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By Jerry White Jr. | April 1st, 2024

Pezz Wurld was created nearly 29 years ago, in 1995. Since this is 30MOM.COM, should we wait one more year for this retrospective? Nah! Besides, this year does mark the 30-Year anniversary of the first issue of HOOFSIP, where Pezz Wurld appeared for over two years, so I’d say that’s a good enough excuse to take a look back, right flippin’ now. . .

If you haven’t read the series yet and want to avoid spoilers, click HERE to read Pezz Wurld now!

Back in the day, in addition to making home movies and public access TV shows, my friends and I played and recorded music, took a ton of 35mm photos, wrote poems and stories, and drew a lot of pictures and comics. We would spend hours at diners or various coffee houses, hanging out and passing around sketch books that we’d draw and write in. Some of my friends were more focused on making comics, like Dennis Petlock, Mike Pipper, and Jesus Rivera who made the ongoing series Crazy Man, Stick Men, and Fort Korp, respectively. The Stick Men were published in HOOFSIP starting with the first issue and we were all super into it. With all that comic strip inspiration in the air, we made some silly comic strips in our artbooks too, either individually or sometimes as a kind of exquisite corpse collaboration. One such collab was a comic Joe Hornacek and I made in which he drew a very simple rectangular character with no arms and three antenna he called Pez and immediately coined his catchphrase, “Why you be so ill?” We later added a extra “z” to his name ‘cuz we didn’t want to get sued. Pezz started popping up in other artbook comics and drawings and since our zine was going strong at the time, Joe and I came up with the idea of making an ongoing collaborative comic for it.

“All I remember about Pezz Wurld is there was a different artist for each issue. Origins? I mean it was something you came up with, right? Or was it Joe? I didn’t come up with any of it, but just rolled with the punches. I thought it was a fun and creative idea. It reminded me of the ‘telephone line’ game, but in comic format.”
–Dan Augustine, editor of HOOFSIP

Joe and I came up with a set of guidelines for the comic. Each installment of Pezz Wurld would be written and drawn by a different artist and would end with a cliffhanger. Artists were instructed to respect where the previous writer left off and not abandon the cliffhanger that had been set up. I don’t think there were any other rules really so, other than that, you were free to do whatever you wanted with the characters and story! Pezz Wurld premiered summer 1995 in HOOFSIP #10 and continued monthly through summer 1997, concluding in HOOFSIP #34.

We knew Pezz was going to be a main character, but he wasn’t going to be alone. I don’t know where I got the idea for Bill Stickhead, who became Pezz’s buddy, occasional frenemy, and, in one instance, lover. I think Pipper’s Stick Men got me thinking about someone who wasn’t a stick man, but just had a stick head. Physically he was somewhat inspired by me, with his big belly. Character-wise, he’s the opposite of Pezz, who was innocent with a childlike sweetness. Bill had a sour temper and was a bit more street smart and surly. As for other supporting characters, I had been drawing these hand-head people for a while, but I didn’t know anything more about them. In my notes to Joe and Dan for the first two installments, I drew Bill Stickhead and then a hand-head person with a question mark on the palm——leaving it up to Joe what to do with it. As the first artist to kick off Pezz Wurld, Joe made the question mark part of their character, always present on their “face.”

“The first one, the way it came together was really impressive, like the way it flowed and the way the jokes went into the next panel. I couldn’t believe I actually drew all that stuff exactly the way it should look, like when the hand people were throwing them. I was like, man, I figured that angle out and drew that perfectly, what the heck?”
–Joe Hornacek

Pezz made a brief cameo in PCP Robot on 30MOM episode 12.

1994-1996 was a very creative and productive period for LF Productions. Hoofsip started in late 1994, then in 1995 we were working simultaneously on episodes 12 and 13 while new issues of our zine came out every month. We were making music, hanging out, and still drawing stuff. We also worked jobs——Joe, Dan, and I were saving up money for our production company——so there was a lot of hope and excitement about the future. Pezz Wurld wasn’t our main focus, but it was an ongoing project that we felt good about and deepened the lore and variety of our creative canon. I was always hyped to see what the latest artist would come up with and where the story would go.

