JoBeth!
By BJ Hiorns and Joey Hetzel
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JoBeth: The Story Behind The Strip

JoBeth is a classic example of filler gone awry. She started out as part of a joke for one of Joey's Tonja Steele strips--all she had to do was hang on Darren and look like a bimbo. But she was such an archetypical bimbo that we couldn't stop feeding her stupid dialogue, shallow values and finally, bestowing upon her the end all and be all of perky blonde names. Apologies to any real JoBeths out there, unless you had to look up the word "archetypical." I don't even think that's a valid form of the word.

Soon we had so much JoBeth material we didn't know how to fit it into the already packed Tonja Steele world. As it so happens, Joey needed filler art for the comics page when classes started in September '98. We didn't have enough space for another strip, but we couldn't do anything that called attention to itself as filler. I already had a bunch of JoBeth sketches from our initial brainstorm, so I quick lightboxed the brownie sketch there and we ran it. Same story next week with the phone sex joke. And all throughout the year, changing formats as the space dictated. You know what takes the longest each week? Thinking of the saying under the JoBeth title. Pretty sad.

Joey and I thought up most of the jokes, but I'd like to give credit where it's due. The teen pregnancy joke was actually uttered by a friend of mine, Carissa Obernberger, in 1991 (!). The "that wasn't my mask" line was created by Art Baltazar for his insanely cool Cray Baby Adventures, as I found out after I reread the collected book, and he pulls it off better than I did, no pun intended. The cheese pizza line was quote of the week on the marker board at Sal's Pizza on State Street in Madison, hence the plug on her cup. The grocery joke actually happened in town; hash was on sale for a penny off! Joey thought of the Fleetwood Mac burger, "Got Brains?", nuclear freeze, Valentine's Day, and the Marilyn Monroe intern (that's Joey in the background with her Brett Favre jersey on). The rest are mine except for the three submissions, where I give credit in the strips, though I did rewrite Brooke's line for brevity's sake. It's the soul of wit or something, you know. I also found out someone really did use JoBeth's mousing technique! I thought it was too stupid to happen in real life, but I guess the world's full of JoBeths.

-BJ Hiorns, 11 May 1999