I'm not here today... I'm guest-posting for Craig over at Puntabulous!

After you've read my Puntabulous post, you can get a "behind the scenes look" at how it all happened in an extended entry... Years ago, I received an email from a reader (sorry, I forget who!) pointing me to a blog I had never heard of before called "Puntabulous." They said that the blogger there had drawn a cartoon that was funny as hell, and I should check it out. Needless to say, I was dubious. Most of the crap on the internet that people find hysterical is pretty boring to me. But I appreciated the thought and decided to take a look. What I found there was one of the funniest things I had ever seen...

Dying to know the mad genius who came up with something so brilliant, I found out is was a guy named Craig...

I don't consider myself much of a cartoonist because the DaveToon stuff I draw is just a desperate attempt to fill space on my blog... so finding somebody who actually has a talent for it garnered my instant respect. Not one to rest on his laurels, Craig's cartoon work just kept getting better and better. His sense of comedic timing (by using the patented "Puntabulous Dramatic Pause Technique"™©®) and epic storylines became legendary. By the time he came up with his fantastic "Guest Debates" last year, I had become a die-hard Puntabulous fan. Then something happened that changed everything. Back in March Craig held a contest to create a super-villain for the next installment of Super Viagra and Vagina Girl. I decided to take a stab at it. What I wanted to do was come up with a villain that was a giant penis, because I thought it would create an interesting battle dynamic. Since Super Viagra makes penises stronger, how would he defeat a villain that got more powerful when he was around? The problem is that Craig had already created Captain Flacid, which was a guy with a penis-shaped head, so I needed to find something a little more unique. After discarding a number of ideas including "Private Dick," "Cock Master," and "Major Erection," worlds collided. My friend Winter writes erotic vampire fiction, which I have always jokingly referred to as "Throbbing Vampire Cock Novels." She had mentioned this somewhere, and a light went off in my head. A giant penis that was a vampire! Think of all the jokes you could make where the character is a dick that sucks YOU! Thus "Throbbing Vampire Cock" was born...

The problem is that Craig needed the character to be drawn in MS Paint, which I don't have. I made a mental note to try and convert it in Photoshop, but never got around to it. I was so busy that there was never time to try and figure it out. So The Throbbing Vampire Cock got set aside, and life went on. But then something happened that changed everything. Again. Craig asked for people to write guest entries for him while he worked on his book. If ever there was a chance for my super-villain to be seen, this was going to be it. At the time I was trying to fall in love with blogging again, so I wrote to Craig and asked if I could be one of his guest-bloggers. He wrote back and said "yes," and the rest is history. Or not. Because I still had to come up with a Super Viagra and Vagina Girl cartoon. And it couldn't be just a typical DaveToon panel, it had to be an epic story that would stand up next to the genius that Craig had been doing. This was no easy task, because his Super Viagra strips set the bar so high. Ultimately I decided to worry about the story later, and focus on creating a DaveToon version of Super Viagra and Vagina Girl. I wanted to come up with something that had a DaveToon "look" but respected the source material. After going through through several variations, I eventually stripped them down to the very basics so they were the most recognizable when compared to the original...

And this is what I came up with...

With the character designs out of the way, I started working on the story. I wanted to have an epic battle where Throbbing Vampire Cock would keep getting stronger because he was being affected by Super Viagra as they fought. I didn't know exactly how it would work, but I did know there would be a lot of jokes about who is going to be sucking who. At the end of the story Super Viagra would realize it was impossible for him to defeat the villain, and turn back time like Superman did in the movies (which I thought would be funny because Craig had already made fun of that idea before). The story would end with Super Viagra sending Vagina Girl to battle Throbbing Vampire Cock alone. The fight would last ten seconds, because it turns out that Throbbing Vampire Cock was gay and the sight of Vagina Girl made him go limp and powerless. The end. While I thought the concept itself was kind of funny, I had several issues with it. First of all, I wanted Lil' Dave and Bad Monkey in the story, and didn't see how I could do it when all I had were fight scenes. Second of all, I got really worried that all the "sucking" jokes would end up being more pornographic than comical. Lastly, I was concerned that the ending could be seen as vaguely homophobic if I didn't do it right. I started drawing the panels, but ended up thinking I was making a big mistake and decided to abandon the storyline I came up with. So I started over, this time beginning with Lil' Dave and Bad Monkey showing up to guest-post for Craig, but getting captured by Throbbing Vampire Cock instead. Then Super Viagra and Vagina Girl would have to show up and save the day. I liked my original idea of Throbbing Vampire Cock going limp at the end when he was defeated, but had no idea how to accomplish it. I wanted to keep sexuality out of the story, but still thought the idea of a vagina defeating a penis was the way to go. After coming up with a half-dozen ideas and discarding them all, I decided the answer might be to give Vagina Girl a secret super-power that would allow her to burn away the vampire virus. Thus I created VagiVision, and tried to explain it within the story since Craig had never mentioned her having that ability before...

After that everything else just kind of fell into place. My goal was to create 50 panels in my strip... I made it to 60, which is just as much work as you can imagine (I have no idea how Craig does it!). I'm mostly happy with how things turned out, but still wish I was smart enough to make my original idea work. But who knows? I'm fairly certain that Throbbing Vampire Cock is very bitter about his defeat and is even now scheming his revenge. Maybe Craig will bring him back one day and show everybody how it should really be done!