Sweet offerings from Mad, the National Lampoon, Cracked, and other satirical publications.
« There are no innocent bystanders… what are they doing there in the first place? » — William S. Burroughs
I’ve sung the praises of The American Bystander before, and I do believe it could still use whatever publicity it can get. And so here are some choice excerpts from the magazine’s Hallowe’en-themed issue — no. 13 (naturally), Fall 2019… starting with its unfathomably gorgeous double-spread by Armando Veve.
-RG
« In old New York it was Turkey Mike, Muggsy and the Big Six.
In San Francisco, Baby Bull, Stretch, and the Say Hey Kid.
Then came the Count, the Hackman, Jack the Ripper
and Will the Thrill.
Barry and Jeff Kent, but a dearth of nicknames,
that is, until… The Giants got the Panda. » — Scott McCaughey, “Panda and The Freak“
This year’s Major League Baseball playoffs are about to begin.
In those callow days of youth when I still cared about big league baseball — having lost interest in such matters when Montréal lost its team — the post season was over and done by, say, the 20th of October. Nowadays, with all the extra teams and trimmings, it just seems to go on and on.
I long for the days when only ball players and little kids wore baseball caps, to be honest. Ah, but the sport yet holds some fond memories for me. I recall most fervently the rather outré facets of it, fostered and amplified by the sport’s scads of iconoclasts and loonies*.
And while we’re on the subject, here are some highlights of Leaf/Donruss‘ 1988 card set Baseball’s Greatest Grossouts, illustrated by the busy yet ever-dazzling B. K. Taylor (Sick Magazine, The National Lampoon, The Muppet Show — he designed Dr. Teeth! — Sesame Street, Dynamite, Mulan…).
-RG
*splendidly — and catchily! — eulogised by supergroup The Baseball Project, featuring members of REM, The Young Fresh Fellows and Dream Syndicate. Four albums on, and their latest, Grand Salami Time!, may just be their finest hour. End of commercial, play ball!
« … so I’d work on it until three or four o’ clock in the morning — that is the time to do Loevecraftian machinations. » — Tom Sutton (2001)
If you ask me, Marvel’s attempts at humour never came off*, being both strained and generally directed at superheroes, who are ridiculous in the first place. It’s like mocking pro wrestling — What’s the point?
Marvel did half-try its clammy hand at a horror humour comic book midway through the 70s, and while much of it looked decent, it was consistently unfunny. You can give it your best Will Elder, but it won’t stick if you don’t have that rare magic comical gene.
And while I’d love to say that Tom Sutton (1937-2002) had it, I’m afraid he didn’t. But Gerald’s World was a story close to his heart, to the point where he actually remembered creating it and having fun doing so.
« Right, and I did “Gerald”, who stayed up all night watching Fay Wray or something like that. I had fun with those! You know there were people who really didn’t like those things? » (Comic Book Artist no. 12, 2001)
It’s overstuffed, but it’s brimming with mood and solid craft. Take it away, Tom!
For a dose of real-life, depressing horror, read the definitive, late-in-life Tom Sutton interview, ‘An Odd Man Out‘. I’m afraid it’s unlikely to leave you swooning with affection and goodwill for the comic book industry.
-RG
*there’s always an exception, isn’t there? I’ll proudly vouch for Scott Gray and Roger Langridge‘s Fin Fang Four stories, circa the late Oughties. Recommended? You bet.
« If you take drawing seriously, you never quite feel you’ve arrived. » — Ed Sorel
This time out, I’m pinch-hitting for my co-admin ds, who’s burning the midnight oil these days.
Just about a month ago, when I wrote a piece about Seymour Chwast (b. Aug. 18, 1931), it occurred to me that I should also devote post-haste (just in case) some column space to his fellow surviving Push Pin Studios co-founder, Edward Sorel (b. March 26, 1929). Let us celebrate the living while we can. The dead don’t appreciate nearly as well such gestures .
