys (and the readers) found out how short she was. It was a fun punchline for what was originally meant to be a one-off character, but one that quickly ran its course.

Some extra info –

• My original idea for Daisy was quite different – she was a gunslinging Texas cowgirl (of average height), and was meant to be the cousin of one of my other characters, Mary-Anne.  The problem was, she suffered from what I call “anime syndrome” – her body and face was more or less identical to Mary; the only changes were her hair and clothes.  I decided to scrap the character until I could come up with something better.
• The decision to make her both short and busty was the sort of lighting-in-a-bottle moment that came about from wanting to do something different, and a tremendous lack of sleep.

Welcome to the first page of “Discovering A Unicorn”!  This is actually a remake – or a complete re-imagining – of a short comic I did several years ago, called “Wilson Says…”, which introduced Daisy.

It wasn’t what anyone might call high-art – in fact it wasn’t even finished art – but it did help introduce my most popular character, Daisy.  More recently I’ve felt that if I were to draw the comic now, the story would play out very differently… so that’s what I’m doing.  Also, this story has absolutely nothing to do with Unicorns, but hopefully it’ll make sense by the end.

Some behind the scenes info –

• My friend Jim insists that these two guys are based on him and our friend, the real-life Wilson.  It wasn’t intentional, but there is just enough of a resemblance in at least one of them that I can’t really dispute it.
• The distrust of the fictional Wilson is also inspired by the real one – when he was introduced to the internet as a teenager, it took Wilson very little time to find all manner of the most vile and perverse material you don’t even want to imagine…  which he then proceeded to e-mail to all his unsuspecting friends (and maybe even random people, for all we knew).  If you were unfortunate enough to recieve one of those e-mails, you quickly learned to block or ignore everything he sent you, and probably wished for some eye-bleach and short-term memory loss.
• The look of Daisy’s Diner is based on a Denny’s Classic Diner in Orlando, FL.