Space Beaver: Man or myth? This black & white 11 issue "mini-series" debuted in the summer of 1986, when Darick was finishing high school. Beave started off as strange doodles in Darick's  notebooks (issue 8 reprints a few of these), which didn't help his studying much. A security guard at his after-school job as a bill collector for a bank (who also drew for a comic called Shuriken for a small comics publisher, Victory) noticed some of Darick's drawings and hooked him up with a back-up stint for Beave in a book called "Komodo and the Defiants," which is a horrid little thing (I'll include some panels from that later...) trying to capture on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze. Remember them?

Excited about the idea of being published but unpaid, Darick showed some of the work to a comic book store owner, Tibor Sardy of Peninsula Comics, who thought that Space Beaver should have its own series. So he started up Ten Buck Comics and put out a 36-pages of Darick's Space Beaver. The book was well-received...
"We sold 18,000 copies, and it hit big in Canada, where the natl. animal is the Beaver, and life was good. By #11, we could barely sell 2,000 and the B&W comic market was deader than Vanilla Ice's career."
Vanilla Ice had a career? Michael Grabois (orbit@ix.netcom.com) found this review by Don Thompson in CBG (Comic Buyer's guide) 701 (4/24/87)...

TEN-BUCK COMICS
As far as I know, the sole title from this publisher is "Space Beaver". The
covers are fairly attractive, but the interior art is unappealing (covers
and interiors are by the same person -- I assume he takes more time on the
covers) and the story is hackneyed space opera with beavers, turtles, pigs,
and such. Hackneyed space opera with animals is no better than hackneyed
space opera with people. Grade: D-minus.

D'oh! This appeared shortly before or after #4 was published and didn't help sales. However, according to Darick, there was some outside interest in making a Space Beaver cartoon and toy line in 1989, which is around the time Space Beaver was ending its run.

Man, Canada's national animal is the beaver. That's awesome...

...ANYWAY, Darick soon found employment outside of Beave and began working for Innovation, pencilling the Child's Play 2 adaptation and an issue of Maze Agency before finding his way over to DC & Marvel, where he would work on Justice League specials and a 25-issue run of New Warriors, while also doing a few Spider-Man specials here and there. A little over 10 years the Beave debuted, Darick had his own book, Transmetropolitan.

In 2000, Planet Lar publisher Larry Young, author of the Astronauts In Trouble, agreed to reprint the entire Space Beaver series in two separate volumes. Volume 2 not only reprinted issues 7-11 but also included the 12th and "final" (we have quotes around the word "final" as you never know, though we're not holding our breath or anything...) chapter of the Space Beaver cliffhanging saga. Things happen. It's awesome. Now Darick can put that cliffhanger out of his mind and get back to drawing Spider-Man specials. Hooray!