Dave Louapre and Dan Sweetman have known each other since high school and have been working together as a creative team since college. Their first collaboration, a weather machine, failed miserably. Their second, a photon-driven “death ray,” actually made the weather machine look like a success. It was at this point that the pair turned to comics, producing a one-panel strip called The Wasteland, which ran in the L. A. Weekly and Fangoria magazine, to name but a couple. Well, actually, to name both. While unable to control cloud patterns or rain death from above, The Wasteland proved a valuable tool in confusing the masses and getting attention, albeit very little.

Soon, Dave and Dan expanded their ideas into a series of self-produced illustrated stories, which they sold on consignment in local book stores. This led to a quasi-lucrative deal with upstart D.C. Comics imprint Piranha Press, where the happy go lucky duo found a home for the next three years creating Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, turning out a story a month and gaining a respectable level of positive media response from the likes of MTV, Mother Jones, Sassy, and The Nation. In its first year, Beautiful Stories garnered five nominations for the coveted Eisner award – a comics industry biggie. Unfortunately, this happened to be the year that the computer tallying the ballots blew up (or something like that – we were never really clear on what actually happened), and the awards were cancelled. That luck has followed Dan and Dave ever since. Boo-yah!

Beautiful Stories stopped publishing in 1992 when the entire Piranha staff was struck by a meteorite on their way to the welfare office. Dan and Dave both entered the realm of Hollywood, with Dave writing screenplays as penance for killing all those people in a past life (he still maintains that playground had no business being so close to what he thought was the road), while Dan has become a top storyboard artist in the industry, working closely with the likes of Mel Gibson and Sam Raimi (not the actual people, just their “likes”), and even doing some second-unit directing on
Spiderman II: Electric Boogaloo.

The sorry pair is currently manufacturing animated shorts adapted from the Cotton Candy Autopsy stories that were published under the BSFUC umbrella and are posted on this very site. They are actively seeking a republishing deal for Beautiful Stories, and are currently in discussions, yet again, with good-hearted humans trying to bring BSFUC to the big incredible world of television.

May God have mercy on their souls!