I’ve blogged previously about the long and storied history of cute duck people in role-playing games, read that here. Modern gamers: get up-to-the-minute duck support from their original (and still kicking) publisher Chaosium, right here. Also for neophilliacs, the long, feathery reach of fantasy duck people is most evident in Dragonbane, the reimagining of a classic Swedish RuneQuest riff, new from publisher Fria Ligan… Check out the Duck rogue on the covers of some of the books.

Anyway, back to our own DIY ducks…

Monster dude gang. Including; dinosaur goat man, man goat man, zombie goat man, goat goat man and vulture goat man. (Goat man dem!) These are Broo, vile, rancid, corrupted goat zombie people. They’re really popular, for some reason.

If you see something, say something. This is the cover of the whole adventure book, ‘DuckPac: The Quackford Terror and Other Stories’. The guys in the hood is a trickster of the capricious god Eurmal; will he help you or hinder you? The duck in the coracle is someone you have to go looking for. The statue in the back is the river god Engizi, surrounded by devotional flowers for his holy day. Other things in there… You’ll have to play or run the adventure to find out. There’s a few more adventures in the book too.

Our duck people discovering why someone would want to chain up an old tree. And some other topics besides. The ducks some of the sample characters from the first book in the series, Red Quill the bandit and Ordek the shaman.

Monster-fightin’. Nobody told me to, but I once again made the duck people more of the sample characters from the first book; the kinky diver duck and the cute, little noble duck with the fancy gear but no self confidence, currently getting pretty wet.
I also had to turn my back on my dairy farming background and a scene of cattle endangerment. Shudder.

A woven reed boat full of curious duck guys approaches a mysterious ruined homestead, deep in the mysterious Upland Marsh.

Female duck warrior, clad in bronze armour (the Iron Age hasn’t happened yet in this mythic setting, it’s still the Bronze Age). She in a devotee of the axe-wielding earth goddess of vengeance, Babeester Gor and is armed with a couple of double-headed labrys axes.

Another Broo, a goat person, this time a hybrid with a tapir-person called a Morokanth. (Yes, RuneQuest and its world of Glorantha has all this kind of stuff going on.)

This horrible little thing is a hybrid maggot monster.

And here’s the sample duck person / people person relations image. These are some enterprising fisher-ducks talking to the humans of the Sun Dome county, uptight, straight-laced, patriarchal, sun-worshipping types.

I’ve got some other fun Jonstown Compendium / RuneQuest art to put up, which I will soon. I’m determined to not just have an annual Christmas card on this blog and then nothing else, even if nobody really reads it or sees it. Ah, to think once upon a time that this very gentle reading pursuit was the white-hot, hyper-speed future of media… Now I could just point my phone at my face and give you a poorly-thought-out hot take on TikTok – possibly while I was sat on the bog for maximum effect – but that’s not necessarily me, I have pictures to show and some silly words to go with them too. Onwards!

Happy Holidays! All the very best from my family and I to you and yours.
Congrats on surviving another year and not going mad.
Here’s hoping that next year, we all continue to push back against all of the things that’re trying to knock chunks of us off and we get even more momentum.

I can’t quite bring myself to poke fun at my country, the UK’s current government – the centre-left Labour party – when there’s already thousands of gammons, right-wingers, super-rich, press barons, corporate drones, trolls, Russians, bots and more all doing it already. So once again, Trump’s crept in here a wee bit. That’s a sadly easy occurrence, because he’s a cartoon villain already.

But… Smashing up a symbol of long-cherished democracy with a dancing digger?
Could this be the end of Highly Questionable Santa..?

If you’d like to see Highly Questionable Santa’s previous rampages against common decency, head here.

To all a good night,
– Lee & fam.

2025 Highlights from me;
– Worked for one of my favourite publishers in the whole wide world.
– Drew, made and sold my first thing that wasn’t necessarily a comic, artwork or print, entirely by myself: a deck of cards.
– We now own a couple of cats and they’re great.

