“With three corporations — Viacom [CBS and Nickelodeon], Time Warner [Cartoon Network and Kids’ WB] and Disney [Disney Channel and ABC] — the major exhibitors of animation on TV, you’re right back in the same situation as the 1960’s when it was ABC, CBS and NBC. And there are no independent producers at Disney — everything there is done in-house.”

Mr./Ms. X goes on to predict that the creative, collaborative atmosphere enjoyed by Antonucci and Warburton to date may be changing. “Cartoon Network was more hands-off than anyone during those years they were making those shows; that’s changing. They’re going to become much more interfering.”

In 2002, Queer Duck made a bit of a splash (as befits a duck) on Showtime’s Website. The brief, Flash-animated Webtoons followed the adventures a fey fowl and his friends Oscar Wildcat, Openly Gator and Bi-Polar bear; creating them was an adventure in itself for their director and designer Xeth Feinberg.

Through his work independently on Bulbo, Xeth Feinberg found his way into the system. © Mishmash Media.

It all began back in the 1990s dotcom boom. Icebox.com saw Feinberg’s Fleischeresque Bulbo Web cartoons and invited him to animate for them. “I had a choice of early scripts and picked Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln by Mike Reiss [The Simpsons, The Critic]. It was the first series on Icebox — I did 13 of them before they could get their other stuff going.

“Mike came up with Queer Duck next, and we did five of them for Icebox before the dotcom crash. Showtime wanted to run the cartoons as a companion piece to their Queer as Folk series, but the property was tied up in Icebox’s bankruptcy. It took eight months of lawyers battling it out to clear things up.”

Feinberg went into high gear. While Reiss wrote the scripts and recorded the voices in L.A. Feinberg produced and directed each four-to-five minute episode in less than three weeks out of his one-man (and one assistant) New York City studio, MishMash Media. “There wasn’t a budget for a big staff, but the real reason I animated every frame myself was that the deadlines were so tight. They wanted the episodes to accompany their new season of Queer as Folk and it was easier for me to work like a maniac for a couple of months than invent a staff. I was sort of a miniature production company — I was hoping they wouldn’t realize how miniature I actually was.”

Feinberg was pleased by the response to the show, which included a New York Times article and an appearance on Time Out magazine’s Gay Pride week cover. Amidst buzz about a possible Queer Duck movie, Showtime asked Feinberg to produce another 10 episodes. Contract negotiations went on into the fall of 2002 while he storyboarded episodes. With a contract for the new episodes in hand, Feinberg was looking forward to getting back into production — until January 2003, when Showtime pulled the plug on the series. “No one ever told me directly, but I heard it was due to random budget cuts. A month later I was reading in the trades that Viacom was reporting record earnings.”

Although it took several months of effort to get Showtime to compensate him for his pre-contract work on the unproduced episodes, Feinberg says it was all worth it. “Just the exposure I got from Queer Duck led to other work, so I don’t feel I wasted my time or in the it was a bad thing.

“There was going to be more development time for those last ten episodes and I thought ‘okay, maybe I’ll have two assistants and take weekends off this time around.’ I guess that’s animation — feast or famine. I was happy to be feasting then, even though it was an insane lifestyle for four months or so. I’d be willing to do it again, too. The ideal for me is to be an independent doing creative stuff and being able to make a living at it. You’re always making deals with various devils to do that.”