Paul Buhle : Comix Artist Spain Rodriguez (1940-2012)

Spain Rodriguez: Transforming comics. Image from CBLDF.
The passing of a comix pioneer:
Spain Rodriguez (1940-2012)

By Paul Buhle / Dissent / December 12, 2012

In Trashman: Agent of the Sixth International, the signature saga of his early years, Rodriguez's revolutionaries took revenge on a truly evil American ruling class.

We are now so far from the 1960s and ’70s that the crucial locations, personalities, and moments of one very popular art form’s transformation have been largely forgotten. Spain Rodriguez, with a handful of others (the best remembered are happily still with us: Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, Bill Griffith, Kim Deitch, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, and Sharon Rudahl, to name a few), pushed the comics agenda so far forward that no return to the limitations of superheroes and banal daily newspaper strips would ever be possible.

Comic art, belatedly recognized in The New York Times (and assorted museums) as a real art and not a corrupting children’s literature, owes much to them.

Spain (his birth name was Manuel, his father a Spanish immigrant, his mother an Italian-American artist) grew up in Buffalo, New York, a rebellious working-class kid who wore long sideburns and was impressed by the civil rights movement. He dropped out of art school in Connecticut and, after returning to Buffalo and working a factory job with a motorcycle gang engagement, landed in New York in time for the efflorescence of Underground Comix (styled with an “x” to distinguish itself) in a comic tabloid offshoot of the East Village Other.

His colleagues were a strangely mixed crew, all of them old enough to have been influenced by EC Comics, the most politically liberal and artistically accomplished of the old comics industry, and the one hardest hit by the congressional hearings of the McCarthy era. (As with attacks on the Left, every charge of subversion and perversion hid Middle-American outrage: these were Jews corrupting innocent American youth.)

In a sense, every “underground” artist of these early days sought revenge in the name of comic art, and realized it through the depiction of sex, violence, and anti-war and anti-racist sentiment unthinkable in what remained of the mainstream. Sex and violence, lamentably, became chief attractions to many readers, recalling the “headlights” (aka “sweater girl”) crime and horror comics of the late 1940s, albeit with a left-wing or libertarian ambience.

The whole comix artistic crowd moved to San Francisco around 1970, joining Robert Crumb and a few others already there, part of the acid-rock, post–Summer of Love setting. Underground comix, replicating the old kids-comics format but now in black and white, grew up alongside the underground press, whose reprinting of comix created the market for the books.

Crumb was the artist whose work sold the best, in the hundreds of thousands, but Spain was widely regarded as the most political. He was heavily influenced by the most bohemian of the EC comics world, wild man Wallace Wood, whose sci-fi adventures depicted civilizations recovering from atomic war and whose Mad Comics stories assaulted the 1950s commercialization of popular culture. Wood’s dames were also extremely sexy, too overtly sexy for the diluted satire of the later Mad Magazine.

Spain Rodriguez. Photo by Sean Stewart / Babylon Falling.
Trashman: Agent of the Sixth International was Rodriguez’s signature saga in these early years, serialized in underground papers, comix anthologies, and eventually collected in comic book form as Subvert Comics. These revolutionaries took revenge on a truly evil American ruling class in assorted ways, many of them violent, but they also had fun and sex, and were subject to many self-satirizing gags, in the process.

By the middle 1970s, his work had broadened into more social and historical themes, often with class, sex, and violence highlighting his points. Histories of revolutions and anti-fascist actions (and all their complexities) inspired some of his closest reading of real events, but he had no fixed point on the left-wing scale.

He admired and drew about anti-Bolshevist anarchist leader Nestor Makhno and also anti-Stalinist Spanish anarchist Durruti, but he also drew about Red Army members facing death fighting the Germans, and so on. (Several of these pieces are now reprinted in Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection, an anthology from that 1980s series, just published by PM Press.)

In recollections of the internal conflicts among comix artists, sometimes pitting feminists against male-dominated circles, Rodriguez is remembered as having been unusually helpful and egalitarian, a memory that contrasts curiously with his sometimes sado-masochistic plot lines but not so curiously with the gender-equality of the sybarites (“Big Bitch” was Trashman’s female counterpart, the tough working-class broad with sex cravings for weaker men).

