Jason Mojica was fighting insomnia one night a few years ago when he turned on the television and caught the biography Hugh Hefner, Once Upon a Time. Instead of putting him to sleep, the film made him realize that, contrary to what he’d previously thought, Playboy was more than just the sum of its body parts.
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At the time, Mojica, now 22, was putting out the fanzine No Shirt No Shoes No Service as well as mini-comics, including the minimalist Hamster Man. He was also running a record label, which released punk-rock 45s. The mini-empire, called Rocco (named for a fictional Mafia character), was a collaborative effort between Mojica, some friends from Saint Joseph High School in Westchester and people he knew from playing bass in various punk bands.
After “meeting every week for six months to decide what a magazine should be,” he and his collaborators launched Shake!, a handsome, hip, and hilarious publication whose big coup is an interview with Robert Crumb by Carole Sobocinski; Crumb also supplied the mag with several new cartoons. Released this summer, the first issue includes verbatim outtakes from Dennis Cooper’s Interview piece on Keanu Reeves a few years ago, in which the actor reveals his inability to speak in complete sentences; an eight-page fashion spread that does a send-up of the 1968 Democratic Convention riots (“Chicago ’96–the whole world is watching…so look your best!”); and a chart comparing the relative talent, relevance, and ugliness of Metallica and Black Sabbath, Pearl Jam and Led Zeppelin, and Liz Phair and Cyndi Lauper.
“One of my closest big giant goals is to open the Rocco Social Club and Youth Hostel,” he says. In the meantime, he stays afloat by helping out at his family’s Laundromat in Pilsen and working as a freelance desktop publisher.
