- L. F. Clark, The Unhappy Duckling

You know what my one abiding memory of my 19th birthday is? Sitting in my basement drawing the scene in The Unhappy Duckling (currently at large) in which the Little Black Duck and Jack the Teddy Bear crash land in Never-Neverland. Little did I know, I was beginning the long-winded and wholly misunderstood "Century in Never-Neverland" sequence. At the time, I thought I was in the home stretch of a little creative side-project that would whileaway the summer and bring a smile to a pretty face or two.

I had no idea that I was embarking upon what would become one of my quirkiest obsessions and ultimately one of my greatest failures.

I could bore you with the details of how I learned to relax and love crudely illustrated graphic novels, but I've already done that, haven't I? Instead, I think I'll bore you with the intricate plot details I've spent the last few years dreaming up in my considerable leisure time. It seems very unlikely that I will ever again lift a uni-ball pen to complete a Little Black Duck Tale. For all intents and purposes, the Little Black Duck is dead, so I would like to eulogize him in a little essay I like to call...

"The Death of the Little Black Duck"
THE STORY THUS FAR: The Little Black Duck came to the University of Wonderland in the wacked-out and wild autumn of 2000 with his ever-faithful and extremely put-upon robot companion Tin. Over the course of that first year, The Duck overcame his self-loathing before it tore him apart on Valentine's Day (I don't know what I meant by that either), helped Batman thwart a lame atomic bomb plot by The Joker on the roof of Jesse Hall, saved McDavid Hall during a tornado that chucked his ass to Oz, and made the long trip home, meeting the ghost of his father (dead for a decade, having been impaled upon the massive stinger of a Big Giant Bee) as well as Harry Potter and the improbably dazed and confused former writer of Deadpool and Action Comics, "Jittery" Joe Kelly along the way. That journey completed with an assit from none other than Clarky Clarkington III, he suffered the perils of Nazi Babysitting, the unending and unwanted presense of That Devil Guy, and after eighteen years and 428 pages, finally got a little action.

But wait! There was more!

Following the "success" of the Little Black Duck's debut in The Unhappy Duckling (presently unaccounted for), I penned a spin-off story focusing on a day in the Arkham-incarceration of The Joker entitled For All the Laughter That Lies Ahead, and a three-part tale of the Little Black Duck's summer woes called The Duck Days of Summer, in which nothing of consequence happens except the Duck brings his kryptonian retriever Krypto back to Wonderland for his sophomore year. This set-up was enough to keep me going through Time Quack, an even longer-winded epic in which the Little Black Duck uses a time machine invented by Wonderland Physics professor Albert Einstein (who I always saw played by Bill Murray when I was writing him) to go back to the year 1892 to prevent the fiery destruction of the University's Academic Hall, an act which not only gave the columns something to hold up again, but created a present day utopian society where not only was there world peace, but The Beatles were still together and the Little Black Duck got action all the time! So, upon learning that his mucking with the time-stream would destroy the very fabric of the universe unless he went back and burnt Academic Hall down (I tried re-reading this to remember what logic -- if any -- was behind this, but lost interest fairly quickly), it was with some reluctance that the Duck did so.

Time Quack was supposed to be followed with Scenes from the Next, which I've gone on and on about at great length in the past, and will go on and on about one last time. The concept behind Scenes from the Next was rather simple: show a series of brief scenes revolving around Penny Lane and the Little Black Duck that would not only illustrate the evolution of their friendship, but also give the reader a glimpse of future Little Black Duck Tales. Originally, Scenes would have been a 100-page book at the most, but one that told pieces of the Little Black Duck's entire life story, serving as the series-bible and directing me where I wanted to go in subsequent stories while also giving me the freedom to throw in whatever might come to my head in what I figured would be the years to come. Where it all went so tragically wrong, however, was in my inability to just tell a small piece of any subsequent stories, a situation so fucked-up that -- while I have yet to finish Scenes, and will never do so -- I wrote Along Came A Spider in its entirety, thinking I was writing Scenes from the Next the whole time.

