“The Singing Pimple”
This Popular JOE Comic Strip Was Rejected By Bananas magazine! For a very good reason. And so it ended up in PUNK magazine.
I showed this comic strip (in sketch form, as usual) to Jovial Bob Stine (the Editor-in-Chief) at Bananas magazine in late 1978. He took one look at the first panel and rejected it.
Jovial Bob (not so Jovial at that moment): “No pimple jokes! Ever!”
I could see his point. When you’re in middle school and high school? Pimples aren’t funny. They can be traumatic, embarrassing, and impactful in a very negative way on your social life. I think most of us felt that pain when we were in 7th or 8th grade. Whenever we had a huge pimple on our face, just when our hormones were kicking in and we wanted to be physically attractive, it was a total disaster to have to deal with a zit. This is why pimple medications make so much money. No one wants a huge pimple on their face.
On the other hand, after you leave high school and have won the “War Against Pimples” they can be so F’N funny! So I drew the strip in black and white for PUNK #17 (the one with The Clash on the cover). and it received so many great reviews that I redrew it in color for “The Joe Show” multi-media slideshow and used it in several performances, where it always went over really well. (As I am winding up the JOE comic strips, I will soon explain the history of JOE and how he first appeared in a Cartoon Concert, etc.). Here are a few of the slideshow images, including one (the newspaper headline) that I just now made up for the fun of it:
Back in the day, when I was performing JOE SHOWs, I enjoyed redrawing the panels from the original comic strip for use as a performance vehicle since they were now rendered in full color, and without word balloons. It was like creating fine art instead of commercial art, and I could add more jokes to the background artwork.
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Classic!!!