Acrylic, 30" x 24", July, 2003.
This image was inspired by a frame of a Carl Barks comic book. Naturally I had to put in a UFO and, if you look closely, a tiny snowflake-like alien in the middle. I thought it would be cute to give him a Vietnamese-sounding name; while teaching computer science at San Jose State for twenty years, I became friendly with hundreds or even thousands of my Vietnamese students. I ended up putting Da Nha Duc into my novel Frek and the Elixir. Here are some passages where he appears:
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“Some Saturdays Frek would fight with Geneva and Ida to try and keep them from watching the Goob Dolls, who always debuted their latest skits and situations at the same time as that funny Vietnamese toon about Da Nha Duc and his nephews Huy, Lui, and Duy...
“Her shirt was a live wall skin playing, just now, a loop of a smug Da Nha Duc, throwing back his shoulders and curving his beak in triumph.
“‘What these free-loading pests doing on my farm?’ fumed Da Nha Duc, immersed up to his orange knees in the green water of his rice paddy. His hoarse voice was so close to a duck’s quack that he was quite hard to understand.”