Along Came A Spider is basically The Little Black Duck version of the first Spider-Man movie, because like Sam Raimi's cinematic opus, Along Came A Spider isn't great by any stretch of the imagination, but holds a very special place in my heart for no other reason than the fact that I really fucking love Spider-Man with an intensity I will unfortunately never be able to give to an actual human being. Seriously. The future Mrs. Clark, great though she is certain to be if you listen to any number of my female friends, will never fuel my fire like Peter Parker. It's disturbing and sad, but true. While I've found the execution of the story somewhat lacking in my frequent, ego-fueled re-readings of the book that nearly spawned Steve Urkel: Spider-Man, I really like what I was trying to accomplish: present the reader with the illusion that this is complete and utter wish fulfillment, as the Little Black Duck becomes my favorite hero, then at the last minute, pull the rug out from under them by revealing that he's actually the Green Goblin.



I was the villain of my own story.

With very little tweaking of another tangental chunk of what I've written of Scenes from the Next, Along Came A Spider could very easily be followed with In the Madhouse Now, which chronicles the Little Black Duck's treatment at Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane and Rehab Clinic for the Rich and Famous. I had a lot of fun writing this. The premise was that Say Anything and Almost Famous director Cameron Crowe had been named director of the mental institution on the basis of Vanilla Sky and an honorary doctorate from a community college in Middle Earth. He'd replaced the clinical staff with actors who'd played therapists and doctors in films, like Kurt Russell, Kelsey Grammer, and John C. McGinley, and the Little Black Duck got cycled through a bunch of group therapy sessions, my favorite of which was his Obsessions and Addictions Group, where he was surrounded by every Hollywood starlet I could think of, and every single one of them was addicted to sex. The most important element of In the Madhouse Now, however, was setting up John Cusack to become this Lex-Luthor-like criminal mastermind. The idea was that Cusack had been hired to play Doctor Doom in an upcoming Fantastic Four film, and while throwing himself into the mindset of the character as only a method actor would, went nuts and became evil, and ended up in Arkham after botching an attempt to rob an ATM machine. During a particularly fateful dinner time, the Little Black Duck gets the last chocolate pudding cup, leaving Cusack with tapioca, and the star of Runaway Jury vows revenge on the Little Black Duck, who remains in Arkham until the Black Panther comes and breaks him out.




I should probably explain that the Black Panther first appeared in a Scenes from the Next scene directly following Time Quack, in which Batman's about to interrogate Penny and her roommate Nancy Drew (a character who only came into existence as a result of the Duck's fudging of the space-time continuum, but I'm probably losing you enough as it is) when there's a flash of light, and this guy dressed up as a Black Panther appears, claims he's come to fight evil, then passes out.

Who the Black Panther is, where he came from, and how he got from passing out in front of Batman to breaking the Little Black Duck out of Arkham would have been the subject of a book entitled The Death of the Little Black Duck, a book that would have been so convoluted and hard-to-follow, it could only have been narrated by robot running a Macintosh operating system. Here's the plot in a nutshell:

When the Black Panther first showed up, Batman would have removed his mask to find the bearded face of the Little Black Duck, because the Panther is the Little Black Duck from a few years in the future. Figuring this time-traveller's appearance to be more cosmic fallout from the events of Time Quack, Batman would have taken the Panther to Professor Einstein in the Chronosphere (the dome on top of the Physics building, which -- according to my imagination -- is an infinite pocket in space-time where Einstein lives and works), where they would have determined that the Panther was indeed the Little Black Duck from a few years in the future, discovered that he was suffering both from some strange kind of genetic degenerative disorder and a lack of a soul, and decided to put the Panther in suspended animation until they could figure out a way to send him back to the future. So the Panther was in this stasis tube all throughout Along Came A Spider, eventually escaping at the end of In the Madhouse Now, and going to Arkham to break out the Little Black Duck.

(Following me? No? Believe it or not, I originally planned to have Tin tell Penny this whole story out of sequence as the frame story of The Death of the Little Black Duck. What a nightmare that would have been.)

After breaking The Little Black Duck out of Arkham, the Black Panther (who, remember, is the Little Black Duck) would have moved in with the Duck and Roommate Number 2, until Roommate Number 2 could no longer stand the horror of living with two Little Black Ducks (even though the Panther is a far calmer and focused individual who's apparantly matured beyond the frantic wordiness and insanity of his younger, present-day counterpart). Roommate Number 2's complaints would have been furthered by Erin Turtle's own sense of unease with the Black Panther, who would have revealed to Turtle that he knew her "secret", and in order to allay everyone's fears, the Panther would have moved out of McDavid into Hudson Hall with Tin.

