I’m trying to find her dad too. For a comic strip that ran for eleven years, there’s not a lot to be found on the web about John Darling (and I don’t mean Wendy’s brother from Peter Pan).
There are entries on Wikipedia and Toonopedia. There’s an out-of-print collection on Amazon ($40 used!), and if you’ve got time, a YouTube clip where somebody pans across some JD strips collected in a scrapbook (!).
But there aren’t a lot of strips to link to online, probably because the comic ended its run before the internet got underway. JD certainly appears to have been better drawn that TB’s other projects (the art was mostly by Marvin cartoonist Tom Armstrong) in an appealing, chunky 80’s fashion. Most of what can be found on the web mentions that Batiuk was in a dispute with North America Syndicate, and decided to kill his character so that the strip could not be continued.
I mention all this because, if Darling was a real-life figure, a talk show host who was shot to death on live TV…would there not be a pretty fair amount of material to be had online and elsewhere, even 20 years later?
Son of Stuck Funky 