"Sometimes I put in about eighty hours a week," he said. "No one's demanding it, I'm just a freak who likes to work. At the end it gets pretty stressful trying to get so many things done. Last night I worked until eight in the morning." Joe works with a team, but he does the voices of Radiskull (a low, menacing growl) and Devil Doll (a high-pitched childlike squeak), as well as all the music. Because most of the songs are rap duets, he has to lay down each track separately. The result is six, soon to be seven, songs that rock, with lyrics that stick in your mind for days after hearing them, inevitably making you return to the site.

Sparks said that his ideas for episodes are planned out currently to the tenth episode, but that details come spontaneously during production. In fact, his creative imagination brings so many ideas that he can only use about an eighth of them. The songwriting process varies. A song might come in an hour, but then again, according to Sparks, it might have to be rewritten and tinkered with for days.

Sparks has been working for Macromedia for two years, starting as an "artist in residence," but before that was a game designer for ten years, fusing his artistic skills with programming and multimedia knowledge. The initial creation of Radiskull and Devil Doll was purely spontaneous.

"I got invited to meet Mike Judge in September of 1999, and he was my idol. I always loved Beavis and Butthead," Sparks said. "I decided to learn Flash before the meeting."

Sparks drew a skull with a punk-rock attitude and then a little devil with a red plush body and a big cute grin. He learned to animate his cartoons, and then the meeting with Judge was pushed back another week. So Sparks decided to keep going, and wrote the song for the first episode.

The meeting with Mike Judge never happened, but Sparks made a webpage for Radiskull and Devil Doll anyway, and showed it at Macromedia. When he checked the server logs a few months later, he was happily shocked to find that 100,000 people had logged onto the site. Shockwave, inspired by the show's popularity, decided to run it. That was about ten months ago. Since then Radiskull and Devil Doll have gained a cult following, especially among university students. Sparks uses a variety of software, including Macromedia's Flash 4, Freehand 8, SoundEdit 16, Fireworks 2, Photoshop 5, Dreamweaver 2, and many more. Interested animation artists can find detailed production notes at joesparks.shockwave.com.

So what's in the future for Radiskull and Devil Doll? Sparks said he'd love to do a feature film starring the freaky duo, or get into television. There has been some talk between shockwave.com and other entities about these possibilities. Whatever happens, thousands of fans of all ages will be watching.

Oh, and as for those sunglasses-they're Black Fly wraparounds that they don't make anymore, and so comfortable that Joe sometimes forgets he's wearing them, for all the fans that wondered.