The Duck's high school rival and amped-up psycho Karl Bloomsday -- who was turned into a baby during The Unhappy Duckling (squirrelled away in some undisclosed location) -- would have made his triumphant return to adulthood at this point, and the Panther would have used his considerable prowess to dispatch with Bloomsday quite swiftly, changing him into an infant once more -- vanquishing evil, and apparantly completing the mission he'd been sent back in time to complete. Having done so, the Panther would have announced his intentions to travel abroad, and departed for parts unknown. Shortly after the Panther's departure, however, Nancy Drew would have invited the Little Black Duck down to her room, where she would have revealed that she had been possessed by the arch-demon Mephisto. Nancy-Mephisto, determined to take the soul of everyone in Wonderland, would have been surprised to discover, however, that the Little Black Duck who'd entered her room was actually The Black Panther in disguise, and that the Panther's actual mission was to defeat Mephisto, which would have been accomplished when the Panther goaded Mephisto into relinquishing Nancy and permanently bonding with his soulless body, which Mephisto would have done, unaware of The Panther's degenerative disorder. Bound to the dying carcass of the Panther, Mephisto would have tried to escape the body -- a move blocked by some mysticisim the Panther picked up in the same mysterious place he got his whole panther costume -- triggering a seizure that would have killed both the Black Panther and Mephisto.




So, to clarify a needlessly complicated story, the Black Panther -- the Little Black Duck of the future -- would be dead, and as such, the Little Black Duck would have witnessed his own death. You dig?

After attending his own funeral, the Little Black Duck would have been fairly depressed, making it the perfect time for The Joker to break out of Arkham, come down to McDavid, and shoot him in the guts at the beginning of the next book, Death Ducks a Holiday (or something like that). Having been shot and left for dead, the Little Black Duck would have had an out of body experience in which he learns that the disembodied spirit of Cedric Diggory (who died at end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) had been following Erin Turtle around since he'd died because the two of them are soulmates, and the Duck would have had a long, strange conversation with the disembodied spirit of his dead future self. (I know, trippy, right?)

Waking up in a hospital days later, the Duck would have been devastated but determined, and after consulting Phish-loving guru Doc I-Funk, would have spent his spring break hauling Baby Bloomsday up a mountain in Tibet to challenge Death to a game of Parcheesi and restore Cedric Diggory to life by taking twenty years off the life of Baby Bloomsday -- a move that would restore Karl to adulthood. Krypto would have knocked Bloomsday off the mountain and flown Cedric and the Duck back to Wonderland, where Mr. Diggory would have had a lovely reunion with Miss Turtle, and the Duck would have decided to move to Never-Neverland for a while.

The Duck ends up staying in Never-Neverland for a thousand years, living with Peter Pan's Tigerlily and her tribe for a while, then stumbling upon the secret nation of the Panther Clan, where he would have teamed up with the Black Panther (Different guy... You know what? Don't ask) to prevent a war... Actually, none of that would have been too important. Let's just say, that eventually, Penny comes and gets the Little Black Duck to come back home.




Upon returning to the warm bosom of the University of Wonderland, the Little Black Duck is shocked to discover that due to his long-standing absense, he's failing one of his classes, so in order to keep on the right academic track and graduate on time, he's got to take some summer courses. With McDavid closed for the season, however, the question becomes where will he live, and the answer comes in a fun little story entitled MTV PRESENTS: If You Knew Me Like I Know Myself.

The premise behind If You Knew Me... (a line from the Bloodhound Gang's unused themesong for Jackass) was that Dawson's Creek star Joshua Jackson (whom, in the Little Black Duck universe, Penny Lane started dating after the two of them did a one act play wrote called "Joshua and Achan's Wife" together) would offer the Little Black Duck a place to stay over the summer, as long as he's willing to be filmed the entire time and appear on a new MTV reality show about Jackson and fellow Dawson's Creek star James Van Der Beek living together with the Duck. If You Knew Me... was written and drawn as if it were an actual episode of the show, complete with commercials and an MTV News update that revealed that John Cusack was using his considerable wealth to brach out into the business world, and making a sizable donation to repair the University of Wonderland's Jesse Hall, which was damaged in a fight between Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus in the opening scene of Along Came A Spider. I had a lot of fun with If You Knew Me... because shortly after they start filming, the executive producers of the show realize that the footage they're getting is just terrible, because -- to their shock and surprise -- the lives of two young Hollywood studs and their odd hanger-on isn't nearly as interesting as they hoped. They decide to liven it up by supplying the Little Black Duck with an endless supply of alcohol, turning the series into the Little Black Duck's tragicomic deterioration into drinking and debauchery.