He poked and prodded San Francisco’s self-image as a haven of liberated sex, sometimes making his younger self a player on the scene. He also helped set in motion the vital murals movement in San Francisco’s Mission District, but was likely best known on the West Coast for his many posters of San Francisco Mime Troupe openings.

Spain Rodriquez lasted long enough to see his work in square covers (if not often hard covers), his unique and quasi-realistic modernism preserved for generations ahead.

The validation of comic art from near the end of the century onward -- Spiegelman’s Maus and left-wing lesbian Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home high among the evidence of artistic achievement -- found Rodriguez with a Salon series, “The Dark Hotel,” and several books of his own. Devil Dog, a biography of disillusioned Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, and Nightmare Alley, an adaptation of the classic noir novel, are easily among the best. Che, his graphic biography of Che Guevara, reached the furthest, with editions published everywhere from Latin America to Europe, Japan, and Malaysia.

At the time of his death, Rodriguez was amid “Yiddish Bohemians,” a strip about Jewish-American puppeteers during the 1920s and ’30s, in what would be the last in a stunning series of collaborations with playwright-professor Joel Schechter. Rodriguez had started a Woody Guthrie poster for an upcoming Bay Area concert and, had he lived, would have drawn a history of the 2003 San Francisco hotel strike.

After more than 40 years (and the disappearance of well over 90 percent of many little-remembered artists’ work in yellowing pulp), the impact of the Underground Comix world remains more a matter of style than substance, daring more than narrative and artistic content. This is unfortunate, because so many artists had particular contributions worthy of note, worthy of reprinting for the sake of comic art alone.

Spain Rodriquez lasted long enough to see his work in square covers (if not often hard covers), his unique and quasi-realistic modernism preserved for generations ahead. That he never lost his political vision or his sense of humor should go without saying, but those of us lucky enough to see him teach or to be taught by him felt the deep impact of his humanism as well.

Rodriguez died at home in San Francisco, with his wife, Susan Stern, a documentary filmmaker, and his daughter, Nora Rodriguez, by his side. A retrospect of his work, including a short documentary film made by his wife, is now in place at the Burchfield Penny Art Center in Buffalo, the second exhibit in Buffalo to honor this improbable local hero.

[Cultural historian Paul Buhl is professor emeritus at Brown University. He publishes radical comic books and graphic novels. Buhle was the editor of Che and is co-editor of the anthology Bohemians, to appear in 2013, with two strips by Rodriguez. Read more articles by Paul Buhle on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / C.E. McAuley : Jonah Raskin's Bio of 'Pedagogical Pilgrim' James McGrath

Jonah Raskin's biography of artist/teacher James McGrath was designed by Rag Blog art director James Retherford.
Pedagogical pilgrim:
Jonah Raskin's new bio of
artist/teacher James McGrath

Raskin's new biography is no simple valentine from one teacher to another. It is an in-depth and compelling look, not only about McGrath’s life journey, but also the sacrifices he made along the way.

By C.E. McAuley / The Rag Blog / December 7, 2012

[James McGrath: In A Class By Himself by Jonah Raskin. Preface by Bill Ayers; book design by James Retherford. (2012: Santa Rosa, CA: McCaa Books); Paperback; $18.]

Teaching, when done correctly, is an all-consuming passion. There is a popular saying from a popular book: “Teach like your hair’s on fire.” In author Jonah Raskin’s new biography, James McGrath: In A Class By Himself, he writes about a teacher who taught like his life was on fire.

Raskin should know. Beyond being a prolific author, poet, and journalist -- Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, has also written biographies of Jack London, Allen Ginsberg, and Abbie Hoffman -- he was a professor for over 30 years, teaching topics ranging from literature to media law and everything in between.

He himself has a cadre of dedicated former students whom he has mentored over the years and he recently became the first ever Professor Emeritus in the history of the Communication Studies Department at Sonoma State University. But his new biography is no simple valentine from one teacher to another. It is an in-depth and compelling look, not only about McGrath’s life journey, but also the sacrifices he made along the way.

