Paranormal Stuff

Something timely, as it were (or as it is), since almost everybody is jumping in on the 2012 end-of-the-world bandwagon (even the usually skeptical mainstream media).
Will it be the end? Probly not. Will something happen? Maybe. but as you'll see in this comic, people have known about the date for years.


by Doug Moench and Rick Parker
from THE BIG BOOK OF THE UNEXPLAINED (ISBN: 1-563-89254-5), 1997



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THE MILD ONE

Now here's a weird one. A hippie comic that actually lampoons hippies. I wonder who the target audience was on this one? Self-deprecating hippies? Regular people that just happen to buy underground hippie comix? Aliens from another planet?
I don't even know. But I do know that the majority of the "underground comix movement" was much more inexplicable than this short story.
Maybe y'all can figger it out.
ENJOY.
by WARNER (?)
from THE O.K. COMIC CO. #11, March 1973

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Five Far Out Fantasies

Gothic Blimp Works, a tabloid companion to NYC's East Village Other newspaper was one of the first of the "underground wave" of comix. For a lot of people it was their first experience with counterculture cartooning.
If you've never read to many of them, or even if you have, the best thing about underground comix is the fact that you can never expect just what kind of surreal or experimental type of stories you'll get. It's more of a surprise when you find a more traditionally constructed sequence.
Here's just five samples of the kind of things that they were groovin' on way back when.

by Lynch, Deitch, Lovenstein, Kaluta, and Wilson
from GOTHIC BLIMP WORKS #2, 1969






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MORTY THE DOG

Morty The Dog is one of those types of comics that you have to experience for yourself to truly understand. Witty, absurd, surreal, and a bunch of other adjectives barely scratch the surface of explaining what he's all about.
This is just one of the numerous independently produced comics that was done throughout the 80s and 90s. There's lots more out there somewhere in the world, as well as quite a few of them scanned and reproduced over at the official site. One drawback to Mr. Willis' site is that there doesn't seem to be any tagging system in place, which makes it complicated to dig through the archives. But if you like a good scavenger hunt, you'll find a bunch of comix gems like this one mixed in with random photos, blog posts, and other stuff.

by Steve Willis
from MORTY - THE DOG WHO WALKS LIKE A MAN, 1987












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Big Daddy And The Rat Fink

Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth is best known for his custom car designs. Model kits of his concept cars frequently sold out during the 60s. He's also as well known for his bizarre T-shirt designs that usually featured a grotesque looking character, oversized, driving a souped-up hot rod. The most popular of those characters was a Mickey Mouse parody named Rat Fink.

Some typical Roth T-shirt designs:





What Roth is not usually as well known for is his handful of comic releases. He released 4 issues of a comic magazines in the 60s, a few in the 80s, and then a couple of reprint volumes in the 90s (some are available at ratfink.com).
This story is from one of the early issues from the 60s, and tells the previously untold origin of Big Daddy himself (art by Mel Keefer):






To close out this post, here's a couple of one pagers. The first is by Roth himself, the second is from the series of comic strips that appeared in the back pages of some punk rock magazine in the 80s.



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The Transformation Of Dr. Cline

During the underground age of comics (which fits in somewhere between silver age and bronze age, but without an established time frame), anybody could do just about whatever they wanted between the covers of a cheaply printed magazine. The established rules went straight out of the windows (which were usually left open to let the smoke out).
This guy whose work we're looking at today, however, seemed content to stick to the EC formula. The only things that really stick out is his rather uniquely personal art style and fondness for using teddy bears as the main characters in his stories.
A larger collection of his work is available from Fantagraphics, if you like what you see here.

by Rory Hayes
from BOGEYMAN COMICS #1, 1969






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Another story HERE
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