THE SECRET OF THE HEXAPOD

When I made the Woody Woodpecker album, Journey to Ramashanka, I knew I would return using the black woodpeckers.
In a which way album, the Mumbo Jumbo Crisis, some black woodpecker extremists frown when a drawing of their guru is circulated. Pictures of Mumbo Jumbo cannot be shown. It somehow came natural for me as a Dane to write a fairy tale like that.

Before that, I had used Ramashanka in an album length story where black woodpeckers arrive at Pecktown. Gnuff has a lot of trouble with some swoqumaskel fruits coming from Ramashanka. Later the hexapod jungle clown also arrives making hullabaloo at a trade fair.

A mute creature disturbing society is not new with me. I used my extraterrestrial Blot in my first Woody Woodpecker album, and here Phineas Phrogg also has a major role as a villain. As always it has something to do with money and profits and twisting public opinion to suit personal gain.

Now that I write books, I have a running joke with swoqumaskel liquor being appreciated at distant places, the latest example being on a distant prison planet Taurus X in my Paragon fantasy book series.

This story with the Gnuffs was planned for the Fantagraphics comic book series Critters and therefore divided into chapters, but it never came to be, because that magazine folded before printing the story.

I usually end up with surplus material when a publishing of a series is cancelled. I have an extra Gnuff album unpublished as well as an album with my humorous Viking series and one more story in my which way album series, which is actually featuring the black woodpeckers in a fairy tale on developments of society, where one faction goes for technology and another faction opposes that sticking to religious dogmas. As you may have learned I easily get obsessed with motifs where a disastrous development may lurk under way...

In the end of this story it is the hexapod settling the scores. I am sure you remember the legendary Barks story with 'Flipism', the ideology claiming that all choices in the world can be settled by flipping a coin. The climax is Donald using the coin to find the fake professor who started the calamity in the first place. And somehow it works, even though Donald doesn't get the benefit from it.

I remember this borderline story very well. In my version it is a strange creature helping in solving the case. Intuitively he leads our protagonists to the culprit. How does he know? Well, this is one of the small wonders of the universe. There is more between Heaven and Earth, as old Bill Shakespeare once said…