Early on McGrath discovers himself as an artist and finds that his creative spark lights up not only his life but what would become his teaching as well. It would be a spark that would become an all-consuming flame, though. One that would destroy his relationship with his wife and strain his relationship with his children.

Some of the relationships are now under repair. It’s something McGrath doesn’t like to talk much about -- but his absence of words speaks volumes about the sacrifices that many teachers and artists have to make for their teaching and art and for teaching as an art.

McGrath grew up in Depression-era Tacoma, Washington. Though he first considered life as a geologist and studied at the Central Washington College of Education, a poor algebra grade led him to reassess and a $1,500 scholarship to the University of Oregon at Eugene helped McGrath find his true artistic path. While getting his M.F.A. from the University of Washington McGrath began teaching at Columbia High School and his legendary journey began.

And when teaching and art fused together McGrath found his life’s purpose. Raskin deftly captures McGrath’s journeys around the globe in what he calls “the life and times of an extraordinary American teacher, mentor, cultural ambassador, and Pedagogical pilgrim.”

McGrath with students at Hopitutuqaki (the Hopi School), Hotevilla, Arizona. Image from James McGrath: In a Class By Himself.
Traveling the world teaching art, making art, and mentoring generations of students may sound inspiring to some -- and it is -- but Raskin does not shy away from describing McGrath’s intensity, toil, and sacrifice as he struggles to bring art and the ways of creativity to students from Asia to Europe and the American Southwest where he became a leader in the Institute of American Indian Arts.

McGrath found himself working across cultures and finding a place where cultures can be shared and honored, and he was also a teacher and administrator at U.S. Army bases across the world.

As a teacher and advisor in the Institute of American Indian Arts, McGrath, the program, and its students rose to national prominence -- garnering the attention of presidents and the national press of the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time when the American Indian Rights movement held the national attention, a time of social foment and revolutionary ideas and ideals.

But even this, perhaps McGrath’s crowning achievement, was not without controversy as he was a Caucasian teaching and helping to bring American Indian art to the forefront. Despite that, his students considered him to be the same as them -- just as his students in Asia and Europe did. It was in that sense that McGrath’s philosophy of creating -- from the center out and expressing oneself genuinely whatever the cost -- transcended racial and ethnic boundaries.

And, as he aged, it also transcended the boundaries of time as his students became artists and teachers themselves. It is not too much to say that McGrath, who is still creating today, is revered as a friend and legend among those who have been a part of his teaching -- and it is a testament to the man’s personal philosophy of art as life and teaching art as life.

Raskin has done an assiduous job researching McGrath and interviewing McGrath and those who have been in his sphere of influence for decades. His compelling writing style brings readers into a book about someone they, likely, have never heard of but need to hear about. As such, this book is a must read for teachers and students.

The world is filled with bad teachers. And good teachers. But, it’s not filled with many extraordinary teachers or extraordinary biographers. And I believe a book about an extraordinary teacher, such as this one, could only be written by another extraordinary teacher and extraordinary writer. Raskin fills both roles with aplomb.

Far too often people want to read biographies about people they’re already familiar with. Most often political figures like Churchill or Kennedy and entertainers or Nobel laureates. And something can be learned from doing that.

But it’s in hearing the stories of the unsung greats -- such as James McGrath -- that people can come to learn the power of one individual, one regular man who became an extraordinary teacher, and who has made a positive difference in the world.

This is an all-true-tale of a teacher who is still teaching after 60 years and continuing to inspire generations. Jonah Raskin has given us a special gift by telling us the story of James McGrath. And I hope one day someone will tell his story just as well.

[Charles “Chip” McAuley is an instructor in the Communication Studies department at Sonoma State University and adviser to the STAR, Sonoma State University’s award-winning student newspaper. He is also a widely-published freelance writer.

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BOOKS / Doug Ireland : Iconic Artist Grant Wood Was Man of Many Closets

A man of many closets:
New biography of Grant Wood
opens all the doors

By Doug Ireland / The Rag Blog / October 27, 2010

[Grant Wood: A Life by R. Tripp Evans (Knopf, 2010); Hardcover, 401 pp, $37.50.]

Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” is the most recognizable American painting.

Of all the paintings in the world, only the Mona Lisa has been more parodied. As Tripp Evans notes in his groundbreaking new biography of the artist, when it was first exhibited in Chicago in 1930, it made an instant global celebrity out of Wood: “Never in the history of American art had a single work captured such immediate and international recognition; by the end of 1930, the painting had been reproduced in newspapers around the globe... Never before, either, had a painting generated such widespread curiosity about its artist.”

“American Gothic” was considered by most critics of that day as something of a national self-portrait, and it made Wood the icon of a new native American, regionalist art. The New Yorker wrote at the time, “As a symbol Wood stands for the corn-fed Middle West against the anemic East, starving aesthetically upon warmed-over entrees dished up by Spanish chefs in Paris kitchens. He stands for an independent American art against the colonialism and cosmopolitanism of New York.”

Wood, who was born in the small town of Anamosa, Iowa, in 1898 and spent nearly all his life painting in the Hawkeye State, depicting its countryside and inhabitants, was said to stand for the flinty, manly virtues of heartland America. The New York Times proclaimed that Wood, who styled himself a “farmer-painter,” had earned his “toga virilis” for, as Evans summarizes it, “ending Americans’ perilous fascination with impressionism.”

Wood himself encouraged this anti-intellectual, quintessentially American, and rigorously heterosexual version of his persona and the origins of his art. He famously declared in a newspaper interview, “All the really good ideas I’ve ever had came to me while I was milking a cow,” adding, “You don’t get panicky about some ‘-ism’ or other while you have Bossy by the business end. Your thoughts are realistic and direct.”

The public image Wood constructed of himself even extended to the way he dressed. As one prominent critic eulogized him on his death in 1942, “In past years artists adopted smocks for their own... the working attire of French peasants. Grant Wood wore the work clothes of his own country when he painted, overalls such as a farmer or mechanic would choose.”

But all of this was an elaborate charade. As Evans, an openly gay art history professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, reveals in this meticulously researched biography, Wood had made a careful study of impressionism during four extended trips to Europe and had been a student for two years at the prestigious Académie Julian in Paris, where he steeped himself in the impressionist and post-impressionist masters.

Although he spent his earliest years on the family farm, he spent most of his boyhood time hidden away in a dark basement, his refuge where he could draw and paint, sequestered from the disapproval of his distant and authoritarian father, who considered such artistic proclivities “sissified.”

His father died when he was quite young, and he then moved to the bustling metropolis of Cedar Rapids with his mother and sister, with whom he lived there for most of the rest of his life until, as part of his camouflage, he contracted a loveless, unconsummated, unhappy, and brief marriage.

Far from being inspired by milking cows -- an activity he only engaged in occasionally in his young boyhood -- Wood told his wife that he felt “disgusted and dirty” by the act. She would recount, “He told me how embarrassed he was at the time because he was sure that no matter how much he bathed, he must carry with him the smell of the manure which permeated his clothes from working around livestock.”

And as a young man Wood wouldn’t have been caught dead in overalls -- he was, in fact, something of a dandy, as photographs in this copiously illustrated volume from Wood’s “bohemian,” European period clearly show. His earliest vocations activities were not in farming but as a jewelry designer, interior decorator, and in theatrical production. One friend described the shy Wood’s voice as sounding “like the fragrance of violets made audible.”

Grant Wood’s classic "American Gothic" (1930) and his painting of a nude male. Photos courtesy Knopf / Gay City News.
Wood’s previous biographers have turned a blind eye to the demonstrable fact that he was a deeply closeted homosexual. Evans documents the always-chubby Wood’s infatuations (many of them apparently unrequited and sublimated into parental role-playing) with an unending series of slim, dark-haired young men who were his students, protégés, and secretaries. As the bartender in a famous Cedar Rapids watering hole Wood favored put it, “Wood was only gay when he was drunk.”