When Penny Lane's oldest and dearest friend Anna Strohem comes to town in the follow up book, Shadow Play, however, it's discovered that the Little Black Duck's not just suffering the threat of alcoholism. It's Anna who notices that the Little Black Duck's no longer casting a shadow (and yes, that is a big deal), which means he probably lost it somewhere during his thousand years in Never-Neverland. This prompts Anna to take the Duck back to Never-Neverland so he can enlist the help of a shadowman to get his shadow back and restore his soul. Along the way, however, Anna and the Duck run a-fowl (ha!) of Jesse, this guy Anna once went on a date with, who's inexplicably gained the ability to get women to do whatever he tells them to as a result of a Love Potion No. 9-inspired lab accident. After thwarting this schmuck's rather harebrained scheme that involved using the Little Black Duck as a virgin sacrifice to a volcano god (apparantly, I was huffing nail polish at the time), the Duck completes his journey alone to the Sacred Mound of the Panther People, where we meet The Priest of the Panther Clan -- my homage to former Black Panther writer Christopher Priest.

While preparing the ritual to restore the Duck's shadow to him, the Priest of the Panther Clan tells an ancient tribal myth of a young prince of the Panther People named D'uk who was cast out of the tribe after making a deal with the demon M'fitu to save the life of the king. The legend would have had it that this D'uk guy was then sold into slavery and sent to Narnia, where he was called the Big Black Duck by his slave masters... a name passed down for generations, revealing the origin of the Little Black Duck's name.

This strange bit of narrative out of the way, Shadow Play would have concluded with the shadow ritual, which would have cast the Little Black Duck's light essense out of his body so he could search the astral plane for his shadow (or some such metaphysical nonsense). Upon completing the ritual, and returning to Wonderland, the Duck -- now sporting a huge afro -- would have learned that he'd missed his chance to say goodbye to Erin Turtle, who's left to live at Hogwart's School for Wizardry to help out in the big final battle with Voldemort that I assume will be depicted in the seventh Harry Potter book, setting the stage for Saga of the Alien Afro.

...Afro would have kicked off a month or so into the Little Black Duck's junior year. Still in McDavid but now living with the cantankerous Spider Jerusalem, the Duck would have started playing street hoops, displaying an unnatural talent for the game of basketball that would win him a spot on the University of Wonderland's basketball team. Penny Lane would have been disturbed to note a difference in the Little Black Duck's demeanor -- as he becomes Wonderland's star athlete, he starts acting more and more like the stereotypical young black male, smoking copious amounts of weed and engaging in promiscuous sexual activities with "many fine white bitches" like Katie Holmes. And when Karl Bloomsday shows up again to exact his revenge on the Little Black Duck, Afro-Duck just busts a cap in his ass, reducing him to a baby once more, and displaying a marked improvement in his fighting skills.

The Duck's new fuck-a-nigga-up, bigger and blacker attitude would have been of extreme use in a little episode entitled "Out Whit: the Musical," in which, during a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", some snobby theatre kid so convinced of his own greatest that his self-worship gives him the power of a god uses his newfound power to make everybody sing and dance. The musical mayhem -- which would have included songs like "He's So Sexy He'll Save Us" (the chorus of which was "He's so sexy he'll save us, he's a nubian god/ He'll beat the bastard to death with his big black rod") -- would have concluded with the Little Black Duck rapping and then impaling The Flaming Mad Trickster God of Musical Theatre with a hot pink pic placed in his hair by his constant sex partner, Beyonce Knowles. Shortly following "Out Whit: The Musical," Batman would have returned from a Justice League mission in Never-Neverland (Gorilla Grodd leads an army of flying monkey's from Oz in a campaign of terror and flinging feces) with Spider-Man, and the two of them would have revealed (with the help of the Priest of the Panther Clan) that the Little Black Duck's afro was actually a mysterious alien parasite that'd fallen from the sky and plagued the Panther People for years, possessing their strongest warriors and driving them mad, before it was finally subdued and held captive until the Duck inadvertantly released it during the events of Shadow Play. The fight to free the Little Black Duck of the alien afro would have been quite an affair, crossing over with Steve Urkel: Spider-Man #11, but ultimately restoring the Little Black Duck to his relatively quiet former self.