Opting for a freelancing career, Sorel left Push Pin, just a few years after its founding. He made it, all right, becoming one of the greatest caricaturists of the century. But he was every bit as accomplished a writer, which elevates his work above the ‘merely’ visual.
I’ve always been blown away by how deceptively easy he makes it all look, and that’s what’s so impressive: very loose on the surface, but with an underlying, laser-sharp precision. I could easily go on at some length, but Sorel’s career and art are well-documented themes. Check out, for instance, The Enigmatic Edward Sorel (From The Comics Journal), or this fine New York Times review of his recent memoir (circa 2021), Profusely Illustrated.
And now, some of the man’s work:
-RG
« I opened my magazine (What did you see?) / I saw Mr. France (What did he have?) / A girl on each shoulder (What else?) / And one in his pants » — 10cc, Sand in My Face (1973)
You may think of this post as a companion piece, a spinoff of its predecessor. I’d had for some time, in the back of my mind, the notion to showcase some obscure French ‘human sculpture’ ads, but it needed more. Comments on the previous post provided the spark.
Is there a more classic “humble immigrant makes good in the USA” yarn than that of Angelo Siciliano, born in 1892 in the tiny Italian town of Acri? The Smithsonian has told the full, colourful story, so I’ll spare you a rehashing of it.
Let’s just say that young Siciliano worked hard to overcome adversity and redeem his puny physique, and the rest is the stuff of legend. The principles of ‘dynamic tension‘ and his immortal moniker aside, Angelo’s finest brainstorm was to employ the lowly but then-ubiquitous medium of comic books to introduce his product and its natural audience to each other. Let’s take the tour!
Then here’s a parody by Lou Brooks:
-RG
« The kind of guy you’d love to have at your next cocktail party, he’s got a million hilarious anecdotes and he’s more than happy to tell them. »
In the early days of this blog, we talked about American cartoonist Arnold Roth (see « All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so. »). But this was some 6 years ago, and back then I wasn’t too generous with images. Roth has now made it to the venerable age of 94, and hopefully with us for many years to come! Even without dipping into his contributions to Harvey Kurtzman‘s Humbug and (unfortunate name association aside) Trump magazines, there is plenty of material to showcase and giggle at.
Did you know Roth not only illustrated many jazz LP covers, but was also a sax man himself? Check out this awesome gallery of some of these covers on Drew Friedman‘s blog!
Here are a few pages from Arnold Roth’s Crazy Book of Science (1971), which offers a few suitably madcap pages:
Then there’s my beloved Comick Book Of Pets (1976) – ‘found, raised, washed, curried, combed, fed and cared for in every way‘.
Read his fascinating interview with Gary Groth here.
~ ds
« … while there are lines of taste that many cartoonists will not cross, Mr. Gross leaped over them, doused them with gasoline and lit them on fire, cackling as he did. » — Daniel E. Slotnik, from Gross’s NYT obit.
A couple of weeks ago, we lost yet another of our remaining cartooning titans, hardly a surprising turn of events given the march of time… but this growing void diminishes and impoverishes both the field and the world.
Gross has been eulogised all over the place, notably in obituaries in the New York Times and The New Yorker, his Lambiek entry is lovingly detailed, so there are precious few blanks left to fill in.
All this adulation and appreciation… and yet, all of his books are out of print, so far as I can ascertain. While this does not bode well, I like to think that some savvy publisher will soon make use of Gross’ fastidiously organised files, reportedly comprising over thirty thousand individual cartoons.
For this small homage, I’ve pulled some of my favourites from his most famous (the most infamous being We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons*), 1977’s I Am Blind and My Dog is Dead. Picking favourites is plenty laborious enough, I wasn’t going to slog through seven decades of material, indeed not.
In closing, this fabulous anecdote from his National Lampoon colleague Larry “Ratso” Sloman:
« After five years, I left the Lampoon and a new executive editor took over. He called Sam into his office. “From now on, I want pencil sketches from all the artists before they do anything,” he told Sam.
