The Origin of Comical Funnies!

AND: JOE in "The Dentist"

Long story here, please stay tuned, I think this is good one so scroll to the bottom if you have the time and inclination:

Several months after it became obvious that PUNK magazine couldn’t be resurrected (mostly due to the cost of printing and mailing an issue to 2500 subscribers, as well as printing enough issues for the newsstand demand (25,000 issues) when we had NO money during an inflation spiral similar to today’s economic catastrophe), a then-unknown cartoonist Peter Bagge met with me. Peter was going to be published for the very first time in PUNK #18 (the issue that was pulled off the presses by the owner of the printing company who thought it was too disgusting and obscene to be produced by his prestigious company, which also created publications for world-famous museums and other elite, fine art institutions). Peter asked me questions about starting a magazine. “It’s easy!” I tried to explain. “You create artwork and comic strips and stuff to fit the pages, then go to a printer and pay them to publish a bunch of copies!”

This explanation didn’t seem to satisfy the youngster’s curiosity, which led to more questions, like: “How do you know how many copies to print? How do you decide how many pages to print? How do you put it all together?”

It seemed like a simple matter to me, so I soon became exasperated by all of Peter’s questions. “Tell you what,” I said, “Let’s put out a comics publication together. I’ll be the editor and you can be the publisher. All we need is around 400 bucks and we can produce a newsprint comic strip ‘zine.” We enlisted the help of Bruce Carleton (who had recently been hired at SCREW magazine and had access to their photostat machine and the office space after hours) and added a “Fun Page” by Ken Weiner (it was supposed to appear in PUNK #18), and a few strips by Peter’s brother Doug. We soon had enough free content for a 24-page, 11.5” X 18” publication. We decided to call it Comical Funnies because we all wanted it to be dedicated to laffs, fun and gags, with no heavy political messages nor superhero crap whatsoever. Only “comic” strips as they were designed to be when they first appeared in the late 19th century: “Funny Pages.”

Comical Funnies only lasted for three issues. The staff split up: Ken Weiner and Pete Bagge produced a comic book together (Wacky World), while J. D. King and I produced STOP! Magazine together (which lasted for a few years and nine issues). There were no hard feelings, since Weiner and Bagge contributed to STOP! many times. Peter Bagge famously went on to edit Weirdo magazine with R. Crumb and produced Neat Stuff and the Hate comic book for Fantagraphics in the 1990s and was one of the best-selling alternative comic books of the 1990s.

I can’t remember if this JOE comic strip was rejected by Jovial Bob Stine or if it was something I thought didn’t belong in Bananas magazine, Anyhow, it was one of several comic strips I contributed to the first issue of Comical Funnies. I drew the cover (trying to send a subtle message to the Ramones that they needed to upgrade their live act, to this day I think a bongo player adding to “Bad Brains” would have been awesome), a couple of Bosko comic strips, and my first “Soviet Work Camp Funnies” strip (inspired by drawing the “Rocket to Russia” Ramones LP back cover: stay tuned for more info about Bosko and those other strips).

JOE’s “Dentist” comic strip was inspired by The Alice Cooper Group’s song “Unfinished Sweet” song from their Billion Dollar Babies LP, which is probably the only rock ’n’ roll song dedicated to good dental hygiene. I found an amazing film of a live performance of the song:

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