Sancho & Panda

Today's Strip:

And so we formally introduce two of our Supporting Characters.  Obviously, I wanted a Donald Duck and a Goofy for this strip, but I couldn't actually have, y'know, Donald Duck and Goofy.  So, thematically, I thought about the whole idea of Quixote Coyote.  With the Quixote part, I had a name for these two characters.  Don Quixote had a sidekick named Sancho Panza, so all I had to do was split the name in half, and I had two names, Sancho and Panza.  I remembered there was a Hannah-Barbera Cartoon from the late 80s/early 90s called Don Coyote (possibly a minor influence on this strip as well), and the character Don Coyote had a sidekick called Sancho Panda.  I always liked that play on the name, so Panza becomes Panda.  When coming up with the species of these two, I went with the Coyote part of Quixote Coyote.  I thought about Wile E. Coyote, whose primary target/enemy, of course, was the Road Runner, while his secondary was Bugs Bunny (there were several cartoons where an uncharacteristically talking Wile E. attempts to outwit and devour Bugs, claims to be a Super Genius, and repeatedly fails in said endeavor.  Strangely enough, in another cartoon, Bugs simply plays the role of the Roadrunner, and as such Wile E. remains Mute throughout.  Bugs meanwhile gets to be his traditional wiseacre self, while scarfing down pills to give him superspeed... which, in retrospect, probably sends the wrong message).  So, Sancho is a Roadrunner, and Panda is a Bunny, who, strangely enough, has a Panda-esque Color Scheme.  Sancho is pretty easy and fun for me to draw.  He kinda reminds me of the Dodo from the old Porky Pig short, as well as a little of the Angry Crow I used to draw back in the original SDF days.  I'm still working on Panda.  The face and the black area around the eyes haven't quite clicked for me that.  I'll figure it out.  Anyway, the character template for these two obviously goes back to Goofy and Donald, in that you've got a tall, gangly, happy-go-lucky fool in Panda, and a short, unlucky, angry at the world fool in Sancho.  I'm looking forward to working with these guys.