Erma Felna EDF page 4

And here is our introduction to Erma. In the earliest doodles of "Astro Duck" a very cartoony satrical strip (with inspiration from the old "Duck Dodgers in the 24th-and a half Century" crossed with the irreverence of the underground comix of the time) she was merely the officious foil to the goofy Astro Duck. But as I worked on ideas for something other than cheap shot comedy, I evolved an action setting, inspired by some work I had done related to the US Air Force special forces rescue attempts at the Son Tay POW camp in North Vietnam, the Mayaguez Incident on the Cambodian Coast, and the Iran Embassy rescue attempt. So the story quickly became one of hard science-fiction with a strong military and political element. And to work against type, made the focused character of all this a female in a time and place where gender equality was still more in theory than practice.