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.