Night School

Author notes

Special Delivery

Evil Emperor Nick

on Oct. 3, 2007

And this one's Mert. He's a little sleepy.
Admittedly, Mert's mother's outfit (or general lack thereof excepting the shirt) is my own little cop-out to character design trends that tend to fully clothe female characters whilst their male counterparts roam pantslessly in the same universe. Mert, as you can see, does not wear pants, as animal legs and tails do not lend well to the pants-wearing lifestyle (and as my character Menu subscribes to this belief also)and since he is a hairy creature, clothes seem a bit superfluous beyond decorative purposes. There is yet another student that will soon be introduced that is even less modest ^_^ Anyway, I thought it was an interesting thing to bring up, kind of that whole "Donald Duck never wearing pants but steps out of shower with towel around his waist" syndrome that we get in the anthropomorphizing of animal-like characters. For some reason animal women, covered from head to toe in fur, are generally more modest then their completely naked without clothes (hehe, duh!) counterparts. Unless you count those old cartoons were most females went completely topless…(and in more recent time, perhaps as a throwback to that era, Dot Warner from Animaniacs who wore only a skirt). That said, I'm sure if Mert or his mother had been given human-like legs, the effect altogether would have been slightly different and they would indeed be uncomfortably too close to nude for my (or some folk's) tastes. If you want an example of what I'm talking about, Disney Adventures ran a comic for a while (I dunno if they still do because I only get to read DA in the dentist's office, that and Highlights. Oh, Goofus, will you never learn to be like Gallant?)Anyway, a comic called "Little Gloomy" about some gothy girl and her creepy-friends, and there's a Cthulhu in it named Carl. While Carl isn't really drawn with naughty-bits or anything, but he always looks too naked to me and I wish the artist coulda given him some sort of accessory…Harveytoon's Casper the friendly ghost kinda struck me in this way too, but not as much. I think it's the lack of tails. If they had tails, they would seem less nude somehow.
Or perhaps I'm just a prude is all (guilty!)