Bonus Content

With that teaser at the end of the last post, you knew there was something else coming, and here it is.  Along with all of the issues pulled from the archives I've also got a handful of sketch pages to share, including a try at Joe Average in 3D!

I was also working a non-Joe, non-stick figure work as well, some type of anime inspired sci fi that never got beyond the brainstorming...

Last and certainly least, here is a sketch of what appears to be one of my high school teachers:

Next:  more comics but less mini.

And Then.....

I sent off #3 to another review rag and did a little better...

Some folks saw this and sent along the eight cents asking price, which I had chosen just because it's an awkward amount to put in an envelope, and I even received notes back saying how much they liked it.

I was working on the next issue when... I don't know... I just stopped and that was it.

So here for the first time ever is an exclusive look at what would have been Joe Average #4:

That blank panel on the first page would eventually have been populated by this:

So that was almost it, except many years later when I made the move out to Eugene only to find that they had killed my major of Film and Video just before I got there.  They were pushing me into their journalism program (!) and I wasn't having any of it.  So I drew one more bit with Joe, a take on something called Jim's Journal which was a strip that ran in The Onion.  In the Jim version the caption was "I went to college today.  It was OK."  I put the below on some t-shirts and gave them as Xmas presents.

And that is the near complete story of Joe Average, except.....

Joe Average #3

I don't recall sending issue #2 off to anyone and I have no evidence that I did, so it's right on to #3, where I've obviously invested a little more effort in the visuals:

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: