Gun control in the 1940’s.

It feels like another Pleasant Valley Friday here at The Nest, so it must be time to dig deep into the mailbox for one of the last couple of ideas sent in by YOU, the readers of this fine blog, in the penultimate edition of Prompt the Squirrel’s second season.  Yes, it’s time to finally honor those contributors who no doubt thought we were ignoring them or inadvertently fed their suggestions to Buster.  As is our customer disservice policy at Evil Squirrel’s Nest, we will do all that is humanly possible to ensure that your wait has been a pleasant one…

At least you didn’t have to watch four and a half months worth of Accent Health programming…

Fittingly on this weekend when Ody celebrates another year of torture having to live with me, the prompt this week comes from one of the bloggers he helped bring my way after he was featured on Bacon’s blog back in March, and that’s the Tabbies from Trout Town!  Unfortunately, since they are based on Blogger, which apparently doesn’t like me and won’t let me leave a comment, I am completely incapable of interacting on their hilarious blog full of feline eloquence and wit… but I thank them very much for hanging in there with me, and I’m honored to take a whack at their prompt suggestion they sent to me….

ody, we would like to see your dad run with a cartoon or a post entitled payback’s a bitch. the paybackers…all the big cats, elephants, rhinos, bears and other creatures that the trophy hunters gun down. we would like to see the animals armed with any and all forms of weaponry on a safari, hunting the trophy hunters; rhinos armed with machine guns, the big cats armed with explosive devices, elephants with bow and arrow, bears with silencers….thanx for the consideration.

Critters with bows and arrows are so cute…

This prompt seems to be tailor made for me and my morbid sense of humor… but it also plays into two of my greatest weaknesses.  First, most of my menagerie, and the animals I’m so used to drawing, are the domesticated and feral beasts you can find right outside your door, not in the local jungle.  The only safari type of critter I think I have in my whole gang is Wiki the hyena… and to say he actually bears much of a resemblance to the wild catdogs of Africa is like believing that Joe Palma could actually pass for Shemp Howard.

They broke the mold when they made Shemp.

The other difficulty I would have with this is my lack of knowledge and expertise in the suddenly popular world of high powered weaponry.  I am probably stupid enough to not be able to tell the difference between a pistol and a rifle… and please don’t ask me to try to draw a gun (Insert timeless Bugs Bunny/Yosemite Sam gag here).  Firepower requires straight edges and perfectly rounded chambers, and hell, I can’t even make the six panel grid for my comic anything but crooked…

OK, maybe unconventional weapons can be a bit jagged in shape…

So as has become PTS Friday tradition, after wasting half the post giving lame excuses about how I’m gonna suck at this challenge…. I’m totally going to give it a shot anyway.  Not a comic, per se… they take way too long to create and can make my Thursday mornings a chore.  But we’ll come up with an array of stunning visuals like I did when I found all kinds of cool ways for my characters to die last week.

If you have an imagination, you can tell it’s a spear.

OK, the first thing we’re gonna need for our reverse safari is a human hunter.  Since I don’t draw people as a matter of lack of talent principle, I’m going to borrow someone from my blog’s past that nobody will shed a tear for is he gets murdered to death by a bunch of vengeful animals.  Ladies and gentlemen… the one and only Sparky!

Howdy-ho folks!

Are you ready to go out big game hunting, Sparky?

Yeppers! Let’s totally go out and kill some stuff!

Unfortunately for Sparky, he was denied admittance into the zoo since he couldn’t make it through the metal detectors.  So he was forced to actually go out into nature to fulfill man’s instinct to mount trophies on its wall.  As he was strolling through the park, being careful not to mistake any of the joggers for deer in yoga pants, Sparky was suddenly ambushed by a hail of gunfire coming from a nearby tree.  The hunter had just become the hunted…

That’ll be another notch in his ear…

Despite being hit in several vital organs, Sparky was able to retreat to safety… or so he thought right up until the moment he stepped in a steel trap that had been put out by a bunny with a Purple Heart…

How does it feel now, Davy Crockett? I said HOW DOES IT FEEL!?!?!?!?

Not one to give up his man card so easily, Sparky struggled on… holding in his leaking spleen and dragging along his leg that was being chewed off at the ankle by a cruel trap.  He staggered to the pond, only to come face to face with one pissed off goose…. who just happened to have a bazooka.

It’ll blow your clown head clean off.

“Wait!” Sparky protested.  “Where did this goose get a bazooka?  I can’t get that kind of firepower!  This isn’t….. this isn’t….”

“Fair?” the goose retorted.  “Is that the word you’re looking for, oh mighty hunter?  It’s not FAIR that I’m more heavily armed than you are?”

“YES!” Sparky proclaimed, completely missing out on the irony.  “Animals aren’t supposed to have weapons of mass destruction!  Only people are allowed to shoot things!  Have mercy upon me!”

“Does this look like the face of mercy?” the goose coldly uttered as it lifted the mini cannon onto its shoulder.  But the goose did not fire it.  He didn’t need too.  Neither of them saw the skunk in the grassy knoll.

Is there anything more adorable than an assassin skunkette sniper?

Until it was too late…

This bullet to the brain is courtesy of all of critterkind!

So, Sparky…. what do you think about the cruelly inhuman practice of hunting for sport now?

It was totes awesomesauce! I can’t wait to do it again next weekend!  Now to go get a transfusion…

Next weekend?  Why, I hear that’s the start of Possum Season!

Don’t you DARE even think of bringing me into this story!!!

I guess given that the last two Fridays have been full of blood and guts, it’s probably a good thing much of my following is MIA right now.  But I only give the critters what they want, and I thank the Food Service Girl and her kitties for helping me to get a little revenge on some stupid humans…. or at least pathetic Bible camp mascots.  I’ll be back next week with, and Ed McMahon would say, the last envelope…

May the unicorn of peace gore you in the belly.