Evans has even unearthed numerous oblique but unmistakable references to Wood’s sexual orientation in the Iowa newspapers of the 1920s. As he writes, “Given the later insistence upon Wood’s sturdy masculinity and embodiment of Midwestern morality, it is surprising to note the frequency and candor of these early references to his homosexuality.”

To take just one example, Wood’s friend MacKinlay Kantor (who won later fame as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter) wrote in his gossip column for the Des Moines Tribune-Capital, emphasizing Wood’s bachelorhood: “Pink of face and plump of figure, he was most nearly in character one night when he appeared at a costume party dressed as an angel -- wings, pink flannel nightie, pink toes, and even a halo, supported by a stick thrusting up his back.”

Not only did Kantor link Wood’s costume to common stereotypes of the “fairy,” but after comparing Wood to Snow White, who lay imprisoned in a glass coffin awaiting her prince’s kiss, Kantor wrote: “The front door of his apartment is made of glass, but it’s a coffin lid. OOOOOOoooooh!” Kantor then exhorted the “boys” among his readers to “look [Wood] over.” The meaning of all this is quite evident, unless one doesn’t want to see.

The fact that things like this had appeared in print drove Wood even further into his closet in the late 1920s, leading him to adopt the overalls and “farmer-painter” pose to bolster its locked door. It was also at this time that he turned away from his early painting style, indisputably marked by his study of impressionists, to the gothic realism that, as Evans demonstrates, bore the imprint of the Dutch and German masters he had absorbed while studying in Germany.

Evans is brilliant in documenting how gender assignments were made to various artistic styles, and how impressionism was considered a “feminine” art form. Moreover, the new school of regionalist, “authentic” American art of “U.S. scene” painting, of which Wood became a symbol in the 1930s after the stunning success of “American Gothic” -- and which was launched as a media fetish with a 1934 Time magazine cover story written on orders of its conservative nationalist publisher Henry Luce -- was impregnated with an explicitly xenophobic, anti-modernist, and extremely homophobic ideology.

Thus, Wood’s famous comrade-in-arms in this movement, the painter Thomas Hart Benton, wrote a 1935 essay entitled “Farewell to New York,” which Evans rightly describes as a “homophobic diatribe.” In it, Benton roared that the city had "lost its masculinity” since the start of the Depression, because it had been polluted by

the concentrated flow of aesthetic-minded homosexuals into the various fields of artistic practice... far be it from me to raise any hands in moral horror over the ways and tastes of individuals. If young gentlemen, or old ones either, wish to wear women’s underwear and cultivate extraordinary manners it is all right with me. But it is not all right with the art which they affect and cultivate. It is not all right when, by ingratiation or subtle connivance, precious fairies get into positions of power and judge, buy, and exhibit American pictures on a base of nervous whim and under the sway of those overdelicate refinements of taste characteristic of their kind.

To cover himself, Wood endorsed Benton’s queer-bashing declaration.

The movement’s most ardent advocate among art critics -- one might even call him its ideologue -- Thomas Craven, in his 1934 book Modern Art: The Men, the Movement, the Meaning, had earlier blown the same trumpet. “The artist is losing his masculinity,” Craven growled.

The tendency of the Parisian system is to disestablish sexual characteristics, to merge the two sexes in an androgynous third, containing all that is offensive in both. Once [male artists] contract la vérole Montparnasse -- the pox of the Quarter -- they become jaded and perverse... They found magazines in which their insecurity is attested by the continual insulting of America, hymns to homosexuality and miscegenation... It is this sort of life that captures American youth and emasculates American art.

Not only was homosexuality illegal and known homosexuals jailed or condemned to horrific “treatments” by psychiatric ghouls in mental hospitals, but the very art movement that had made Wood a central figure was unrelenting in its condemnation of same-sex orientation. Wood’s exposure would have threatened not only his reputation but his income as well.

It was in this context that in 1935 he contracted a marriage with a former actress, Sarah Moxon, to the great surprise of his friends and family. But he soon alienated Sara by falling in love with her handsome, 20-something son from a previous marriage, installing this rather louche and exploitative if decorative young chap in their home, and lavishing money and attention on him, even considering adopting him at one point.

