Genesis: Part Three

I kept writing and drawing Eat @ Shrimpy’s off and on for years, but eventually stopped as my motivation slowed down.  This was a natural course of events as I came to the stunning realization that my lifelong ambition was not going to play out exactly as I had planned.  I had hoped to get a job right out of college doing something that I loved, drawing comics, but when no one knocked on my door save for a few individuals with a couple dollars to spend on pet projects, I started to pick up my pencil with less frequency.  I made a feeble attempt at turning it into a webcomic around that time but poor planning on my part left me with a bunch of art that was at too low of a resolution to be any good to anyone, which basically meant that if I wanted this thing to succeed I would have to re-letter everything that I had already done and then get back on the horse.  At that time it did not seem like a viable option, so Eat @ Shrimpy’s went on the shelf. 

That is where it stayed for years because I knew that if I were to start again, it would be an onerous undertaking.  I had the plot together for the first twenty-five issues and knew that once I started, I owed it to myself to keep going.  Then tragedy struck two years ago yesterday.  A friend of mine from the Kubert School, Lance Eslava died in a motor vehicle accident.  While being a sad event for all of his family and friends, hell anyone who knew him, it was a revelation for me personally.  I know that Lance was heavily involved in creating his own comic book to self publish, and actually had been developing the idea from the time we were in college together.  What he left behind was an unfinished work of art.  I was determined that this would not happen to me.  While I knew that it was damn near inevitable in the long run that something would be unfinished, I also knew that finishing a comic strip would take infinitely less time than finishing an entire comic book.  I decided to throw myself back into Eat @ Shrimpy’s whole-heartedly to ensure that even if I did manage to die before I said all I wanted to say, a good portion of the strips would be done.  I also made the conscious decision to avoid the day and date format that many webcomics try to adhere to.  I would work ahead, as is my general nature, and craft a story.  Sure, I have done some individual strips, and even some pop-culture heavy ones that when viewed even five years in the future probably would carry very little weight, but the bulk of the story is written well in advance.  The plan is that if I was to croak before my strips are completed, I could feasibly pass the reins to anyone and all they had to do was follow the script.  This is a large portion of my life that covers a huge portion of the lives of my characters and if I can’t finish it, I would hope that someone inquires about doing so.  I have the story-arcs broken up into “issues” of 32 strips each (as that is the size I wanted back when I was trying to do this as a print comic).  Currently I have twenty-eight issues written and I am working on issue twenty-five right now.  I know that sounds weird, but I haven’t written all of the issues in order and issue twenty-five is going to be huge so it has taken awhile to flesh out.  Needless to say, I have enough material in the queue to last me for quite some time in terms of story.

It also turns out that, because of the shorter amount of time that it takes me to produce a comic strip as opposed to a comic page, I can actually keep a decent schedule while still preventing the nerve damage in my hands and arms from becoming too much of a factor.  There is nothing worse than being halfway through a page and not being able to finish because of the pain in my hands.  By sticking to strips, I cut down my time drawing while, in essence, getting more done and being able to get more out to the viewing public in less time.  And on those rare occasions when my hands are working properly for an extended amount of time, I can pump out four to six strips at a time.

This is a perfect storm of both ambition and opportunity coming together and kicking me in the ass to get moving  While I still hope that someday Eat @ Shrimpy’s can be bigger than I would have ever imagined, just getting this out there for everyone to read and hopefully enjoy is enough for me at this point.  Thanks for reading!

There you have it.  Now you know the history of Eat @ Shrimpy's, so you can tell your children and grandchildren.  If you want an actual book to show those kids as well (kids love pictures!) be sure to pick up Shrimpology which is the visual history of The Masked Shrimp including all of his earlier comic book appearances as well as a ton of extras.  Ordering info is in the right column.

Genesis: Part Two

Sitting around our college studio one day during my sophomore year of college (my first at the Kubert School), an extremely talented and very bright classmate Hovard Johannsen (we called him Howard and he was patient enough not to murder us in our sleep when we massacred his name while trying to say it in his native Norwegian) mentioned that he could see me doing a daily comic strip containing The Masked Shrimp.  At that time it was destined for a comic book series and I had the whole thing planned out from issues 1-100, hell I had even written the first four issues and started penciling issue one. Hovard’s observation was that I was so in tune and close with my characters that I would not be content with producing once a month adventures involving this lovable band of misfits.  When the observation was presented to me I blew it off as pure speculation, and while I appreciated his recognition of my ties to my characters, I was set in my ways and probably a little too headstrong to really take what he said to heart.

Again, I still thought I would be drawing the X-Men the day after I graduated from college.  Shows how much I knew then.

I did dabble in the comic strip medium for a brief moment in my first year at the Kubert School as my dorm-mates and I considered putting together a newspaper-esque pamphlet of comic strips showcasing our talent for the school and surrounding area.  While that never materialized (I believe I was the only one that actually had strips ready to go shortly after our initial meeting) I was able to recycle some of the more generic jokes in later Eat @ Shrimpy’s strips. 

The notion that comic strips would not only be a viable, but a preferable method of storytelling did not surface until I was in my second year at the Kubert school and was tasked with the assignment of creating a month’s worth of comic strips (which make up a good portion of the first storyline you have seen on this site).  It should be noted that at the time this assignment was given out, I had just signed on to pencil a forty-eight page comic book (that of course never saw the light of day and I was never compensated for) and actually used that “assignment” in place of my scholastic one.  I started the comic strip assignment after my classmates had already moved on to the following one (a Mad Magazine-style caricature adventure which I missed out on completely).  Thanks to my teacher Mike Chen, a spark was created within me.  Something clicked when I realized that I could tell jokes, and I could break up a story into beats, where it was still a cohesive and comprehensive narrative when put together, but each day, each strip was able to stand on its own. 

It all took off from there as, instead of just doing the assignment and moving on to something else, I decided to keep writing and creating comic strips in addition to doing my schoolwork.  This continued into the following year (my third and final year at the Kubert School) where I decided to collect the finished strips in a comic book format, much like Frank Cho’s Liberty Meadows was doing at the time.  At the time I had just called it The Masked Shrimp Strips so as not to confuse it with The Masked Shrimp regular series which was still very much in development. 

It was not until showing the book to my humor teacher that year, the incredibly talented Brian Buniak, that the name Eat @ Shrimpy’s was born.  A random sign in this strip that said “Eat @ Shrimpy’s” caused Brian to pause and question why that was not the name of the strip as The Masked Shrimp Strips was just an awful name, which I fully acknowledged.  From then on the name of the strip changed, which not only set itself apart from the other work I was doing with Shrimpy, giving it its own identity, but also creating a name that could be instantly recognizable and that actually has a lot to do with the plot of the strip itself.  Brian is a genius when it comes to humor in general, but the fact that the identity of the strip wasn't really born until that day proved that he was partially responsible for where the strip is now.  In fact, if it wasn't for my time at the Kubert school, I would guess that Eat @ Shrimpy's wouldn't even be here and The Masked Shrimp would be toiling away in unpublished comic book pages at the back of my closet somewhere. 

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.

Another Birthday...Kind of

Lost in the Sketch-A-Thon fun over the weekend is the fact that Eat @ Shrimpy's has been in existence for one whole year as of Sunday the fifth.  What started out as a way to get me off my ass and working on something I was passionate about has ballooned into something much more.  Thank you very much to anyone and everyone that is a regular reader, and I hope to reward that faith and loyalty with more content delivered, and delivered on schedule.  As always if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to throw those out there.  Thanks again, and here's to at least one more year!