SHRUNKEN-HEAD JOE

It was more than 10 years ago now I did a comic strip in a local monthly entertainment magazine called News-4U. It ran a little bit more than 2 years. Here are the 1st 4 strips. In the beginning I did it by myself but soon after I found myself stressed out by the grueling 1-strip-a-month pace, and called upon my friend Bob Canada to help me. When Bob started helping the strips looked better but I don't have any of those scanned yet.
CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE

I only have these 4 scans right now. They aren't as clear as they could be because I scanned the printed magazine pages. Someday I'd like to dig out the originals and scan them nice and clear.
The strip was fairly gory when it needed to be STRICTLY FOR THE PURPOSE OF MOVING THE STORY ALONG and not at all just for the fun of it. No way! Uh uh!
I came up with a secret code system using letters and numbers back when I was in high school. Who would have known it would come in handy later in life.

We got $30 for 1 strip and divided that so we made $15 each. We did it more for the fun than the money. After Bob started helping me he would pencil and I would ink. Eventually Bob wrote the story too so all I did was ink and give joke input every once in a while. That sounds easy enough, right? Well it wasn't. Bob was really good at drawing extremely microscopically indescribably tiny, and I wasn't. He loaded the page up with details apparently drawn with Hobbit pencils. I remember he'd have an entire character's face within the area of what my brushpen tip would cover if I even made a dot.

I remember pleading with Bob to ease up on the details. Then I remember him saying okay. Then I remember him handing me the next strip and it had an army of 5,000 Ant-Creatures in each of the 3" x 3" panels.

We were given free website space at the time (from these guys) so we had a website called shrunkenheadjoe dot com. We had all the strips on there and various other features. There was animation, music, reader comments, model sheets and even an action figure. Shrunken-Head Joe's character was a singer and some of the songs he performed in the strip could be heard for real on the website (recorded by my brother and me.)

Eventually the big cheese of News-4U actually read it and fired us. We got away with a lot before he finally looked. Sucka! Getting fired was almost a relief. It seemed like a lot of work for what was essentially 50 cents a day for Bob and me. $30 per strip is not much but if we'd had it in more magazines I guess that $30 would add up.

Hey! If there are any hip entertainment magazines out there (not afraid of a little blood) in need of a 2 year supply of comics we have them ready to go. Contact Bob or me.