Projects The SteamDuck Chronicles
Archimedes' Fish
A talking duck in the 1880s comes across a talking fish. It goes badly for nearly everyone.
The first SteamDuck story, written in an afternoon as an antidote to three years of careful, G-rated television work. Archimedes is a duck living in the 1880s. The fish he comes across talks. It is absurd — the fish does social networking — and it is fairly bloody. The fish dies, as do others.
I drew the pictures myself in Illustrator, wrapped the whole thing in a PDF, and sent it to Craig, the line producer on RollBots, for feedback. Ten minutes later he replied: "Please stop writing to me." That was when I knew I was onto something.
Within a few days of going up on the site it had amassed over 5,000 downloads, fifty emails of praise, and close to two hundred angry letters bordering on death threats, from all over the world. Writing in 2009, I called it one of my most popular books, if you count hate mail and fan mail as one — and it spawned a series aimed squarely at alienating every potential reader with vicious murder and idiocy.
"That was the most offensive thing I have ever read." — a reader, by email
It is a picture book. It is not a book for children.
This page was reassembled from the archive — the book predates the last two versions of this site, and its original page is gone. The description is stitched together from what I wrote about it at the time, so it may be missing things.