Making of "Clever Hacks"

My oldest started playing Minecraft around the same age I got my NES (6ish) and I am constantly astounded by his abilities compared to mine.  I remember feeling VERY clever holding the Zapper up to the screen, it never once dawning on me that I was just cheating!  Roll on to my kid, a year younger, making this "Nerf Gun House" on a whim!

Getting the last panel on the comic right was tricky.  For nostalgia purposes, I wanted the screen AND zapper clearly visible, which technically isn't possible because they'd be at 90 degrees from one another.  I also wanted Kitty-Fran facing the camera (my rule #1: show faces wherever possible!) which meant I had to fudge the perspective a bit!

I really like the silhouette of my 1st attempt with her arm back, but the more I looked at it, the more off it seemed.  Having her body turned towards the camera exaggerated the already dodgy perspective of the gun and screen.  She'd have to be twisted more than 180 degrees to make it work!  I switched to her body orientated towards the screen, holding the zapper with 2 hands.  It doesn't look as dynamic, but it is more believable.  I found this 3D render of a zapper gun online as reference:

I would have liked to draw the zapper to be a little larger to emphasize how little she is, but the bigger it got, the bigger her hands had to be to hold it and at a certain point it didn't look right.  I originally colored the gun as the orange/grey version, which popped better, but I discovered that that one came out in '89, compared to the original grey from '86.  We actually have both in real life, mines the grey and hubby's the orange.  I changed the comic one to correctly date this as her at 6.

Nintendo can be a bit litigious, so I wanted a parody name for the gun.  J's the master at this and after thinking for a bit he came back with Nyantendo (nyan = cat in Japanese).  I found a Nintendo font online and made this:

I went really overboard with the screen.  The largest Duck Hunt picture I could find had a bunch of image corruption, so I cleaned it up and redrew sections by hand:

I wanted the ducks to be a little larger on the screen, but they started getting blurry, so I found the sprites and recreated them as pixel art with my more muted colors:

Similarly, with the dog in the bonus panel, I couldn't find a large sharp image of him, so I recreated the pixel art myself:

All of this was probably unnecessary, but sometimes you get a bug up your ass to do something and it's easier to just do it than think of another solution! :)