Sharp Hand Joe

 

“Haw haw haw hawwwww! My dreams…are your nightmares!”

 

Thought-forms are like biological life in that most species of thought-forms aren’t sapient. Most thought-forms are essentially animals. They have impulses and act on those impulses. They have hunger and so they feed on the thoughts of  other beings to sate their hunger just as some animals feed on the flesh of other beings. They do not reason. But a rare few are sapient, just as a rare few biological species like man are sapient. These thought-forms create societies for mutual benefit and form strategies for how best to obtain their food. Some negotiate. Some conquer. Some deceive entire worlds. Generally, it is seen as a great mistake by sapient thought-forms to take a life. Those that have adopted a philosophy that accepts the innate virtue to life see it as a sin. Those that do not see it as wasteful. Ghosts cannot be harvested as easily as living beings, if they can even be harvested at all. Killing a living being deprives a thought-form community of a food source, and so thought-forms that kill are punished, as killers in human society are punished.

 

It is rare to find sapient thought-forms that kill. But thought-forms reproduce with random variation as do humans. Sometimes, circumstances line up in such a way as to produce a monster, a being with strange appetites and poor impulse control.

 

Humans have their serial killers, and so do thought-forms.

 

There is something abnormal to the psychology of killer thought-forms just as there is something abnormal to the psychology of killer humans. The killer understands that their impulses are illogical, that their actions are considered reprehensible by their community. But their reason is not as strong as their impulse. They must kill, as illogical as it is, and so they do.

 

Case in point, the infamous thought-form Sharp Hand Joe. Born a thought-form of fear, he has the insatiable desire to not only frighten his prey and feast on their terror, but to kill them at the height of their fear. Even thought-forms that see humans as nothing more than cattle find him wasteful and bizarre. He has been hunted not only by human telepaths but by his own people.

 

Sharp Hand Joe naturally exists within the Bessant layer of the Astral, as do most thought-forms, but while most thought-forms travel “down” towards physical reality and the Odic layer to hunt for food, Sharp Hand Joe fears his own kind, as they would capture him if they could, and travels “up,” going deeper into the Astral, to the Oneiric layer, the layer of dreams and dreamworlds.

 

Thought-forms in the Odic layer can psychically attack prey regardless of what state of consciousness they’re in. Sharp Hand Joe can only attack prey in their dreams–cold comfort for someone coming face-to-face with him.

 

Sharp Hand Joe appears as a parody of mankind, a creature with a candy cane colored shirt and a melting face. One hand if furred, like an animal’s, and has claws which gives him his name. As a sapient thought-form, Sharp Hand Joe has little understanding of humanity beyond them being food and playthings. He communicates almost exclusively in bad jokes and cackling laughter. He punctuates every fear he summons with a pun or a wisecrack. He doesn’t seem real. Encountering him feels like running into a joke. People look for the hidden cameras. But though he may act like a goofball, don’t be fooled. Sharp Hand Joe is dangerous, and many have fallen beneath his razor phalanges.

 

Sharp Hand Joe will call upon the greatest fears of his prey to assault them. As long as his prey shows no fear, he will spare them, but once they reach emotional exhaustion, he will kill them. For Sharp Hand Joe, nothing is more pleasurable than gorging on fear and then suddenly cutting the feed. The contrast between satiation and hunger thrills him.

 

Sharp Hand Joe possessed considerable dreamshaping skill. Novice dreamwalkers are no match for him in the Oneric layer. He is also crafty, though one would never guess based on how he presents himself, and once used a team of superhuman serial killers called the Monster Maniacs in an attempt to uncover the lost calendar of the Mayan Lords of Night in the hopes of using it to lock mankind within an eternal slumber in which he would gorge himself.

 

Remember, no matter how much you laugh at him, no matter how much you think a cackling fool is trying to gut you, you can’t disbelieve the danger away.

 

…Though that being said, it is worth noting that recent events have diminished his menace considerably. While attempting to pull his usual schtick on a group of teenyboppers in Joyous Harbor, he encountered Emmy, an ERC coach and disciplinarian at Martin’s School. Emmy was able to detect his presence by the evil stench of his soul, something all onis can do, and physically entered the Oneiric layer of the Astral to give him the worst beating of his life.

 

Since thought-forms can’t be destroyed, Emmy did the next best thing and locked Sharp Hand Joe away in the (somewhat spacious) interior of her mind. Every other night, he attempts to escape as Emmy dreams, only to get thrashed, and all his plots and schemes of revenge have to be put on hold until he can escape his oni jailer.

 

(Behind The Scenes Inspiration)

 

 

Aw, Sharp Hand Joe.

Where did you come from? Where did you go? Sharp Hand Joe…

 

He’s probably the most high-profile bootleg toy and enjoyed a decent wave of popularity a little while ago. Not many bootlegs become a meme, which is a shame, because I would love to see people post about Amicable Herculean.

Sharp Hand Joe, the Thomas the Tank Engine mech, and the Evil Stick form the unholy trinity of bootlegs that have achieved meme status. Not only have people made review videos on Sharp Hand Joe, but someone even made a comedy sketch about him. It’s not my kind of humor, but I appreciate anyone making content about discarded and forgotten pop culture artifacts.

 

He’s even got a cool t-shirt graphic which you can see above. I’m not sure who made it, because it seems every t-shirt website on the planet sells shirts with it, but it’s cool. I’m not sure why they got Japanese kanji with it. I suppose it’s to signal to those not initiated in the ways of bootleg action figures and memes that what they’re looking at is a bootleg Freddy Kreuger. “Asian” is invariably linked in the mind to “bootleg toys,” even if you know next to nothing about bootleg toys. Such is the influence of cheap Hong Kong/Taiwan manufacturing.