At the same time, Wood also kept a secretary, Paul Rinard, another in the series of slightly-built, dark-haired young men with whom the painter surrounded himself, and with whom he was also in love -- albeit unrequited. All these boys under one roof eventually were too much for Sara, and the brief marriage ended in acrimony.

There were several points in Wood's life at which exposure of his homosexuality seemed imminent. In the late 1920s, he was blackmailed by a young man over their relations. And though he piled layers of protective cover on his public image, Wood was stifling in his closet, and from time to time this was reflected in his painting.

In 1937, he produced for sale by mail a lithograph, “Sultry Night,” that showed a handsome, full frontal nude man beside an outdoor bathtub pouring a bucket of water in a slow cascade over his head. Declaring the work to be an example of pornography, the censors at the U.S. Postal Service barred its publisher from distributing it or featuring the image in its catalogues (although not banning the many female nudes the publisher carried).

Wood was forced to publicly defend the “innocence” of the work as a recalled scene from his boyhood, something Evans demonstrates was more than unlikely.

Evans’ book is much more than a biography -- it is also a lesson in looking and seeing. Evans is blessed with a felicitous gift of description that makes his dissections and deconstructions of Wood’s art not only enlightening but also enjoyable. And as an openly gay man, Evans is not blind to the multitude of clues in Wood’s paintings that signal the artist’s queer sensibility and even homoerotic sentiments that most previous critics have ignored.

Even those not steeped in the arcana of art criticism will find Evans’ descriptions of what the paintings mean an engrossing read, all the more so because these works are included among the book’s many illustrations. Readers may judge for themselves whether or not his interpretations are on track -- as I think they are.

Wood’s reputation fell with the rise of abstract art in the post-World War II period, but a revival of interest in him began in 1983 with an exhibition that, as Evans notes, “coincided nicely with the dawn of the Reagan era. In Wood’s sunny, presumably uncomplicated imagery, conservative art critics could have found no more perfect illustration of President Reagan’s relentless optimism and call to ‘traditional American values.’”

But in Grant Wood: A Life, Evans reveals the dark ironies in Wood’s portrayals of heartland America and its culture that he traces back to Wood’s love of H. L. Mencken, whose contempt for that backwater culture and its “booboisie” he shared. It is evident in Wood’s work for those who wish to see it, and Evans is a reliable guide.

In the book’s epilogue, Evans pays tribute to Paul Rinard, Wood’s last secretary, who entered politics after serving in the navy in World War II. Rinard became a powerful backroom policy broker, first with Iowa’s liberal governor Harold Hughes in the 1960s, then joining the staff of Senator John Culver, who at Rinard’s funeral in 2000 called him “the intellectual godfather of Iowa’s progressive agenda for half a century.”

From the 1970s on, Rinard was “a defender of gay and lesbian civil rights -- a courageous stance that struck even Culver’s younger staffers as radical... It would be difficult to explain Rinard’s commitment to this issue,” writes Evans, “especially during a period when its advocates were so scarce, without taking into account his profound loyalty to Wood. The artist might have led a far happier life, Rinard believed, had he been able to live in a more authentic way -- safeguarded from the fear of losing his job, his reputation, or both, for being exposed as a homosexual.”

Gay activist friends of mine from Iowa who knew and greatly appreciated Rinard tell me that Evans paean to him is not misplaced.

Tripp Evans’ book is not only sure to change the way the art world looks at Grant Wood and his work, it is also a valuable contribution to this country’s cultural history, and one that shows the insidious homophobia that has often shaped that history. This is a splendid, beautifully written book.

[Doug Ireland is a longtime radical political journalist and media critic and an openly gay man. His work has appeared in many U.S. and French publications, including the New York Post (back in its liberal days), the Village Voice, New York magazine, The Nation, Bakchich, the Parisian daily Liberation, the LA Weekly, and Gay City News, the largest lesbian and gay weekly in New York City, where this article also appears.]

