Joe Soap

Joe Soap was a photographic comic series published in the British comic book Eagle, from issue 12 (dated June 12, 1982) until issue 45 (dated January 29, 1983). It was written by Alan Grant and John Wagner, with photography by Gary Compton. Another character of the same name appeared in Cracker and The Beezer. The humorous strip featured Joseph Soaper, a self-styled hardboiled "enquiry agent", who was in reality a down-trodden and occasionally incompetent private detective. Nicknamed Soap due to his softness, Soaper spent his days mired in unprofitable or even ludicrous cases, which weren't helped by his tendency to miss obvious clues and antagonise both clients and police. The character of Joe Soap would reappear during the late 1980s, this time in drawn form, in a comic strip/puzzle feature which would be published in both the Eagle Summer Special and the Eagle Annual of that year. Titled Could You Be a Joe Soap?, readers were encouraged to read the story carefully and try to spot in both the frames and speech balloons all the clues Joe missed. In the final panel, after realising that he has got everything completely wrong, Joe would almost always end up exclaiming "Oh no! Where did I go wrong this time?", or words to that effect.

In 1994 Andrew Motion published a long poem with the title Joe Soap.

Famous quotes containing the words joe and/or soap:

    “While we were thus engaged in the twilight, we heard faintly, from far down the stream, what sounded like two strokes of a woodchopper’s axe, echoing dully through the grim solitude.... When we told Joe of this, he exclaimed, “By George, I’ll bet that was a moose! They make a noise like that.” These sounds affected us strangely, and by their very resemblance to a familiar one, where they probably had so different an origin, enhanced the impression of solitude and wildness.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.”
    —C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)