Saga of the Alien Afro would have been followed by Ducks in a Row. I didn't have Ducks in a Row plotted out as much as some of my other stories, largely because it wasn't meant to be nearly as convoluted. Here's the basic gist though: The Little Black Duck gets kidnapped, and Penny Lane, Nancy Drew, and Anna Strohem form a Charlie's Angels-like team to find him, only to discover that he's been locked up in some secret lab (which I would have drawn like the smoke stacks near McDavid) by Mysterio and The Riddler who've been using him to make Little Black Duck clones. In the end, the facility would have been blown to hell, and all the clones inside killed, and we would have later learned that the whole project had been funded by the diabolical and evil star of Grosse Point Blank.

Fly Me to the Moon would have followed, starting off with a bang. With their junior year drawing to a close, the Little Black Duck would have told Penny that he was planning to live in McDavid Hall one last year, joining the staff and determined to leave his mark on the place, only for it to be inexplicably blown to hell in a horrendous explosion. Unphased by the blast, the Duck and Penny would have decided to live together senior year, and started apartment-hunting.

At the same time, on the moon, the Justice League of America would be gathering to answer an emergency distress call at their lunar headquarters, (all save Batman, who'd be busy fighting the Incredible Hulk in Wonderland). Once gathered, the assembled leaguers would learn that their base had been infiltrated by none other than the homocidal star of High Fidelity, who would have killed Superman with a hunk of kryptonite, and sent the rest of the JLA into the furthest reaches of space with their own teleporter.

Meanwhile, back on earth, while Batman continues his battle with the rampaging Hulk, Penny and the Little Black Duck would have stumbled upon what seems to be the housing deal of a lifetime: A stately manor sold to them for the flat rate of a whopping six dollars and sixty-six cents. Taking the deal in a heartbeat and thanking Jason Blood -- the odd, brooding realtor -- it would be the Tin who later tells them the big rumor: their new digs are a haunted former frat-house inwhich 13 Kappa Kappa Kappas met an untimely demise. Before they'd have the chance to exchange puzzled looks, however, Tin would vanish in a flash of light.

Using an old homing beacon that he'd had Doc Fust install in Tin's ass, the Little Black Duck would learn that Tin had somehow been transported to the moon, and with Batman still too busy with the Hulk to be bothered, the Duck would have built himself a space suit, tied himself to Krypto, and told the super-dog to fly him to the moon. Before takeoff, Penny would have shown up with her own space suit, demanding a chance to come too because she "never gets to have any fun".

Reaching the JLA Watchtower in record time, Penny and the Duck would stumbled upon Cusack just at the very moment he was about to put his sinister plan into action, and a long-winded narrative on Cusack's part would have revealed the whole backstory: Ten years earlier, Tinnovations Inc. had created an army of Tin Soldier Robots to serve in the Narnian military during the Narnian invasion of Agrabah. All of the killer androids had been destroyed in the war, except for Tin, who partnered up with a nine-year-old Little Black Duck (who'd been inexplicably drafted) and managed to survive because of it. Cusack, having recently purchased all of Tinnovations patents, would have decided to use the advanced technology of the Watchtower to construct an army of Tin Soldiers, but needing the original combat programming, had kidnapped Tin in order to download the necessary files, which had been squirreled away in Tin's positronic brain this entire time.

Penny and the Duck would have rescued Tin, but not before Cusack had gotten the programming he wanted, and unleashed his army. Surrounded by 10,000 Tin Soldiers with updated weaponry, it'd look like curtains for the Little Black Duck and company, but at that crucial last-minute, a batarang would have come flying in off panel, and everyone would have turned to see a motley crew led by Batman, who would have said "Avengers Assemble," right before I wrote "To Be Continued."



