One day in prison treatment for being a sex offender I had an idea: Annotated Comics.

I know. No one should ever explain jokes ...and yet, therein lay the challenge. Could I do something I'm not supposed to do and make it great? Take for example: peeing into water fountains. No one should ever do this. They'll label you a sex offender for sure! However when I am asleep and dreaming and I have to pee, I will pee into sinks, cups, bowls, bubblers, sewer drains, open water pipes; I rarely if ever pee into toilets. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Maybe that alley in your town that always smells of pee is actually where people go to fulfill their dreams! The point is: Annotated Comics could be a dream come true. Which means that like dreams they could get a little weird. That's OK. I brought candy. To share of course!

In my free time in therapy I checked out a book from the prison library on the history of Monty Python which had a poignant chapter on the nature of jokes. It said that jokes reveal the truth and that the more uncomfortable the truth the funnier the joke—it has to be--or we wouldn't be able to stomach it. The laughter physically wobbles our bellies and the quick intake of oxygen physically overdoses our brains so that we can accept the truth inside the joke. We love that truthy goodness. We just need a little sugar on top.

The idea was that the comics would be the sugar and the annotations would be the chewy truthy centers, namely the hard truths I was learning in therapy. The most obvious truth being that I was in prison. For a sex crime. Performing the mandatory therapy for chomo-wobble-heads. And I always thought I was such a nice guy! My ego wasn't ready for this truth.

Back during my first year in county jail I spent a long time thinking, “There is a reason why I am here.” It's the existential question that hits every inmate, only most of us have no clue how to answer it. Did we leave our flies open too many times after pissing into water fountains? I needed to drip melted sugar over the truth, let it harden into a lollipop, suck on it a bit, maybe share it with some kids in a sandbox somewhere, or you know—my fellow inmates. I had the idea to make comics like a confectioner makes candy and hand them out to see what others thought of them.

As it turned out the men in prison therapy with me loved the comic. I passed it around like the Sunday funnies to loud laughter. Men looked forward to the next week's installment. Friends suggested jokes to which I said I only wanted ones that taught what we were learning in MOSOP, which got them thinking along with me. Everyone was getting it and loving it. Many of these comics were suggested by friends in the program. Once started I began churning out comics day after day.

And then I hit symbolic comic number one-hundred and quit. I never even wrote the annotations. I folded up the comic and moved on to to other things. Like charcoal drawings of Ansel Adams photos, or whacking off again; I don't know--I didn't annotate it. OK, I do know, I just don't want to talk about it. The point is, I followed my normal pattern: high energy up front petering out into nothing in the end but a few drawings in a file somewhere.

Well not anymore! It's time to pee in that water fountain! It could make me famous! That or label me a sex offender for a second time. That's the thing about great ideas. You can't tell if they're horrible until you try them out. Like the idea of explaining comics. If you think this is a bad idea, well, you've already completed the first explanation. Sugar coating and everything. That wasn't so bad now was it? OK. Now who wants another piece of candy?