 

But why did Sharp Hand Joe become a meme? Well, why does anything become a meme? A funny idea is in the right place at the wrong time. If it was possible to manufacture memes without the touch of the Muse, leftists would be experts in the art, rather than their meme efforts being memes themselves. But while no one can will a meme to catch fire, elements can always be identified that contribute to a meme’s success.

 

First, Sharp Hand Joe is cute. With his exaggerated toy proportions and adorable candy cane colored shirt, he’s not NOES I Freddy, he’s not even NOES V Freddy, he’s NOES VI Freddy. Incongruity is one of the atomic building blocks of comedy, and with the mainstream idea of Freddy Krueger being NOES 1-3 Fred, a Fred knock-off with the goofy dials cranked to max is going to come off as very incongruous. And then there’s the name. Sharp Hand Joe. It’s a perfect bootleg name, like if there was a Power Rangers knock-off called Rainbow Fighters. It’s a perfect “this, but lesser” name, and it gets bonus points for bringing to mind another Joe, whose association increases the humor value of Sharp Hand Joe.

 

But I think a certain video game helped popularize Sharp Hand Joe, and I don’t see people talk about its influence enough.

 

 

For those who have no idea what Dead By Daylight is, it’s an asymmetrical multiplayer game. 4 survivors try and escape from 1 killer, and over the years they’ve gotten a lot of slasher/horror IPs to guest star. It’s gradually become the Super Robot Wars of horror flicks, though it’s worth mentioning Terrordrome did it first (and better), and being unlicensed only means it has more soul than DBD ever will. DBD is a game that features Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Sadako from Ringu, Ash from Evil Dead, a Demogorgon from Stranger Things (but only if you purchased him before the license expired), a Ghostface, not actually from Scream, but from the license of the costume that Scream pays to use for each film, if you can believe it, Pyramid Head from Silent Hill, Wesker, Nemesis, William Burkin, and Hunk from Resident Evil (someone at Capcom really likes DBD), Pinhead and Chatterer from Hellraiser, Michael Myers from Halloween (he was the first licensed character), Amanda from Saw, a knight from For Honor (don’t worry, no one gets what they were thinking with that one), and Freddy Krueger…from the remake no one liked.

 

Yeah.

 

They were able to wrangle the rights for the Freddy that few remember and no one likes. Apparently, New Line is a bitch when it comes to licenses. So DBD got the lesser Freddy Kruger, the Sharp Hand Joe, if you would. And to add insult to injury, he sucked. I don’t want to go make your eyes glaze over with game mechanic details, so to keep it short, to get a survivor when you play as the killer, you got to hit them twice, pick them up, and put them on a hook, which starts a timer for when the game’s magic Lovecraft spider OC, the Entity, eats their soul. But Freddy had a mechanic where he starts in the dream world and had to put people to sleep before he could even touch them. Faithful to the films, yes, but that meant he had to perform an extra step to kill people that no one else in the game had to.

 

While the devs did eventually rework Freddy, leading him to briefly rise to top-tier, his wise was quickly quashed, leading to him dropping to middling, and Sharp Hand Joe memes are applied to him to this day.

 

While I doubt the DBD community invented the Sharp Hand Joe meme, I have no doubt they boosted it. Take a look at this video…and this video…and this video...you get the idea.

But where did he come from? Well, we have Sungold to blame. Sungold produced several knock-off lines back in the 80’s and 90’s, the most famous of which was Galaxy Heroes, a MOTU knock-off which became the most bootlegged toy line in history, likely due to the He-Man body it used for all its figures providing a good, generic “base” to work with.

 

One of their lines was simply titled Monster.

 

And you know what? The funny toy line featuring Sharp Hand Joe would be called Monster, now, wouldn’t it? The multiverse smiles.

 

Monster’s single pack line  featured several of the usual suspects of a generic monster line–a wolfman, a vampire, a Frankenstein monster, and a mummy. But there were two figures that didn’t fit the traditional Universal lineup–Killing Beast, who seems to be the Toxic Avenger (warning on the link–It’s from a Troma film, and if you don’t know why that’s important, you probably shouldn’t click) spliced with a little bit of the Tarman from Living Dead and Quasimodo, and our boy Sharp Hand Joe.

 

Freddy Krueger and the Toxic Avenger. Now that’s a crossover that should have happened but didn’t. Toxie would have been right at home with the humor of the later “powerglove” NOES installments.

 

Now here’s a little bit of trivia–Monster didn’t just have single packs. There are also two packs, and for some reason, the figures in the two packs are different from the single packs. Case in point, this is what Sharp Hand Joe looks like in the double packs:

 

 

Check it out! Ketchup and mustard Sharp Hand Joe! If he’s ever in a fighting game, this is his player 2 colors. And check out who he came with. Who is he? A zombie very upset that someone dressed him up in a skirt? Rowdy Roddy Piper from the timeline where he didn’t break the conditioning? You decide!

 

I got to say, the two-pack figures are, on the whole, more interesting than the singles. You got less Universal filler and more gross zombie dudes which speak to the late 80’s/early 90’s zeitgeist. Before Pokemon took over, slime and garbage and filth were king. The TMNT lived in a sewer. The Garbage Pail Kids were a mega hit. The Toxic Avenger cleaned up his violent act and became the Toxic Crusader. And even knock-off artists like Sungold got with the spirit of the times with a line of gross zombie-mutant-monsters…and Freddy Kruger looking like a human condiment bottle.

 

So, we’ve discussed where did he come from, but where will he go? Where will you go, Sharp Hand Joe?

Well, wherever he goes, he’ll always have a home at Capeworldcomics, eternal home of the obscure and forgotten.