In the beginning, there was Mr. Wu
He was not Bai Yun’s first cub. In fact, he was her 6th. But he was the first panda at a US Zoo that I had watched being born on the panda cam. I had become enthralled with pandas a few years earlier, when the sudden recession here in the US in 2008 left my art sales in tatters and I was in serious need of something to cheer me up.
If there is anything less serious and more cheering than pandas, I don’t know what it is.
I just started drawing them, and as I got more engrossed in pandas and the panda cams, characters began to develop in my drawings. They became cartoons, and at first, the only named panda was Bob T Panda, and all the little pandas were unnamed members of the panda kindergarten.
When Xiao LiWu was born in 2012 at the San Diego Zoo to hero mother Bai Yun, his keepers nicknamed him Mr Wu and the entire panda cam watching world swooned from the unrelenting cuteness. You’ve probably seen the now famous video of one of his well baby panda vet check ups, where the keeper gives him a green ball, then tries to take it away but he pulls it back. I’m sure there was some veterinary assessment that was going on, but to the panda loving denizens of the internet, it was just too. darn. cute.
We were in love.
I started making stories staring Mr Wu, which often featured the Panda Kindergarten leading him into trouble, like an especially fluffy gang of lost boys. When I was growing up The Wizard of Oz was always rebroadcast around Halloween. I must have watched it enough times to internalize the story, and so, I thought that maybe I should do a parody of the Wizard of Oz. As it is one of my longer stories, I’ve broken it up into 3 parts, so I hope you’ll ‘toon in at least the next 3 Mondays in October to read the whole series!
Speaking Mehitabel’s part as the Wicked Witch of the West in the witch’s voice is optional!
Be sure to ‘toon in next Monday for the next installment of The Wizard of Wu! And if you want to see more of the Wu canon (heh) you can head over to The Panda Chronicles and check out the archives. You can also find my books of the collected cartoons on Amazon. The Wizard of Wu is in Book 4 of The Panda Chronicles: The Book of Wu
A quick and sincere thanks to all who have signed up for both the free subscription and the paid subscription. I am gratified and blown away more than a little.
See you next week!