This would have brought us to The Coming of the Avengers, which I always thought would be the Little Black Duck's last big cosmic adventure. While Batman led his hand-picked heroes against Cusack and his Tin Soldiers, a series of flashbacks would have revealed the origin and identities of Batman's new team:

Finally subduing the Hulk, who'd have reverted to the pale and placid form of Dr. Bruce Banner, Batman checks the Batcomputer's Watchtower monitor feeds to discover that the JLA had been defeated. Vowing to avenge his fallen comrades, but realizing he'd need help to do so, Batman would have gone out to recruit a team to do just that. The team roster would have included Spider-Man (recruited in a crossover with Steve Urkel: Spider-Man #17) who'd be sporting a new black costume (which Batman would eventually reveal was actually the same alien parasite that had once been the Little Black Duck's afro); Professor Albert Einstein, who -- donning the temporal togs the Little Black Duck wore in Time Quack -- would have taken the name "The Mad Scientist"; Erin Turtle, who would have been plucked out of the celebration ceremony at Hogwart's following the defeat of Lord Voldemort and been the team's sorceress supreme as The Wicked Witch of Wonderland; Dildo the Punch-Drunk Monkey for no other reason than because I missed him; Clark Kent (the young Smallville version, first introduced to the Little Black Duck universe in Time Quack), joining team as Superboy; and in a surprise addition to the roster, Karl Bloomsday, restored to adulthood, and wearing an electro-shock collar to keep him in line. With the team assembled, Batman would have revealed a massive Bat-Spaceship (designed to look just like U.S.S. Enterprise with a little bat-motif going) hidden under Stephens Lake, and the Avengers would have flown out to the moon with the unconscious Dr. Banner squirrelled away in the brig.

The battle between the Avengers and the army of Tins was to be a grand and epic, action-packed thrill ride... Bloomsday would have saved the Little Black Duck's life... Clark Kent was going to really come into his own in this one. He would have started the fight a Superboy, but undoubtedly finished it as a Superman... We would have seen Erin Turtle channeling dark and supernatural forces in ways that would have made your ass pucker... Batman's ruthlessness would have frightened you when he hauled Banner our of the brig, slapped him around, and unleashed the Hulk... and in the end, Penny Lane would have saved the day, cold-cocking Cusack... and how!

The Coming of the Avengers would have ended with the team deciding to take the Bat-Spaceship (and their special brand of teamwork) into the farthest reaches of space on a desperate search-and-rescue mission to find the JLA. But, while Tin would be more than happy to come with them, The Little Black Duck and Penny would opt out and ask to be sent home, requiring Urkel and Einstein to do a patchwork job on the old JLA teleporter, cross their fingers, and throw the switch. Penny and Duck would have made the leap home whole and intact but with one little wrinkle:

They've switched bodies.

What would have followed in the tentatively titled The Body Swap Principle would have been a rather cheap, tongue-in-cheek affair in which I'd throw in as many man-in-a-woman's body and vice-versa jokes as bad taste and crude stick figure artwork would allow. You know... Penny would constantly have to tell the Little Black Duck to stop cupping his/her breasts... The Duck would have his/her first period... Penny would be astounded by the frequency and seeming abitrarity of the male erectile function... and so on and so on. I like to think, however, that Body Swap would have also tackled some deeper philosophical issues. I would have put forth the notion that seeing the world through another person's eyes meant seeing through an entirely different spectrum of color, and Penny trying to enjoy her last summer with Joshua (he's going to Israel to do a documentary) in a man's body would have become a treatise on love versus attraction.

All this, and we would have gotten our first good look at Penny and the Duck's new place while they waited for the Avengers to come back and put them back in their own bodies again. When the Avengers finally do come back, having saved the JLA from the Skrull homeworld, they do so with none other than X-Men main-staple Wolverine, who apparantly popped up during the big fracas and saved the day. Now, I know that I've gone on record as saying that I hate Wolverine, and I still maintain that to be true, but every comic book writer I admire has written him at some point -- except for Alan Moore as far as I know -- and I really would have taken a cue from Garth Ennis' interpretation of the character: drunken braggart whose sheer inanity makes him too funny to believe. And in keeping with the oldest of Little Black Duck Tale conventions, since he's a major comic book icon, Erin Turtle would have fallen in love with him. Speaking of Turtle, it'd be The Wicked Witch of Wonderland herself who -- using a long and involved spell in the living room of their haunted house meant to "restore bodies to their rightful form" -- would finally switch Penny and the Duck back, but with the new twist of the Little Black Duck actually becoming a four-foot tall talking little black duck.

The next Little Black Duck tale, The Haunted House of Blood, would have started off with the Little Black Duck still a duck, and hating every single minute of it. Erin's constantly trying to figure out what went wrong with the spell, ultimately discovering that casting spells in the house was the biggest mistake one could make when Hellblazer's John Constantine shows up and tells her the true story of Penny and the Duck's new home: It's been turned into a supernatural prison for Etrigan the Demon.

