THE HISTORY OF JOE PART TWO
"The Joe Show" began as a slideshow in 1973
The above comic strip was based on “A Bad Day,” one of the longer stories in the very first Joe Show performance. Below are some of the drawings that appeared in the original “Cartoon Concert.” (Primitive, aren’t they?) Bat Lash and I decided to create it for a Media Communications class, and spent months writing, drawing and photographing the live action and the drawings (over a hundred).
Bat Lash helped with the script, and our friend Allen Schwartz colored the drawings. I’m still scanning hundreds of slides from the Joe Show, so the opening segment for “A Bad Day” and several other images are missing. (Maybe I can scan everything and do another performance some day?)
The story begins with Joe suffering a terrible mishap. He sits on a park bench, bemoaning everything that’s going wrong. A bum harangues him, telling Joe that his war-time experiences were much worse than anything Joe was dealing with. “I tell ya, it was no pic-a-nic!” Joe starts to feel better and walks down the sidewalk, but slips on a banana peel, falling into the street, where he gets hit by a pizza truck. More mishaps happen, until he finds a quarter! Joe figures his luck is changing! Then he gets mugged, and the mugger steals it and beats him up for being so cheap. A policeman sees Joe on the ground and throws him in jail for loitering. Joe figures, “Well, at least nothing bad can happen to me while I’m in here!” But Joe is wrong: The H-bomb drops on the city! Now he’s living in a post-nuclear nightmare. He sees someone approach… And wonders: “How can things get any worse? What horrible fate awaits me next?”
It’s the bum: “It was no pic-a-nic, I tell ya!”
When we finally performed The Joe Show in front of our Media Communications class (after months of hard work), we had an audience of 20 bored art students. Batton Lash did the voice for JOE and a few friends appeared as other characters. We played some background music and did sound effects, which used musical instruments and a few odd devices for sound effects. The Joe Show mixed Radio Theatre with comics! How could anyone not enjoy it! We were jazzed!
The instructor insisted that we run an introduction to comic strips before presenting the slide show. Otherwise, he explained, most students wouldn’t understand what we were doing. That seemed like a stupid idea to me, since The Joe Show wasn’t a comic strip: It was a new art form!
Sadly, the teacher had a point. I couldn’t believe that anyone attending the School of Visual Arts (Formerly The Cartoonists and Illustrators School) could dismiss the idea that comic strips are an art form. But I was wrong.
The Joe Show went over like a lead balloon. Most of the students in our “Media Communications” class were fine art snobs who hated comic books, especially anything attempting humor. This attitude towards comic strips still exists today, even when comic books (aka graphic novels) are the inspiration for so many Hollywood films, a Superman or Spider-Man comic book sells for millions of dollars, and original artwork sells for hundreds of thousands. Comic strips are still the “Rodney Dangerfield” of the arts world: “We don’t get no respect. No respect at all, I tell ya!”
I wasn’t daunted by the criticism or the negative attitudes. I knew what we were up against. I flunked art class throughout middle school and high school whenever I drew comic strip characters. I was bullied and mocked by other kids who didn’t read comics. Back in the 1970s, adults still thought comic books were trash, enjoyed only by juvenile delinquents. Senate hearings on how comic books transformed innocent children into depraved monsters took place only 20 years earlier. This was all due to Seduction of the Innocent, a book written by Frederic Wertham, a psychiatrist who claimed that comic books were almost entirely responsible for the rise of teenage crime in the 1950s. The entire comic book industry was almost put out of business by all the bad publicity.
I refused to give up on JOE. When Will Eisner was hired to teach comics the next year, I figured he would appreciate JOE, a typical teenager who could be the new Archie! So when Eisner gave out an assignment to create a character later that year, I drew up a JOE character sketch. I figured Will would like it (even though he rejected Superman before he appeared in DC Comics).
Even Will Eisner hated JOE! Now what?
NEXT WEEK: JOE gets discovered by BANANAS magazine!