Actually they don’t have spots, they have stripes. They appear in the latest installment of Astronaut Elementary and I thought I’d catch up with fellow Lunchbox Funnies creator Dave Roman and get the scoop on them.

Hey Dave, what’s with the new characters? Are they some sort of raccoon species, and what’s with the one that looks human with raccoon headgear?

They are mostly Tanuki, which is a form of Japanese dog that look very much like American raccoons. There are few raccoons though and also human kids who wear fake raccoon hats (kind of like in Super Mario Bros. 3) to better fit in.

Members of the raccoon family are known for being clever and mischievous, is this the case with them? Can I expect to see these crazy kids digging through my trash at night?

Like all raccoons they get a bad rap because of the dark eyes and “masked bandit” look, but the kids at P.S. Gamma Q are mostly good kids. Most of the students at Astronaut Elementary get caught up in the infectious nature of inter-school rivalry. Except the newest student, Hakata Soy, who is unfamiliar with the school’s history, so he thinks his fellow students are overreacting and paranoid. The name of the P.S Gamma Q fireball team is “The Midnight Snacks” which is a nod to their reputation for nocturnal dumpster diving.

G for Gamma eh? What’s does the whole PSGQ abbreviation of their school stand for?

Public School Gamma Quadrant. I only realized last week that the Gamma
Quadrant is a Star Trek reference and not a real astrological term!

And such fancypants little school uniforms, were they inspired by anything specific?

Since I’ve already established that the kids at Astronaut Elementary wear different clothes in their daily activities, I thought it would be a good contrast if the rival school wore uniforms. It’s sort of a bit backwards in the future, since P.S. Gamma Q is a public school and Astronaut Elementary is a private school. I specifically styled the uniforms that P.S. Gamma Q wears off a manga/anime series called Negima.

So they are a rival school that was defeated by Astronaut Elementary at the last Fireball Championship, what is fireball? Are the “spears” they are holding used for fireball or are they hunting wild boar?

Fireball is a popular team sport in the future world of AE. It’s played during Spring Semester of school and involves two teams defending a small fort on each side of a grassy field. Usually there are 4 players on each team and they wear mecca-suits for protection/mobility and toss the fireball, using spear-like fire pokers. They try to throw the fireball at the apposing teams fort to burn away at it, revealing the winner’s trophy inside!

Wow, I hope they keep firefighters and a burn-care unit on call.

Click here to see some concept sketches of the PSGQ characters.

Alright everybody, be sure to head over to Astronaut Elementary for the appearance of the new Tanuki kids and follow along in the next installments to see what Dave has in store with them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under Astronaut Elementary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.