/ 10 December 2010

Gone fishin’ — for swimmers

Designer and illustrator Dale Halvorsen created his alter ego Joey Hi-Fi “partly out of necessity, partly out of my love for comic-books".

Designer and illustrator Dale Halvorsen created his alter ego Joey Hi-Fi ‘partly out of necessity, partly out of my love for comic-book superheroes”.

‘I was working at a design studio, doing corporate stuff by day — and my own freelance stuff at night. Pretty soon, though, Joey Hi-Fi started getting cooler work than I was. So I quit my job and took up illustrating full-time. I kept the name. A lot of my clients actually call me Joey — even my agent calls me Joey.”

These days, most of Halvorsen/Hi-Fi’s work is commissioned from London — he is represented by publishing agency Pocko, and his clients have included book publishers Hodder & Stoughton and Angry Robot, Bizarre magazine and Wired UK, as well as large brands such as Smirnoff and Hilfiger Denim. Hi-Fi has also designed several book covers for local publisher Jacana, including Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City and David Dinwoodie Irving’s African Cookboy.

In his spare time, Halvorsen, with Sam Wilson and Greig Cameron, does a podcast called Fresh Hell.

‘What happens is we watch an awful film, with a guest, and then we talk about the film together — hopefully it’s hilarious.” Shark Jesus was born during one of these recordings, when Simon van Wyk of the band The Brothers Streep was Fresh Hell’s guest. ‘We watched Sharkman,” says Halvorsen, ‘which is about a mad scientist who fuses his dying son with the genes of a shark and creates this horrible mutant sharkman. In one of the scenes, the scientist was giving this rambling speech about sharks being immortal, how they don’t grow old, and I said, ‘It’s almost like the Highlander of the sea’. Somehow that led to ‘the second chumming’, which became Shark Jesus.”

Halvorsen spent ‘about a week, on and off, working on the illustration”. When Wilson posted links to Hi-Fi’s illustration on Twitter, there was such interest in the design that Halvorsen agreed to print a limited run of Shark Jesus T-shirts. ‘It’s been quite an interesting experiment,” he says. ‘To put an illustration up online, and see how people respond to it.”

I’m still hoping he does a future version with my favourite pay-off line on the back — Swimmers repent.

For more on Joey Hi-Fi go to www.pocko.com. To order a Shark Jesus T-shirt, contact @JoeyHiFi on Twitter. To listen to the free podcast, go to iTunes and search under Fresh Hell