P.S. Swear I’m actually going to put some groups of images together to put on here soon.

Wishing you and yours the happiest of happy holidays. Hope your year’s been good, give thanks you don’t live in a warzone and all the very best for the coming 2025.
But… Drawing fire (literally) from his detractors over his political plans… Could this be the end of Highly Questionable Santa?

(Thankfully we now have a centre-left political party in power in the UK, so no bashing my government in snide cartoons for the next four years, gang!)

If you’d like to see Highly Questionable Santa’s previous rampages against common decency, head here.

To all a good night,
– Lee & fam.

P.S. Oh, poor neglected blog! Oh, for the time when a weblog entry was the fastest, zippiest, most engaging thing on the web..! No longer, for we have all pivoted to video, phones and then increasingly snappier videos until they’re all the blink of an eye. Never mind.

Hey everybody, we hope you’ve had a good year, you have a good break and that 2024 has some good stuff in store for you. Happy Holidays.

In 2023, my country’s government – the UK Conservative Party – didn’t really do anything decent and just shouted about a load of xenophobic crap, like punching down on refugees arriving in small boats and a bunch of other stuff that kinda made them look like a bunch of fascists. Sadly. Please don’t be like them.

He’s deliberately being a dog-whistle for racists… Could this be a end of Highly Questionable Santa..?

See previous Highly Questionable Santas here.

To all a good night,

– Lee & Bex.

Here, a duck shaman is sending out her spirit to go and met her mentors’ spirits in the spirit world. Shaman business. Her look is actually based on a real duck breed. (I was thrilled endlessly that all of these fantasy ducks are based on real-world duck breeds.) The big one with the snout is a troll shaman. Also pictured: her pet bullfrog and the sculptures of it that she’s made, because she loves it so much.

So these aren’t furries or anything, they’re more realistic versions of whimsical, hissing cartoon ducks like Marvel’s Howard the Duck or Disney’s Donald Duck. They’re sword and sorcery duck people! More precisely, they’re part of the accepted and generally very well-loved fantasy setting called Glorantha. You will know about Glorantha in a roundabout way I suspect… The Elder Scrolls game Morrowind lovingly ripped off a bunch of it and it was the setting for the indie game legend King of Dragon Pass and its successors. The most popular way for people to experience Glorantha over the years though has probably been the table-top role-playing game RuneQuest.

Here, a healer initiate of the goddess of mercy Chalana Arroy, tending to some fellow ducks. (The seated guy in the middle with the shoulder bandage is supposed to look like a mandarin duck, I had to tone him down though, otherwise his bright colours would have stolen the show.) 

So Runequest has a very lovely new edition that came out a while ago. It has a unique appeal in that it’s an RPG that lets you play out mythology. Well, kinda. Being a mythology nerd (I have an in-progress Fionn Mac Cumhaill graphic novel as proof) I was powerless to resist. RuneQuest’s storied publisher Chaosium (they of the Call of Cthulhu RPG) run a community content programme for RuneQuest called the Jonstown Compendium (named after a big library in the setting of Glorantha) where people can publish their own adventures and sourcebooks as PDFs via DriveThruRPG and popular titles then become Print-on-Demand books.

A put-upon member of duck nobility here, she’s a big deal for the duck people, but sadly the humans nearby don’t take her seriously.  The crosses aren’t crucifixes, they’re the rune of death, which is supposed to look like a simplified sword. The runes that look like Ys are the truth rune. These are the runes of her god, Humakt, GOD OF DEATH. And sword fights. The duck people love the god of death. *Falls off chair*

You can buy the book with these guys in as either a PDF or a hardcopy, it’s called ‘Duckpac’ and is from Drew Baker, Neil Gibson and friends at Legion Games. (The title of the book is a bit of a pun on an old RuneQuest book about trolls, which was called ‘Trollpak‘.) This book is for you if you want to play as a fully-realised duck person, with duck-person things to think about, based on a history, genealogy and mythology of duck-people. Yes, really! It’s pretty incredible.

