REEL BIG FISH: The Comic That (ALMOST) Happened

UPDATED WITH MORE ART SKIP TO THE BOTTOM FOR MORE A SAMPLE COVER!!!!

Up until about Ninth Grade I didn't really care about music outside of the oldies my parents listened to. Then I discovered musical theater albums and movie soundtracks. Even with the soundtracks I wouldn't have called myself music obsessive. I may have liked certain songs but was never inclined to seek out more from any one specific band.

Jump ahead roughly ten years later: I love music now and actively search out anything new I can find. I have over twelve-thousand songs on my ITunes. At one time I had two 80 gig IPods that couldn't hold all the music I had acquired. So what changed? How did I go from being only partially interested in music to a full out music lover?



It started with a band called "Reel Big Fish" and their third major release, an album titled "Why Do They Rock So Hard". The RBF are a ska-punk band that formed during the height of the 3rd wave revival of ska in the mid 90's. Here's some info from their WIKI page:

Reel Big Fish is an American ska punk band from Huntington Beach, California, best known for the 1997 hit "Sell Out." The band gained mainstream recognition in the mid-to-late 1990s, during the third wave of ska with the release of the album Turn the Radio Off. Founding member Aaron Barrett has been with the band since 1992, and horn players Dan Regan and Scott Klopfenstein have been involved with the band for more than 14 years.

Their music was life changing for me. Their sound was hard but fun. Their lyrics were silly yet infused with a type of discontent that was familiar to me. They sang about being rejected, hurt and frustrated on some tracks. They also sang about being in the mosh pit, being vegetarian and having a lesbian ex-girlfriend. Their themes are eclectic but all of them struck a cord somewhere inside Young Shawn. Their music and lyrics combined into a sound and mood that seemed to be speaking direct to me. Their frantic energy was just like mine; scattered but mostly geared toward making people laugh and smile. They were and remain my favorite band.

In 2005 I contacted the RBF's manager Vince with a proposal to write and produce a comic about and starring the band. Vince could not have been nicer and was quick to put me in touch with two of the band members who I was to meet in person while they were on tour in South FLorida (where I lived at the time). Just reaching this point alone was a dream realized. I hung with the band, we discussed my ideas for the type of book it should be and the kinds of things they wanted to have in it.

When the meeting was over I had a legal pad full of notes and a brain bursting with ideas. I went home to start scripting with my buddy Dave (the guy who introduced me to the RBF in the first place) and we came up with a series of short stories, each focusing on one or two members of the band. Some of them were spoofs of super hero comics, one was a cooking segment, another (which you'll see at the end of this post) was a Tales From The Crypt type story. Part of me wants to post the full script here (and I might) but I'm reluctant because I still hold a thread of hope that this project might someday find its legs.

So what the hell happened, Shawn? Why don't I have an RBF comic in my hand right now?

The answer is both complicated and simple. The short version goes like this: after loosing a few artists and then gaining a few we seemed to be on track. Then the band lost a member who had factored into the book pretty heavily, but with some quick rewrites that was taken care of. The killing blow was when one of the founding members of the band, Matt Wong, announced he was leaving the band to be a family man. At this point there was so much art drawn that included him we would have either had to publish the book as is or struggle to have it all redrawn.

Ultimately the book stalled and has sat on my hard drive ever since.

It's sad to me that I could never give the band the gift of an awesome, published comic book. That's maybe the worst part. I just wanted to be able to give back to them. This was to be my "thank you" for being the greatest ska band in the entire world. Maybe someday we'll get to make this actually happen but until then, this blog post will have to suffice. Thanks guys.

Now I don't want your time to be wasted here at Shawn Writes so I'm going to end this with a never-before-seen look at one of the "Reel Big Fish: The Comic" short stories that was completed in its entirety. The art is provided by Andrew Drilon.

This story is called "I'm The Bad Guy", enjoy:




There it is. Any thoughts?


UPDATE: Here is some more art I found. This is Zac Trover's proposed cover: