To help celebrate twenty years of Cool Jerk, I’ve whipped up not only the first Cool Jerk floppy comic book, BUT the first COLOR Cool Jerk comic collection! And you can be among the first to get it… at San Diego Comic-Con!

OMG Color! Vol. 1 is 28 pages of Cool Jerk Sunday Funnies made full-color; every double-sized strip from Hodabeast and Chickadoowa is in here. In fact, it makes a perfect companion to Hodabeast and Chickadoowa, providing that extra punch of color that those books lack. Read them side-by-side, or cut and paste pages from OMG Color! into your copies of Hodabeast and Chickadoowa!

All but one of these strips have always remained in black and white… UNTIL NOW! (I colorized the Zits one for The (Palm Springs) Desert Sun in 1992, but it’s been remastered for OMG Color! Vol. 1.) And, as you’ve come to expect with all my books, I’ve provided new commentary for each strip! NOW how much would you pay??

Here’s the kicker, friends— the price is $4.00 if you buy it à la carte. But it can be yours FREE with a purchase of a Cool Jerk t-shirt, Cool Jerk Canvas Panel or if you buy BOTH Hodabeast and Chickadoowa!

It’s at the printer right now and should be in-hand in about three weeks. I’m doing an extremely limited print run on this— only 100 copies. First crack goes to San Diego Comic-Con attendees, then I’ll make them available for everyone after the show.

(Thanks to Darlene for indirectly giving me the cover idea, btw!)

Twenty years ago on this exact date, the FIRST Cool Jerk was published in the Reno Gazette-Journal! That’s a true fact, Chester! Many things have changed in 20 years (Armpit’s hair, no more hand lettering or Zip-a-Tone) but many more things have stayed the same (four-panel format, the logo, my sense of “humor”). I talk much more about Cool Jerk’s genesis and early days in Cool Jerk Vol. 1: Hodabeast, so if you have your copy, bust it out and thrill in the tale!

As you can see, I still have the tearsheet. (I’m like that— I have tearsheets and clips of everything I’ve had published since junior high school. Serious.) Some time capsule-y stuff from June 15, 1991: “City Slickers” was in the theaters, the most-popular songs in Reno were “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M. and “Seeing Things” by the Black Crowes, and Sparks opened up a paintball park.

The first published Cool Jerk is different from the one online and collected in Hodabeast; I remastered all the older Cool Jerks with my font Hornopolis, and I made some slight changes/fixes in the process.

You’ll also see that Cool Jerk ran vertically. THAT JUST KILLED ME! Paste-up would cut the velox of my strip and arrange it vertically down the right-hand column. This happened for several months until I redesigned the page to accommodate Cool Jerk in its intended horizontal format.

So yeah. Twenty years! To commemorate this event, I revisited the other five characters who appeared with The Kid Who Would Eventually Become Armpit, none of whom we’ve seen since the first Cool Jerk strip. I also decided to give them names, which will be convenient when action figures are made of them.

Coaxed out of retirement for this special occasion, Howard Hindenburg chimes in with a quickie editorial!

Go HERE for a four-decade retrospect of Howard’s best reviews!

I hope you’ve been enjoying this series of strips (start here) centering on Manuel Dexterity. I’d been planning this tale for many years, patiently waiting until the right time. It’s been my intent all along, having Manuel be gay. In fact, as you look back from his debut in Hodabeast through to the present day, you’ll see that he’s always stayed true to my vision. That’s about 16 years of character development.

Has it really been 16 years? In that time, we’ve known Manuel to be a freelance special-effects artist, a good friend of Puppy’s and Manhattan’s, he’s Hispanic and barely bilingual, he saved Spittle Beach from Comic Sans, he’s had porno dreams about Anthony Bourdain, he was devoured by DeeDee’s temporarily gigantic ass, he paints nudes, he created a TV pilot that NBC swiped and turned into “Heroes” and knows how to do the Wild Boys dance. He’s an important part of Cool Jerk and I refuse to make him “the token gay.”

The last thing I wanted was to screw up Manuel’s day in the spotlight, as it were. Manuel needed a voice that wasn’t mine. So, I enlisted my friend David Poller to help plot and co-write this series. David should be a familiar name to long-time readers— he’s been subtly improving my sense of humor over the years by influencing punchlines (see the Mary Annibal the Cannibal on Gilligan’s Island strips) or just killing me with laugh-out-loud conversations (the peeps strips). He’s even on the back cover of Bimboozled.

David is many things: He’s a professional photographer and photo editor. His appetite for pop culture is insatiable. He’s a snarky socio-political commentator. He’s well-traveled. He’s a Cubs fan. He’s a teacher. He’s lived in — literally — three of the four farthest corners of the continental United States. He’s a mentor. He’s hilarious. He’s brilliant. He’s a good friend. He’s gay. No single one of these traits defines David as a person. And thusly, I —we— didn’t want Manuel to be defined solely by his orientation.

Next week is the double-sized finale, and after that an epilogue strip. By my count, that’s 10 strips in this series (plus the bingo card). David wrote/co-wrote nine of them. Can you guess which one was all mine??