Runequest has a reputation online for being ‘the game with silly duck people in’, which is entirely justified, they’re like the cute mascots of the whole deal. The story goes that back in the late seventies, one of the gang of friends who help make the game world was a Carl Barks Donald Duck comic strip fan, resulting in a town called Duck Point existing on the map. There’s another story that someone involved was making lead miniatures of Carl Barks style Conan the Barbian gag ducks and he needed a game to attach them to so it didn’t look like a straight Disney rip-off. Stories real and apocryphal abound. There’s never been an official book about ducks (or the ‘durulz’ as they call themselves) for the RuneQuest game so this one’s here for you and has background, characters, locations, adventures and more.

A scarred duck boatman (boatduck?) and diver, initiate of a river god, on his barge, wondering what the heck you’re doing paddling about in his river.

The bit of decorated driftwood in the background above is his effigy of his god. I made him look like a Bronze Age version of a swimming athlete, like Duncan Goodhew with rustic trunks and a swimming hat. I was passed a reference photo of an upright duck (who looked amazing), so this was an upright composition, in a tall portrait frame.

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Here’s a little vid of me flipping through the lovely hardback print version of the book. This is the first print volume and then there’ll be another volume of solo and group adventures.

That old love of the UK comics scene Mr. John Freeman even saw this madness and featured it on his Down The Tubes site here, Which Was Nice.

Oh and as if you above verbiage wasn’t enough proof, you can check my RuneQuest nerd chops by looking at my very own RuneQuest campaign log page and wiki here, if you fancy. It’s got more drawings on there!

Happy Holidays! Hope your 2022’s been treating you well.

Happy slapping an insane, shirtless Russian despot and solidarity with the people of Ukraine. But, raising the ire of the mad Russian bear… Could this be the end of Highly Questionable Santa..?

Season’s Greetings and all the best for 2023 from Lee, Becky & Seb. 

To see previous dodgy Christmas card art, head here:
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/leeoconnor/highly-questionable-santa-christmas-cards/ 

(Also, ah man, sorry for being so bad at keeping this thing updated… I have stuff to show, just not got around to putting it up and talking about it yet.)

The Trinity Continuum games takes place in alternate pulp adventure fiction history. There’s the pulp modern age, pulp sci-fi, pulp superhero and now we have a forthcoming steampunk, weird science and superpowers Victorian pulp era game with ‘Aether’.

ZORP! Martians from ‘War of the Worlds’ attack Victorian London! Big Ben gets heat-rayed and the River Thames is clogged up with The Martian Red Weed!
Because why just have weird science superheroes when you can have weird science fiction aliens too..? (A friendly reminder here that sci-fi is actually a Victorian period thing, from about 1850, futurist types.)
I might have been listening to Jeff Wayne’s ‘War of the Worlds’ musical while I was painting this. UULAAA!

Don’t drink that mate, it’ll make you ill.
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde hi-jinx in the SCIENCE POTION quaffing, FOR (weird) SCIENCE!
There are historical figures in this as well as the literary ones like this Doctor Jekyll-alike.
Watch out for the homebrew, kids.

Victorian urchins cutting some squares’ purses. Some ‘Oliver Twist’ style lovable scamps pickin’ a pocket or two so they can get some more gruel.
All of these were painted in Photoshop, guvnah.

Firmly back into the weird science with curious super-powers bestowed by the brand-new, alternate world science. This gentleman is clearly a Benimaru from King of Fighters fan, standing in his blown-out lap, presumably after repeatedly shouting, “More power! More power!”
Hope your next leccy bill isn’t too steep.

Here, a fearless explorer thinks maybe she shouldn’t have gone so close to a volcano.

This is ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’, who was a genuine historical phenomenon where people (or possibly sensationalist newspapers) claimed to have seen someone (sometimes with fiery breath) who could jump as high as a building. Finding some period etchings to reference was fun, believe it or not there was no consensus on what the guy actually looked like.
I’ve got him dressed in something a bit like some period accounts, jumping over a chimney pot like Victorian Spider-Man, while the police get left behind at street level.

