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Who the %#@! is John Luzar, or How to Launch a Comics Career with Just a Luchador Mask and 5,000 Shart Jokes

John Luzar writes

Hi. My name is John Luzar, and I'd like you to buy my comic book. It's my first.

Well, who the %#@! is John Luzar, right? Exactly. Maybe if you were a passionate devotee of off-loop, non-equity, storefront theatre in Chicago in the early part of the 21st century, you'd have seen my work as an actor. I was a pirate once, in Treasure Island. I had a sword fight and everything.

But now I'm trying to break into comics, so the old stage resume is about useful as ________. I'm not dumb, comics is a star-driven business, and I'm the farthest thing there is from a star. I'm a rookie. A nobody. A noob. As a noob, I can't use existing characters either, obviously, so I'm asking people to buy a book featuring brand new characters from a writer nobody's heard of.

Tall order.

I do have this blog, though.

Check it out if you want. Showercapblog.com

I'll warn you up front, it's political. It's certainly not for everybody. Actually, if you hate it, feel free to say so, I don't get nearly as many haters as I'd like, and trolls are really good for the brand.

Why "Shower Cap?" Heh. Well, in March 2016, Donald Trump announced he was coming to Chicago for a rally, and I got myself a ticket and dressed up for the occasion:

Who the %#@! is John Luzar, or How to Launch a Comics Career with Just a Luchador Mask and 5,000 Shart Jokes

…because I'm the kind of guy who gets superhero luchador masks and bathrobes as gifts. So that's how Shower Cap was born. (Donnie Dotard chickened out and never showed, but that's another story.)

Anyway, the blog! It started out as a running gag on social media, just for my friends, kind of a "can you believe all this shit happened in just one day?" kind of thing. Somebody found one of them and posted it on a liberal message board called Democratic Underground, where people seemed to dig it.

It turns out there's a healthy audience out there for political news roundups delivered with juvenile profanity and shart jokes, which is fantastic, because I was having a helluva time writing the stuff. I started posting on Daily Kos, and a couple of other places, and after a while, with the help of a web designer friend, I launched my own site.

I've kept it up for, oh, about 2 1/2 years now. I don't run ads on the site. There's a little digital tip jar that brings in a bit of money, but nothing to write home about. Because I've been planning (well, hoping anyway) the whole time to someday sell a comic book to the weird, glorious, audience I was building, one poop joke aficionado at a time.

Now, my audience is absolutely fantastic, but they're not a typical audience. It's a… really specific thing I do, and it's not for everybody. My content runs insanely long by internet standards; I regularly have commenters stop by to post, simply, "tl:dr" because they're offended anyone would even dare to post something that takes five whole minutes to read. Anyway, they're activists. Political junkies. The kinds of folks who have opinions about congressional primary elections…in districts they don't even live in.

So I wrote my first comic with this audience in mind.

Who the %#@! is John Luzar, or How to Launch a Comics Career with Just a Luchador Mask and 5,000 Shart Jokes

It's political. It's about activism. It's a nifty little sci-fi fable about coming off of the sidelines, and onto the front lines. It turned out well. I think they'll like it. But I don't know. There are a few comics readers amongst 'em, but these are not Wednesday Warriors.

And I find myself worried because…there's not enough swearing in the comic. Like, what if the only reason people click on my site is to see Rudy Giuliani called a "rotten-toothed cousin-fucker," or to have the President of the United States described as "marmalade shartcannon?" I tried to put more swears in the script, I swear I did, but nothing seemed to fit. I had to settle for this:

Who the %#@! is John Luzar, or How to Launch a Comics Career with Just a Luchador Mask and 5,000 Shart Jokes

So I launched a little Kickstarter with a modest target. It's time to see if the years-old plan will pay off. Will my weird, wonderful, righteously indignant, readership follow me into an entirely new and largely curse-word-free medium, and pay for the pleasure to boot? Or will it be "Hey, good luck with your funnybook, Cap, but times is hard, y'know?"

I go to bed nervous the night before the Kickstarter launches. Hoping for the best, but prepared for the worst.

And y'know what? They came through! Better than I'd hoped, or even dreamed; we'd tripled our goal by noon on the first day. We're 730% funded as I type this, from almost 250 backers. Not bad for a noob.

Even better, I think I've managed to sell some comics to folks who don't usually buy 'em. Neat.

So, yeah, who the %#@! is John Luzar? I wrote that blog. I wrote this article. I wrote this here comic book, you should %#@!ing buy it.

Here are some pages we particularly like, by artist Beth Varni and letterer Toben Racicot:

[Insert the following images:

Who the %#@! is John Luzar, or How to Launch a Comics Career with Just a Luchador Mask and 5,000 Shart Jokes

Who the %#@! is John Luzar, or How to Launch a Comics Career with Just a Luchador Mask and 5,000 Shart Jokes

Who the %#@! is John Luzar, or How to Launch a Comics Career with Just a Luchador Mask and 5,000 Shart Jokes

 

Here's a link to the Kickstarter.


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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