Blast From The Past!

Way back in 1999 my pal KW Monster and I collaborated on a comic strip called Shrunken-Head Joe that ran in the local free paper. You can read all about that and see the strip here.

Once that particular SHJ story was over we ran a few filler comics while trying to come up with a new adventure. This was one of them. Obviously it's based on those old Johnson Smith ads found in the backs of comic books. And obviously you'll have to zoom in to read it.

The whole time we were doing the Shrunken-Head Joe story the editor of the paper never once complained or demanded any changes. Then one day he actually read the strip and suddenly he was nitpicking every little thing and refusing to run that month's comic unless we bowed to his capricious whims and changed it.

He especially hated this particular strip for some reason. His main beef was with the "Anal Kazoo" in the upper right hand corner. Apparently in his mind the word "anal" was the most vile and horrific word a human could ever utter (never mind that it's a medical term), and demanded we change it. We did, and changed it to "Wahoo Kazoo," which we thought was not only better but funnier as well. Oddly enough he hated that name even more! I can't remember now for certain, but I think he went ahead and ran it (because he was up against his deadline and didn't have anything else to run) but told us that our services would no longer be needed. Yes, we were fired from the free newspaper.

Enjoy this rare piece of journalistic history!