Haunted House... probably would have been a rather annoying read for anyone but Caleb Prewitt, as the idea was for it to be this huge horror story that would have brought comic book mystics like Constantine, Jason Blood, Doctor Strange, and maybe even Hellboy together with select Harry Potter characters like Ron Weasley, Cedric Diggory and Sirius Black, as well as given me an excuse to bring back Daisy Sparks -- the Little Black Duck's high school sweetheart and this generation's vampire slayer -- all before explaining how the Black Panther ended up travelling back in time for The Death of the Little Black Duck.

See, the plan was that the Little Black Duck -- tired of waiting for Turtle to fix him and slightly miffed that she's making goo-goo eyes at Constantine (who's not only a comics icon, but British to boot) -- would have decided to go back to Never-Neverland and once more enlist the aid of the Priest of the Panther Clan in restoring himself to human form. This act would require a tribal ritual so intense and deeply personal, the Little Black Duck would decide to remain with the Panther People afterward and train to become their new champion: The Black Panther. Meanwhile, back in Wonderland, Turtle and Constantine's attempts to cast out Etrigan would set off a magical chain of events that would get Penny trapped in the house, at the mercy of the demon, while outside, a cross-section of who's who in the mystic set is trying to break the immensely powerful barrier spell keeping them out, because Etrigan's planning to revive Mephisto. I'd really been looking forward to building this antagonistic dynamic between Constantine and Sirius -- the idea being that Constantine had tried to get into Hogwarts as a young student but had been rejected, so he resents the elitist attitude of all those "snobby Hogwarts gits," and this would have manifested itself in him constantly asking Black if he'd do things for Scooby snacks.

Ultimately, we'd learn that the only person who can cross the barrier is one of the owners of the house, so the Little Black Duck (now the Black Panther) receives word of what's happening and, forced to choose between remaining with the Panther People and saving his friend, returns to Wonderland without hesitation. Still garbed as the Black Panther, he storms into the house to find that Etrigan has successfully revived Mephisto. While the Panther and the Lord of Perdition do battle, the magicians finally find a way to break down the barrier and everyone goes charging in. Another epic battle ensues, at the climax of which, Doctor Strange opens up a portal in time to shunt Mephisto into The Void Before the Universe, and in order to save the world, the Black Panther (who again, remember, is the Little Black Duck) tackles the Great Adversary and they both go headlong into the portal. They continue to battle as they hurtle through The Very Stuff of the Cosmos toward the Oblivion Before All Things. Mephisto ends up defeated and reduced to nothing, but the Panther gets tossed through a rip in time, and suddenly pops up in a field in Wonderland a year earlier, where he finds himself masked-face-to-masked-face with Batman (as well as Penny and Nancy Drew), tells them that he's come to fight evil, and passes out.

Realizing that the The Black Panther is dead (because they would have already witnessed his death in The Death of the Little Black Duck) everyone would have been all sad and bummed out. Then, Daisy Sparks would have finally shown up, too late to help out in the big mystical brouhaha that'd gotten her to leave Oz in the first place and confused that everybody's so sad. When Penny tells her that the Little Black Duck has died, Daisy would stun everyone -- and closed The Haunted House of Blood -- by saying, "That's impossible. He's been living in Oz for the last six months."

In the untitled subsequent book that we'll claim would have been called Ducks in a Row II: Electric Boogaloo, Penny, Erin and Batman would have gone back with Daisy to Oz where they'd find a young man with a remarkable resemblence to the Little Black Duck living like a hermit and drinking heavily. In a series of flashbacks, it'd be revealed that this pseudo-Duck had survived the cloning facility explosion at the end of Ducks in a Row, decided to start wandering, and ending up in Oz, where he ran into Daisy and didn't have the heart to tell her that he was actually a clone of the Little Black Duck. Through probing examination of these events on Batman's part -- which would include interrogations of the incarcerated star of Better Off Dead as well as genetic testing on the part of whiz-kid scientist Steven Q. Urkel -- we would learn that this was in fact, the real Little Black Duck, and that the guy we'd been following around and reading about since Fly Me to the Moon had been a clone -- an idea I stole from Spider-Man comics in the mid-90's. This revelation would have hopefully tied everything up, explaining why The Black Panther had a degenerative disease (he was a clone and he was falling apart) and why he didn't have a soul (until he earned it through his sacrifice) as well as parallelling the old African myth of D'uk (who tricked the demon M'Fitu into claiming his shadow instead of his soul).

