Here!

Children With Glue, which I edited, was the first collection of Shannon Wheeler's strips and definitely did not have a bullet hole. It appeared some two years prior to the first bullet hole comics.

(A little side note: he created his seminal character Too Much Coffee Man as a mini-comic to help promote Children With Glue)

Jab #3 featured a Too Much Coffee Man story by Shannon Wheeler and some of the earliest work by Ted Naifeh.

(Disclaimer: I conceived and plotted the story drawn by Naifeh in that issue.)

And thanks, Ryan! That's a great idea!

More likely, they never saw it. This was during the days of newsstand distribution, before comics shops were common. Most comics were sold alongside magazines at newsstands, drug stores, etc. (And oh, yeah, pterodactyls When experiments like "Savage" were published, the newsstand operators didn't know where to put them. They didn't fit (I mean physically -- they were a different size -- let alone conceptually) with the comic books, and if they were displayed at all, it was probably near the porn and crime magazines. Probably just as often, they may have been returned without ever being displayed at all (again, this was before direct distribution, so vendors could return merchandise for full credit). Later titles in similar formats (Kirby's "In the Days of the Mob" from DC, and Marvel's Savage Tales) had similar difficulties; Savage Tales had a couple of cancellations and restarts before it caught on, by which time there were enough direct sales outlets (comics shops) to give it a chance of selling.

I have vague recollection of this but I'm pretty sure an issue of an anthology published by Shannon Wheeler's Adhesive Press in the early 90's (either Jab or Eyebeam) and all the issues were actually shot through with a real .22 caliber bullet, as a parody of gimmick comics in general and the Protectors comic specifically. I didn't ever see the comic in person but I remember the ad for it featuring a sterotypical slovenly comic fan screaming in horror "It's not mint! DEAR GOD IT'S NOT MINT!". They used one bullet for every 10 comics, and poly bagged every 10th issue with the spent shell as a "variant cover".

I swear I'm not making this up.

A few years later Shannon Wheeler decided to jump a few issue numbers in the Too Much Coffee Man series (jumping from issue 6 to issue 10 I think) and then advertising the never-produced missing issues as extremely rare. He even advanced the main storyline so that it was like the missing storyline had really happened. So the bullet hole thing could have been an earlier elaborate hoax.

Could be a good item for another column!

I don't remember it covering any dialogue or significant artwork, but it wasn't an overly clever use of the hole. It didn't even make a whole lot of sense since I believe Night Mask was beaten to death, not shot. Never the less, it wasn't a bad issue. I had never read any of the characters before or since and the death scene did stir some emotion. That's more than I can say for most Image comics from the time when people would get killed with no rhyme or reason.