“Pencils! Cartoonists don’t do no stinkin’ pencils. Rodrigues will tell you to go fuck yourself rather than show you a pencil,” Sam said. “Oh, and by the way, you can go fuck yourself.” His tenure as cartoon editor was finished. But the funny thing is, Sam was still selling cartoons to the Lampoon long after that editor had been penciled out of his own job. »
-RG
*From Gross’ first-rate 2011 Comics Journal interview, conducted by Richard Gehr: « His doorbell sports an old family name because he doesn’t want to be hassled by anyone who might have been offended by his 2008 book We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons. »
Long before Cracked* was ‘America’s Only Humor Site’ deluging its readers in hit-or-miss listicles (5 Stupid, Stupid Things Humanity Has Shot Into Space, 15 Bonkers Crossovers That Somehow Happened, and so on), it was a satirical mag consciously aping Mad Magazine‘s schtick. I don’t know if anybody is actually hanging on to fond memories of it – Fantagraphics’ Kim Thompson famously quipped ‘I don’t think I’m alone in thinking of CRACKED for most of its run as “a bunch of crap, and John Severin” – but it’s undeniable that quite a few great artists have contributed to it over the years (including the aforementioned Severin, who was a powerhouse** whatever you may think of his art).
Cracked was born in 1958 and shuddered its last in 2007 (more about said demise later). Here are a few Severin covers I like!
As a bonus, here is ‘Phooey’ Smythe as depicted by the amazing Jack Davis for the cover of Cracked no. 12 (January, 1960).
Head over Mort Todd’s website for a more extensive look at Severin’s contribution to Cracked!
~ ds
* When Cracked Magazine was sold to a group of investors in 2005, it was supposed to return in force with a new design à la ‘lad mags‘ like Maxim. Website Cracked.com launched several months later, outdid its parental unit, and when the magazine folded in 2007 (new design and all), the website stuck around, gaining popularity in exponential numbers. My only interest in it is the fact that Winston Rowntree occasionally contributes articles.
** « After being one of the founding artists for Mad, he began working for the Mad imitation Cracked in the late ’50s and stayed there for nearly 40 years, because he was paid as well as the Mad contributors and was allowed to contribute several features in every issue. In addition to the mountain of work he produced for Cracked, he was simultaneously working for Marvel, Warren and DC. Severin was the consummate professional who editors and art directors knew could draw anything, from a Roman legionary to Cracked mascot Sylvester P. Smythe, and everything in between. Like fellow EC colleagues Jack Davis and Frank Frazetta, Severin could crank out great humor comics with the same facility he drew war, Western and historical tales. » [source]
« Bonnie and Pepsi are obsessed with sex, but they’re not there for the male gaze. Their desire is frank and straightforward and more than a little demented, and it’s depicted with a bracing honesty that feels less like a political statement and more like Flenniken is reporting from the front lines with no filter, no safety net, and no intention of telling anything but the truth. »*
I first came across a Shary Flenniken‘s Trots and Bonnie strip in some random issue of National Lampoon. I can’t even really narrow down the decade**, as it ran within its pages from 1972 all the way to 1990. I was intrigued, but not enough to pursue it.
When New York Review Comics published a Trots and Bonnie collection in 2021, gathering 160 strips in a handsome hardcover volume, I was happy to finally be able to partake of T&B in a more organized fashion. One perplexing thing about this collection is that some strips were omitted due to concerns of misinterpretation***. It was apparently feared that some topics would be too controversial, or that the modern reader has lost the ability to interpret things in context. I would have liked the possibility of deciding what has or hasn’t aged well for myself. As it stands, this collection features strips offering a most varied list of topics to horrify the easily triggered (rape, racial epithets, kids getting shot, electrocuted and castrated – albeit by other kids – and pedophilia), so I am truly curious what the censored strips were about. I guess I am now doomed to collect National Lampoon issues (to be fair, the latter was home to many a great cartoonist – Rick Geary, M.K. Brown, Stan Mack, etc.)
