Benny Beaker, Gym the jock - no, it's not a spelling mistake - and Jeffrey the egg head, sounds like a trio of misfits but these chicken brothers are birds of a feather, according to their creator Kyle Gerber.
The 20-year-old Prince George resident made up his own Kockadoodle comic, which debuted June 7 in the Prince George Citizen.
Andy Capp fans might be sad to see the iconic alcoholic moocher and his long-suffering wife, Flo, finally leave the pub, but Capp's creator Reg Smythe died in 1998, so it was time to let a local modern comic creator have his spot on The Citizen's Saturday colour comics page.
Gerber was surprised to hear that he replaced Andy Capp.
"He's been around for about 60 years but then again it's a newer generation so we might as well get the new stuff out there," said Gerber, who works as a general labourer to pay the bills.
"It's kinda cool."
Gerber started thinking about the characters when he lived in Horsefly in 2010 because, well, it was Horsefly and there's not that much else to do there, he said of the isolated community near 150 Mile House about 50 km off Highway 97.
"So I was watching a lot of Family Guy and SpongeBob and I started thinking about what it would be like to have something you created for everyone to watch and see and be entertained by," said Gerber, who originally drew the chicken characters in high school and revisited them in Horsefly.
It took time to tweak the beaks, so to speak.
"When I first started to draw them, they were terrible looking," said Gerber. "They were horrid, horrid, horrid. I spent a year just playing around with it."
Questions came up like should they wear clothes and what other characteristics should they have to distinguish them from one another. Each chicken is a different colour and size makes a difference, too.
"The characteristics came from family members," said Gerber.
Benny Beaker started out as Bert but then Gerber wanted to honour his father, Ben, and renamed the little chicken.
Gym's the mellow, laid back, big, dumb character, Gerber added, and Jeffrey is the smart one and has a lot of common sense.
"He's always looking out for his brothers and he feels like the parent in all this and sometimes comes off looking like a jerk for it," explained Gerber, who drew the characters then put them in the Paint program on his computer with blank eyes and neutral beaks and then smooths ruffled feathers in Photoshop for each installment of the comic.
Gerber makes sure his humour is clean and can be enjoyed equally by young and old, he said. It's important to him not to go to the smarmy side of humour.
"I want to appeal to all audiences," said Gerber. "And there is a real trick to it."
He gets his ideas by thinking of ways to make fun of things and has a list he refers to when it's time to create the comic.
Through this creative process Gerber is aiming big. He wants the comic to morph into a TV series.
"In fact I pitched it to a lot of companies and was rejected by all of them and to be honest I had actually given up on it," said Gerber.
"Then one day I stopped in at the paper and talked to Neil [Godbout, managing editor of The Citizen] and I sent him four [comics] and he thought they were good and he took them and that's kind of a bounce back for me and gives me hope - at least people are seeing them and it's nice to see it go ahead for once. This is a stepping stone and I hope it gets really popular."
Syndication is always the dream for a cartoonist and Gerber is no different.
Be on the lookout for some cool merchandise, coffee mugs come to Gerber's mind. Building a web page and promoting it that way could be in the near future as well.