A total sidebar, but I wanna take a paragraph to talk about The Homestar Runner. I’ve been a fan of The Brothers Chaps comics, cartoons, games, and ephemera (and there is a lot of ephemera) for nearly twenty years, since the moment I was introduced to homestarrunner.com. I’m not comparing the quality of Pezz Wurld to their work, but I believe there’s a shared sensibility and creative approach. Homestar Runner is full of inside jokes that become an almost second language and an ever-expanding cast of characters and lore that, despite being totally ridiculous, is taken seriously in-world. There’s a passion for making silly and fun stuff for (and with) friends and family, whether an outside audience catches on or not. Even in the characters of Homestar Runner and Strong Bad, you can see a bit of Pezz and Bill Stickhead. Homestar is also childlike and has no arms, but still manages to pick things up, and Strong Bad is prickly and skeptical with a big round gut. Both were born in the 90s, with the first Homestar Runner comic appearing in 1996, just a year after Pezz Wurld! What the Brothers Chaps created and the way they’ve endured while staying true to themselves continues to be an inspiration to me. They could’ve applied their considerable talents to remixing existing pop culture or chasing memes, but instead they’ve kept doing their own thing, their own way. Their flash website was a huge inspiration for the flash version of 30MOM.COM——I loved the idea of creating a whole virtual world for the show, instead of just being yet another video on someone else’s platform. Anyway, that’s a lengthy tangent, but I can’t help but gush!

Episodes 12 & 13 proved to be the swan song of the original run of 30MOM, though we didn’t know that at the time. Going into 1996, having just finished those episodes, we were focused on the future of LF Productions: buying video equipment so we could start selling our shows and future films. We shot skits in ’96, but not as often, as we no longer planned on making public access television shows. Pezz Wurld continued to be a creative project that we could all collaborate on, in addition to other HOOFSIP features and music projects, while our video work was kind of put on the back burner.

Pezz Wurld wrapped up just as some of us were going our separate ways creatively and socially, which wasn’t long after we moved in together. At some point during the run of the comic, Pezz seemed to represent Joe in a way, and Bill Stickhead was kind of a version of me. The last few artists had Pezz and Bill wanting to kill each other and, in the final installment, Bill ends up shooting Pezz, then disappearing himself. I didn’t think it was a coincidence that Joe wrote that ending while he and I were also on the outs. A bummer ending for the comic, but I remember feeling it was sort of apt and poetic to just kill the project and move on.

Rereading the stories has its joys, though I have no idea if anyone outside our circle would appreciate it. Then again, that pretty much applies to 30 MINUTES OF MADNESS and all the LF Productions stuff. In collecting the series and writing this article, I’m inspired to do a collaborate comic again, though I’d be a bit more strict on some of the guidelines. I’m a huge fan of Adventure Time and love the friendship between Finn and Jake——I wish we’d taken more that route with Pezz and Bill. I feel like it would’ve been more fun and interesting for the two of them to always have each other’s backs and have the conflict focused on the obstacles they faced. And I agree with something Joe pointed out long ago: there was an over-reliance on the “skyhole” as a get-out-of-plot free card. The skyhole became a floating deus ex machina that was employed far too often and easily. Overall I guess I just wish there was more “yes anding” to Pezz Wurld. More like a comic roleplaying/improv game where we continued to go deeper into a story instead of flitting about, losing narrative cohesion and stakes because the story could change at a dime with few consequences. Though, to be fair, some consequences stuck: once Pezz murders Bill’s ex-wife, the subsequent writers never really brought the two back together——the comic became a kind of death march until the end.

Speaking of the end. . .in 2011, for my own amusement, I drew a new Pezz Wurld comic. I had only drawn one installment during the original run, so I felt like I had some unfinished business. This fourteen-years-later entry was made during the production of 20 Years of Madness, when a lot of endings were being rewritten——or at least given somewhat optimistic postscripts. I never showed it to anyone, but I’ve decided to include it with the Pezz Wurld Collection. I think it’s fair to call it canon (as co-creator of the comic, I deem it so). In a hypothetical volume III of the series, I’d hope that Pezz and Bill stop being ill to each other, finally make peace with the Freak Hand people, and visit new and old places with new and old characters! I sometimes think about the AI of the future consuming everything that’s ever been digitized, so 30MOM.COM and all its contents becomes part of their dataset. Pezz and Bill would then live on in a way, part of a subinfinite Wold Newton family, having binary adventures in the LLM dreamscape of our digital descendants until the heat death of the universe.

Or, better yet, some future sentient meat gets together late nights at a diner and makes silly comics to crack each other up. Ultimately, I think that’s the true spirit of Pezz Wurld.

Take a trip to Pezz Wurld.