Say Onyx Path of the book;

“Trinity Continuum: Aether is a game of steampunk adventure, exploration, and mystery set in 1895 in the Trinity Continuum. In the decade prior, Nikola Tesla identified and learned to harness Aether, an energy source capable of spinning new realities or unwinding the effect to restore reality. Now, Aether users dot the globe, silently spinning and unwinding with ease while Victorian era society goes about unaware of the dangerous experiments taking place in underground laboratories, dark alleys, and foreign worlds.”

It’s out physically in… March 2024! It’ll soon come round!

Here, ‘Highly Questionable Santa’ is breaking COVID regs and having a Christmas party, just like it’s been revealed that the UK’s Conservative ruling party did too, back in December 2020… Which they’re still denying, despite all kinds of testimonies to the contrary. They even fired someone who had nothing to do with it, which kinda backfired and then made them look even more silly.
Don’t end up looking silly, kids.

Meanwhile, could this be the end for Highly Questionable Santa..?
All the very best for 2022, which can only get better.
– Love from Lee, Bex and Seb.

(To see all of Highly Questionable Santa’s previous shindigs against common decency; they’re all on the blog, click here!)

The English Riviera one was just so well received, we had to go and do it again.
Buy the forthcoming ‘Small World’ album from Drift Record Shop – click here – and you’ll get a special tea towel and a comic, both with art from me, for free!
(You can get the comic bundled with the album from any indie record shop in the UK, but the tea towel is a Drift exclusive!)
Again, this was just a massive laugh from start to finish.

Here’s a lil’ preview of the art for the tea towel.
We went for the full chintz on this one. Truth be told, it’s based a lil’ bit on a genuine vintage tea towel, banging on about how The Isle of Wight has eight wonders, more than the rest of the entire world put together. Eeesh.

The choices of places are from all over the world are are Joe Metronomy’s top location picks, spread out all over the globe. They are;

• Garden Bowl bowling alley, Detroit, USA
• Zona Arqueológica de Cholula ancient pyramid complex, Puebla, Mexico
• Nice ‘n’ Sleazy indie night club, Glasgow, Scotland
• Broadmarsh Banks skate park, Nottingham, UK
• The Montmartrobus route, Monmartre, Paris, France
• The Thai Oase karaoke bar, Lindau, Hamburg, Germany
• Coin Laundromat, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan
• Bunbury Beach, Bunbury, Western Australia

It’s really nice that Nottingham and Glasgow got a look-in too.

(Thanks to Because Music!)

Here’s Joe Metronomy modelling a mock-up of the tea towel with customary high style in a charity shop. That guy!

Buddy the Cat is; Fritz the Cat, Fat Freddy’s Cat, Itchy from Itchy & Scratchy, Felix the Cat, Garfield, Heathcliff, Custard from Rhubarb & Custard and some kind of hero for our times, all rolled into one.

Follow this link to buy..!

We got T-shirts!

Clothe yourself in a surly cartoon cat trying to keep his hooch (and records) out of the sun. Lovely off-white, pink colour. Really makes the art pop and the whole thing look tasteful.

We got Tote bags!

The tote bags are made of great, thick material and have side and bottom panels on them,  you could fit eight heavy bottles of hooch in one, no problem… Or whatever you choose to lug about on street corners, while you’re going from pillar to post.
Buddy’s pose on the bag is an obvious reference to the ‘Keep on Trucking’ underground comix motif from Robert Crumb et al.

We got tea towels!

Admit it, everyone hates washing up… I’m really pleased with how these turned out, the slightly distressed art and off-white cotton look great together.
I think everybody’s with us on sentiment too.

So just to sum up, you can use things with my art on to pose in, keep you warm, hide your nakedness, carry things, dry things up, rub things down and more…

Buddy is the new mascot of The Drift Record Shop. He’s based on a real shop cat. Well, he’s there sometimes, but he mostly lives with his Drift owners. Won’t you let him into your life, too?