The story behind Funny Water’s “unofficial” publication in San Francisco newspapers.

The setting was San Francisco, 1993. At that time, the City hadn't experienced the Dot Com gold rush. As Wired’s Gary Wolf accurately observed: “In San Francisco, it was a time of skinny magazines printed at midnight in copyshops, of pranks and irony, of in-jokes and do-it-yourself radio stations.”  French Lads, The Haters, Three Day Stubble and other absurdist collectives assaulted the city with nonsequitur pornography and strange performance art. This was also the time of Funny Water’s birth.

Funny Water was all about people who unknowingly drank radioactive water and lapsed into momentary insanity during everyday situations. I grew up near Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, and often wondered whether radioactive contamination had ever reached the public water supply. It seemed like a fertile premise for a comic series.

Each 7-paneled comic fit on a single sheet of typing paper. Sitting at Eddie's or Cafe Abir in the Western Addition, I’d spend hours drawing elaborate gags that had “too many words,” as an editor for DC comics said in a letter of rejection.

Rejection is the name of the game when you’re trying to get paid in the Art world. I must’ve sent my comics to every magazine in the Artist Market Handbook. Nobody wanted to publish my stuff.

Instead of taking the Universe’s hint, I decided to self-publish.

Every Tuesday night, I’d go to a corner market with a Xerox machine and crank out 200 photocopies of each comic. There were a lot of black spaces on my comics, and the store keepers would scowl as I used up their copier toner.

Every Wednesday morning, I’d walk up and down Haight Street and insert the latest Funny Water in the back page of new issues of The Guardian and SF Weekly. After a few weeks, store owners and patrons recognized me as the Funny Water kid. At that point, any recognition felt good.

One day, I received a letter from a member of some Oregon cult, who picked up a Funny Water from the sidewalk during their weekend trip to the Haight. They enclosed a single dollar bill and requested other comics. I sent them the complete Funny Water collection. That was the last I heard from them.

Anyway, in the absence of a significant response, this guerilla distribution method eventually grew tiresome. After several months of weekly drops, I packed it in and focused my attention on Cheap TV.