If you were a kid like me in 1991 and 1992, you spent your mornings watching Darkwing Duck, serenading your friends and family with the catchy theme song, and digging into your parents' closets for a fedora, purple jacket, and turquoise turtleneck. That blow drier in the bathroom? Yup — that was the gas gun that Darkwing was armed with. The obsession with "DW" was real.
Darkwing Duck was an animated series produced by Disney that ran for two years both on the Disney Channel and on Saturday mornings on ABC. We were treated to 91 episodes of the adventures of Drake Mallard (a deep cut homage to The Shadow's Kent Allard). By day, Drake lived an unassuming life with his adopted daughter, Gosalyn. But by night, he became the sometimes bumbling but always tenacious Darkwing Duck. Aided by his sidekick and pilot Launchpad McQuack, they protected their city, St. Canard, from crime and danger, all while Mallard would struggle to be a good father to his daughter. It was a goofy yet heartwarming show that resonated with me more than most other cartoons at the time.
Now Darkwing Duck is coming out of the darkness to strike fear into the hearts of criminals — and of course satisfy that nostalgia in all of us. But this time, DW's adventures will be told in comic book form. Published by Dynamite, produced by Disney, the creative team includes writer Daniel Kibblesmith (Lockjaw, Loki) and art teamTed Brandt and Ro Stein. The series also includes variant covers by original creator Tad Stones.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Kibblesmith to discuss the new comic book, his history with the caped defender, and what we can expect from "the terror that flaps in the night"!
Ryan Sprague: What was your experience with the Darkwing Duck property prior to working on the new series and how did the opportunity come about to co-write it?
Daniel Kibblesmith: I'm the exact right age to have watched the primetime premiere of Darkwing Duck and grown up loving it. I didn't see it again for years, of course, and I recall it was one of those shows that had a little bit of DVD lore, maybe not available for a while and I believe an episode was withheld and remains so to this very day. But the voices, the look, the tone and feel are all burned into my brain, so it felt like it never left.
Why do you think 2025 is the time to bring back Darkwing Duck?
One obvious answer is that it's all on Disney Plus now (aforementioned "lost" episode excepted), so I'm assuming people in addition to me are revisiting it, or discovering it for the first time, or sharing it with their own children, like I am. And a love of comic books is often handed down in the same way.
[Editor's note: The "lost" episode that Kibblesmith is referring to is episode 86, "Hot Spells," which only aired once, on Halloween 1992. It was pulled from syndication due to parental complaints after one of the characters, a child, makes a deal with a demon named "Beelzebub". It is not available on Disney+ as of this writing.]
What, in your opinion, makes a good Darkwing Duck story?
Without giving too much away ... A classic villain, and Darkwing has one of the best rogues' galleries in all of superhero-dom. An understanding that Darkwing is both hyper-competent and overconfident, and can be on top of the world one moment and comically electrocuted the next. The relationship between Darkwing, Launchpad, and Gosalyn, where their personalities clash, what keeps pulling them back together, and what do they all bring out of each other. And of course a good "I am the terror that flaps in the night" speech, which is getting tricky, because the series used up a lot of the good ones.
You'll be exploring Darkwing Duck's past in the series. What made you decide to go this route when beginning your series?
"Past" in air quotes is a better way of looking at it. Darkwing is writing his autobiography in our story and much of what he writes (as in the conflicting origin stories in the original show) should be taken with a grain of salt. As an author, I'm the same way. These are stories that could slot into Darkwing's past, in the manner of Untold Tales of Spider-Man, but did they actually happen? Who can say? (Who can say?)
Besides his past, can you tell us a little more about what to expect from the story arc?
Before starting to write our story, I read every Darkwing comic I could get my hands on, which, luckily, turned out to be most of them, and noticed that when converting Darkwing into a comic character, a lot of writers obviously used the structure of comic stories — multi-part serialization, concluding in a finished arc about the length of a trade paperback. So, since that had been done, we decided not to do that. Instead, each issue is an individual episodic story where Darkwing faces off with a classic villain (or villain team-up). If you miss issue three, you can pick up issue four and not miss a thing. However, there is a tiny bit of serialization set up in the first issue: how can Darkwing finish his autobiography if he hasn't decided who his ARCH-NEMESIS is? So each of these episodic villain battles is considered by Darkwing to be an arch-enemy audition. And, yes, a winner will emerge.
What was it like working with the original creator, Tad Stones?
Unreal. Tad is not only doing covers for the series (along with covers by our interior artists, Ted Brandt and Ro Stein, and many, many other variant covers to come), but Tad has also made himself available for insight about the characters and their relationships to each other, including things I'm paraphrasing in this very interview. As the godfather of this world and the reason we're all here, his involvement makes the whole thing feel enormously "real" and I think everyone is working insanely hard and having an incredible amount of fun living up to that responsibility and the fans' expectations.
What about the rest of the creative team?
I already mentioned Brandt and Stein, but I will talk about them endlessly. We first worked together on, of all things, a book of DC Comics-themed Christmas carols where they provided the cover illustration as well as a number of interior illustrations. I was already a big fan from their work on Crowded, which is very cartoony and expressive while being high-stakes action comedy. A perfect resume for Darkwing Duck. The pages and layouts I've seen so far are pitch-perfect, characters are recognizably on model, so to speak, but they bring this unmistakable touch that you can't unsee once you know its them. We have fully finished preview pages up already, so people can see that our colorist, Dearbhla Kelly, also has an incredible command of the look and tone
Everyone is becoming a master at oscillating between sunny family comedy and gothic pulp, which is kind of the show in a nutshell. Some of the amazing aforementioned variant covers are coming from Nicoletta Baldari, who has done some of my favorites so far (she should make a Darkwing Tarot deck), Ciro Cangialosi, and Mark Bagley, who you may know of from being Mark Bagley.
If you could team up the terror that flaps in the night with another property or character, who would it be and why?
I get asked this question a lot and I always forget what I said the previous time, so here's another new answer: Pikachu! When S.H.U.S.H. accidentally opens a portal to another dimension, St. Canard becomes flooded with Pokemon and Darkwing Duck must reluctantly track them down with the help of Pikachu, who, let's say can sense where other entities from his universe are hiding. They do not get along and Darkwing gets shocked a lot. A lot, a lot. Pikachu and Megavolt get in an electricity feedback loop duel. Launchpad bonds with Psyduck. This is a good idea. We're doing this now!
What can we expect that's new with the comic book series other than nostalgia and good ol' fashioned humor?
The stories will be brand new, but hopefully they all feel like you could've watched them after school in 1991. That's what we're going for.
When and where can we preorder and where can we find everything you're up to?
You can preorder immediately from Dynamite directly or (even better) calling a comic shop near you. Again, if they haven't sold out already. I would call now. As for other things, you can see what I'm up to or send me a message by visiting www.Kibblesmith.com.
Darkwing Duck #1 lands in comic shops on Wednesday, Feb. 19
