MooBeard: The Cow Pirate

So here’s part 2 of the continuing series of posts where I talk about how I arrived at the character designs for MooBeard.

Today, I’ll talk about what went into the design of MooBeard’s best friend and the ship’s navigator, Sailor Bird. I got the idea for Sailor Bird while contemplating the stereotypical Japanese school girl uniform you see in anime like Inu Yasha and Sailor Moon. I thought “people call it a sailor uniform, but would anybody be caught dead on a sailing vessel in this thing? So I drew up the first Sailor Bird in March 2003 (same week as the first MooBeard).

Sailor Bird’s design was subconsciously inspired by a lot of things. Like a lot of bird characters I draw, she was in part inspired by Booker from Jim Davis’s other comic strip, U.S. Acres, more specifically the way he was drawn around the time Jim’s assistant Brett Koth took over the drawing chores. I also had Yenny artist David Alvarez in the back of my mind, especially the way he draws Tweety in DC’s Looney Tunes comics. The sailor uniform, like I mentioned, has been featured in a lot of anime, but it was most directly inspired by A-ko’s uniform from Project A-ko. I was also thinking of Sakura from Street Fighter. For those who don’t know, fighting game characters have different color variations within the game, and as a result, I like to vary the colors in Sailor Bird’s outfit. I’m not currently sure which one I’ll use in the short.

As you can see above, only a few things changed from the old version of Sailor Bird to the new one. First of all, her legs have changed considerably. You’ll notice that Sailor Bird’s legs get wider as they go down. That’s inspired by the little girl from Rankin/Bass’s Frosty special. I originally drew Sailor Bird with a bandanna to make her look somewhat piratical, but I ultimately decided she worked better looking completely unlikely and replaced it with the Donald Duck hat, which you’re also not likely to see on a sailing vessel. I used to draw the color of Sailor Bird’s eyes around her pupil, but I changed that when I created additional crew members for MooBeard (who ultimately were cut from this short). Quill, a crazed porcupine woman, also has her pupils drawn that way, and so I changed Sailor Bird’s to keep things varied up.