MooBeard: The Cow Pirate

A few months before I designed MooBeard, I doodled a little ninja ducky on a grey sheet of paper. I didn’t have any plans for it, so I just set it aside. Later, when Andrew Dickman and I was planning on making a MooBeard pilot on our own to shop around, I thought it’d be cool if there was a hoarde of these little duckies and a big leader ducky. Well, after bringing the idea to Oh Yeah Cartoons and several storyboard revisions were made, I was left with only the leader ducky, Dark Blade of Fire.

Dark Blade’s design is very much an homage to Doug TenNapel who I’ve been a fan of for years. Doug has several characters with large bodies and cylindrical heads like Earthworm Jim and Klayman, so I thought I’d give something like that a try. Unlike those designs, I made Dark Blade’s body thinner in order to contrast him directly with the short and squat MooBeard. Batman, particularly the redesign from The New Batman/Superman Adventures was also a big inspiration. I didn’t want to use the stereotypical Donald/Daffy duck bill, so I tried something a little closer to Duckman