Trots and Bonnie is a hilarious strip, and it’s also quite unsettling in the best of ways. While both cartoonists would surely be offended by this comparison, it makes me think of some of Charles Rodrigues’ work (see Charles Rodrigues’ Pantheon of Scabrous Humour) – the same electrifying unwillingness to shy away from difficult topics, although Flenniken was doing it to make a point, and Rodrigues would do it for sheer perversity. More than once while reading T&B I would start wondering how far a certain storyline would go – and it went all the way to its logical (call it immoral, call it stomach-churning…) conclusion. Just take the Dr. Pepsi’s Vasectomy Clinic from 1974, a panel from which made it as the cover of the collection –
« Two youngish girls, dressed as medical professionals, appear to be playing doctor with a young boy, who lies under a sheet, grinning blankly at the viewer while one of the girls, brandishing a pair of scissors, cheerfully communicates something to the other one. A sweet-looking dog with fancy eyelashes lies at their feet. It’s only once you know the particular strip it comes from, in which Pepsi (the shorter firecracker) and Bonnie (the taller girl) attempt to give neighbor kid Elrod a vasectomy and wind up referring to themselves as a sex-change clinic, that you blanch a bit at the art choice. There you go. That’s “Trots and Bonnie” in a nutshell. » [source]
It’s also a charming strip, with a heroïne who is refreshingly in no hurry to grow up (despite being prodded into it by her early bloomer friend Pepsi, ‘dressed in incongruously childlike pinafore paired with fishnets, a perfect metaphor for the terrifying underage sex fiend she is’). Bonnie dresses like a tomboy, hates going out with her parents, and collects sex magazines and prophylactics like other kids collect marbles. In a world of sleazy men with a creepy predilection for pre-adolescent flesh, she somehow manages to remain an innocent, and shrug off any unpleasantness in favour of a wide-eyed curiosity about everything, be it boys’ cock sizes or sci-fi movies.
In case that isn’t clear, I heartily recommend purchasing the Trots & Bonnie collection.
~ ds
* This strip is hard to write about and do justice to, and I could not do any better than Emily Flake’s truly excellent introduction to the T&B collection.
** I found it – it was Women’s Erotic Art Gallery, published in 1975.
*** Flenniken explains, ‘the things that I did that we omitted here in this book, I think we looked at those and went, “oh, that might hurt somebody’s feelings or something.” That was me being naïve when I wrote those. A lot of times I was just exploring a subject rather than having a definitive stance. People are pretty darn outrageous today, more so than me. What has changed is what people think is offensive.‘
« I’m not saying I’m cool. That’s your job. » — Happy Bunny
When it comes to Jim Benton‘s work, it seems I got in on the ground floor, thanks to a friend’s shrewdly chosen gift of the man’s first cartoon collection, ‘Dealing With the Idiots in Your Life‘, twenty-nine years ago this Christmas. Yikes!
In a way, Benton’s nearly too obvious a subject for a post: his work is everywhere you turn, but such a large audience seems to have been reached at the cost of relative anonymity. In other words, people know his work, but they may not know his name. I’m sure his name does, however, enjoy some currency with a couple of generations of younger readers familiar with his Dear Dumb Diary (nearly 10 million sold!) and Franny K. Stein (over five million sold) series.
Given his intimidatingly formidable output, I’ll stick to material from his first collection, which I like best anyhow… which is not to say, echoing what all and sundry tell Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories, that I strictly prefer “the early, funny ones“. Mr. Benton is possibly even funnier — or at least more sophisticated — today than he was at the dawn of his career, but these early cartoons are less ubiquitous than this century’s crop.
In closing, a bonus one from quite recent days. While I’m less fond of the digital tablet aesthetic of his latest work, his writing has acquired some even sharper edges. Sadly, this strip will likely be relevant only to medieval citizens of the German town of Hamelin, right?
-RG
Who's Out There? 