And so, the Little Black Duck would have returned to Wonderland for his senior year, living in the now unhaunted House of Blood with Penny. I hadn't plotted out senior year nearly as densely as the others. The biggest thing I had planned was that the Little Black Duck would finally watch Titanic for the first time. From a pure logistics standpoint, this would be a good time to throw in a story called Stranded in Stuckeyville, which would either be another Joker-centric story like For All the Laughter that Lies Ahead, or this bittersweet sci-fi riff in which, following a freak accident in the Chronosphere, the Little Black Duck and Erin Turtle are phased slightly out of existence -- meaning no one can see them and they can pass through matter... like Geordi and Ensign Ro in that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation -- and closing the book on their... whatever.

What I had planned for the rest of the Little Black Duck's life was meant mostly for Scenes from the Next. On graduation day, while Penny and the Duck are reflecting about the sheer insanity of the last four years, Penny -- who you'll remember is pretty freakin' clairvoyant -- would have made the cryptic comment, "If you think that was crazy, wait'll you meet our grandson." And so begins the end.

The Duck would borrow the Batmobile to drive Penny to the City of Angels so she could make a go of it as an actress. There'd be a brief stop in Vegas where -- using the principle "unlucky at ladies, lucky at cards" -- the Little Black Duck would have won $100,000 playing blackjack and he and Penny would then proceed to trash their hotel room like rockstars.

Dropping Penny off on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Little Black Duck would sit down to contemplate what he'd do with his own life, and five years later, having built an impressive career as a starlet, Penny would walk by to find him still sitting there, selling back issues of Amazing Spider-Man for booze money. Penny'd help him get his foot in the door as a screen writer. The Little Black Duck would meet his future wife at Penny and Joshua's wedding, get married himself soon after, and his wife would be killed by a Big Giant Bee shortly after giving birth to his first child, a daughter. The Duck would have become a celebate single father (like Affleck in Jersey Girl), and his daughter would develop a close friendship with Penny and Josh's son. The two of them would eventually fall in love and get married, naming their only son after his grandfather, and thus the Little Black Duck name lives on.

The story of his last years would have been captured in Swan Song. By the time the little Little Black Duck has kids, the big Little Black Duck would be living at the McDavid Retirement Community in Wonderland with most of the old supporting cast, including Penny, Tin, Dildo the Monkey, Doc Fust, That Devil Guy... you get the picture. I had this one bit worked out in which the Little Black Duck's great-grandson (also named Little Black Duck) learns that Brent Wayne -- one of the old fogeys at the retirement home -- used to be Batman, and the little little Little Black Duck would have blackmailed him into training him to be Batman for his generation in a nod to Batman Beyond.

Meanwhile, the old Little Black Duck's making glaucoma-ridden goo-goo eyes at the fiesty old broad who lives down the hall from him, Erin Turtle.

So these two geriatrics, who haven't seen each other in, like, 60 years fall back into their old will-they won't-they routine, which is either really really sad or really really funny if you ask me. In the end, the whole thing becomes this old fart's rendition of the first act of The Unhappy Duckling (I'm sure I'll get it back eventually), but instead of a massive thunderstorm on Valentine's Day, it's a light drizzle. Finally, Erin and the Duck decide to go out to a late, five o'clock dinner at Shoney's. The Little Black Duck pushes his walker down to her door to pick her up, but there's no answer at the door.

She's dead. It means I break a promise I made years ago, but she's dead, which is either really really sad or really really funny if you ask me. And really, is there any other way to lay the little black guy and his universe to rest?

As it stands, The Little Black Duck series remains the highpoint of my creative career, which is also either really really sad or really really fun. It's derivative hack work that's often poorly executed. It's a disturbing expression of every pathetic obsession I've had in the last four years tossed into a blender. It's stupid. It's hokey. It's stick-figures and word balloons on notebook paper.

But it's mine.

This is a story no one in the world but me would tell. It's a story I could probably keep on telling, but I really think it's time to stop now. There are more productive things to do with my time. Maybe not nearly as fun, but definitely more productive. It's time to put childish things away...

The Little Black Duck is Dead. Long Live The Little Black Duck.