Joe Average #2

Besides handing out copies of Joe Average #1 to friends, I had also mailed off a couple of them. One went to a publication called Small Press...somethingsomething, a newsprint fanzine that ran reviews of all of the comics that they were sent.  In the end they said they had a handful of submissions that were so "visually dreadful" that they weren't even going to bother to read them. Listed there was Joe Average #1.  Ouch?  Oddly enough, some people read that and sent me money for an issue anyway, proving that even among the small press there were rebels bucking the system, no matter how tenuous that system was.

The other issue went to Matt Feazell, who responded in a much kinder fashion:

This was pretty cool, considering I was blatantly and nearly totally ripping off his "shtick".            
(!(OOOOF!!!))

So then it was on to the next issue, a little cleaner and a tiny bit more ambitious:

Joe Average #1

Apparently it was 1987.  I had been reading and collecting comics for a while right around the time that the medium saw its great surge into the pop culture consciousness.

Among all of the things that rose with that ocean were the independent creations, including minicomics.  At some point I received a how-to minicomic from the king of stick figure minicomics at the time, Matt Feazell, creator of Cynicalman.  I decided to give it a go and throw my hat into the giant and, at the time, still-growing ring.

Keep in mind that this obviously wasn't much more than a go at simple execution.  I surely wasn't trying to be the Picasso of the small press...not yet.  The ugly mistake on the cover that I didn't bother to actually redraw proves that: