Genesis: Part One

For the three of you that read this blog and want to know how Eat @ Shrimpy's started, from the very beginning, stay tuned for the next three weeks as I weave a yarn about the formative years of everyone's favorite restaurant-owning crustacean.  And if you want to see Shrimpy and the gang's genesis in visual form, be sure to pick up Shrimpology (order details in the panel to your right).

I have long enjoyed reading comic strips in newspapers, always grabbing the “funnies” first when the Sunday paper arrived and enjoying the comic strip wrapping paper that many of my larger Christmas presents over the years would come in.  One thing I never thought though was that I would ever willingly create a comic strip.  I always saw myself as more of a comic book, 22 pages of action and adventure, kind of guy.  I thought that while comic strips were fun and often funny, they were a little too restrictive for what I wanted to do. 

Remember this is coming from the mind of someone that had the foolish notion of working at Marvel Comics in his mind from fifth grade until about his junior year in college.

The Masked Shrimp was not created to exist in a comic strip world.  I had always had “bigger” aspirations for him, to live out his life in comic books.  My ambitions were entirely the opposite of one Stan “The Man” Lee back in the 50s and 60s who thought that newspaper comic strips were the big time and comic books were small potatoes in comparison (and in his defense, back then they were).  I created The Masked Shrimp and his merry band of misfits through a series of doodles and sketches that, at the time, I had no real intention of doing anything with.  What this did do though was allow me a lot more freedom to come up with characters that I could literally do anything with.  This was of great appeal to me because, while I enjoyed the structure and overall linear nature of a comic book series, I really liked the ability to just put the characters in any situation, no matter how absurd.  The greatest example of this is the Looney Tunes cartoons.  Bugs Bunny could be in space saving the world from Marvin the Martian in one eight minute short, and in the next be taking a wrong turn at Albuquerque and winding up, not at Pismo Beach but in Ali Baba’s treasure stash.  This blank canvas kind of character really appealed to me because it opened up so many possibilities instead of having to create a superhero character, and then a western character, and then a Roman gladiator character, etc.  While the Eat @ Shrimpy’s strips, and even the Masked Shrimp comic book in general, deal more with the recognizable, modern world, I have used Shrimpy and his gang in both Western and Medieval-themed stories that have yet to see print.  Regardless of the genesis of these characters, the initial plan was never to use them in a comic strip format.

Even though The Masked Shrimp was not meant to be a comic strip in any shape or form back in those days, my first narrative art attempt was a Sunday comic strip, or at least it turned into a Sunday comic strip.  When it was first drawn, I just wrote a little one page story (which is essentially all a Sunday strip is) that told a joke.  I have since redrawn and recycled that same joke numerous times.