And here we are, the main reason this comic exists – the speech!  This was something I came up with to hopefully clear up any misconceptions people might have about Daisy.

• I’d originally planned this story as a 3D-animated short. The panels for Daisy’s speech – moreso than any other part of the comic – are essentially storyboards.
• Being built the way she is, plenty of people make quick assumptions about what my plans for Daisy are.  Usually those assumptions are some variation of “how could she NOT be for porn?”  The inspiration for this comic was to simply have Daisy address the viewer, and say something like “Yeah, I’m short and have large breasts.  Let’s move on…”
• This is essentially a 180 from Daisy’s original appearance in “Wilson Says”.  In that comic, her personality – if you could call it that – was more bubbly and naive.  She was basically a prop.
• The final panel was just going to have the two guys looking at each other in disbelief, only it looked more like they were trying to decide on a booth or table.  They’ve spent enough time being speechless already, I figured one of them should say something stupid.  It was either this, or something like “sorry, you lost me at the unicorn”.

There are probably much more gentle ways to get their attention, but not nearly as fun…

• Daisy using a horn to get their attention was a last-minute change.  The original idea was to have six panels – the top four, but with a shot of each guy as Daisy looks from one to the other.  Those two extra shots likely would’ve used the same art from page 2, which would have been boring.
• The panel of Daisy using the horn was drawn at my local movie theater, while waiting for Thor: The Dark World to start.
• The length of her arms can sometimes be a challenge – when she’s plugging her ear, I wanted her hand and index finger to be straight.  Her arms are too short for that to work, though.
• I’m a big fan of Adam Warren’s work.  I still have a tutorial he did for Wizard Magazine way back, that focused mostly on speed-lines.  I’m a long way from being able to do the type of crazy line work he does – especially motion-blurring – but at least simple speedlines are easy to create digitally.

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.