Lucky Joe

September 22nd, 2011
7:23am

Last night I came home and actually slept for a solid 12 hour chunk, and THERE WAS NOTHING ENJOYABLE ABOUT IT.  Dear God.  For some reason I feel like I’m trying to escape a horror movie placed within the squidgy universe of the back of a cereal box… or something like that.  My brain is way too foggy and I’m having a hard time conceiving of going to work in an hour.  Surprised I can even spell.

Luckily, however, the night was not a total loss.  The oversleep-induced dementia of the long hours of the night blessed me with a charming little side-comic concept: “Lucky Joe”.  I have yet to figure out if it was just one of those things that seemed funny because I was 3/4ths asleep or if I’ve actually stumbled onto pure comedic gold, so let me lay it out-

A convict (Joe) awaits the judge to hand down his sentence for some unspeakably heinous crime.  The judge, through with being inundated with criminals in a prison system where there literally isn’t even room for the inmates to move, throws his hands up and decides to let the Fates deal with him as they might see fit, and turns him loose.  His final words as he hands down the sentence?

“May the Fates have mercy on your soul.”

They don’t.

From the second Joe steps out of the courtroom, celebrating what a lucky guy he is, the Fates begin to unleash their own brand of Justice on him in the form of increasingly wacky misfortunes and terrors.

It’s just a silly concept, a plot vehicle in which I can take a character and do horrible things to him in one-page shots, practice drawing him being tortured in various unthinkable ways from falling down a manhole to being chased by a pack of wild rabid infants to being abducted by extradimensional beings to just not being able to fix a damn pot of mac-n-cheese properly. We all love an infinitely unlucky protagonist, and even better if he deserves it, right?

We’ll see.