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Paul Buhle : Pekar and Kupferberg were Oblique Jewish Intellectuals

Harvey Pekar (left) in 2003, and Tuli Kupferberg in 1968. Photos from Getty Images / Forward.
Harvey Pekar and Tuli Kupferberg:
They looked at the world from an oblique angle

By Paul Buhle / The Rag Blog / July 28, 2010

See "On the grumpy but sweet Harvey Pekar," Below.

Harvey Pekar and Tuli Kupferberg died on the same day, July 12, and shared much, including peacenik politics, a strong sense of humor, and a passion to carve art out of the fragments of popular culture. But they were almost an American Jewish generation apart, a detail that now seems difficult to grasp entirely, but is still crucial.

Kupferberg, born in 1923, was a real bohemian of the pre-beatnik era, a hipster whose leap off a New York bridge in an attempted suicide famously appeared, without his name, in Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem “Howl.” He once told me that he had become an anarchist in the mini-boom of postwar anti-bomb, anti-government sentiment among intellectuals and artists on both coasts.

He recalled being a young man bitterly opposed, from the left, to Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate of 1948. Meanwhile, Pekar, then 9, was following his mother’s lead, passing out Wallace leaflets in his Cleveland Jewish neighborhood. He shared his Bialystok-raised parents’ joy at the birth of Israel.

The two future artists were both shaped by the Depression and by Franklin Roosevelt, two key influences upon practically any American Jew of those years. But Kupferberg had briefly become a Trotskyist even before Roosevelt died, while Harvey remained, till the end of his life, at one with his family memory that the great leader had saved them all personally, as well as the country, from disaster.

Kupferberg and Pekar were both college dropouts -- but with a difference. Bright and focused, born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Kupferberg graduated cum laude from Brooklyn College in 1944 (psychology and English), and hit the wall only as he began working on an advanced degree in sociology, at The New School. After that, as he recalled, he faced with equanimity a long and productive life as a luftmensch, a person who makes his living, as it were, “from the air.”

By contrast, in one of Pekar’s several autobiographical comic art books, “The Quitter,” he bitterly regrets dropping out of college after only two semesters in his native Cleveland. He couldn’t get his head around schoolwork, and slipped into bohemianism almost by accident. The two were evidently major jokesters as schoolchildren, which may have marked them out as a particular Jewish type, prepared to look at the world from an oblique angle when offered the possibility of getting friendly laughs.

Despite these differences, Kupferberg and Pekar were deeply interested intellectually, and even more deeply involved personally, in urbanism, the decay and sometime revival of the neighborhood for good or ill. Through his life’s work there, Kupferberg made himself into an iconic figure of the Lower East Side, latterly fighting gentrification, just as Pekar was forever in Cleveland, actually moving to one neighborhood from another across several decades, ahead of the bulldozers and the urban renewal that never renewed much of anything.

Their work -- in Kupferberg’s case, words, drawings and music -- was full of neighborhood people, all types, storefronts, crowds, friends (in Harvey’s case, his own first two wives, who were often not so friendly) and a sensibility all their own.

They hit upon art forms whose uniqueness will remain, long after their deaths, the signature of a time and place, hinting always, but in highly curious ways, at something larger.

Drawing by Tuli Kupferberg.

Kupferberg began writing poetry early and, if he had agreed to the definition, would be rightly classified as a Beat Poet in what might be called the Ferlinghetti or City Lights school: humane, free form, and uncensored, above all raging against the madness of the Cold War arms race. In 1958, with his future wife, Sylvia Topp, he brought out Birth, a literary magazine that would publish the likes of LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima, among others. Living off B Street, selling 1001 Ways To Live Without Working, a beatnik humor book of his own, on the street, he ran into another poet, Ed Sanders.

The two of them opened the Peace Eye Bookstore in 1964, and were the most famous of The Fugs, one of the delightfully outrageous rock groups of the coming era. The Fugs performed endlessly at peace demonstrations and other venues. Paul McCartney foiled autograph hounds by signing himself “Tuli Kupferberg.” The Fugs wore themselves out by 1970, but Kupferberg went on and on, performing in many ways, often as inauspiciously as sending out packets of his photocopied cartoons to friends (I was one of them). Peace and resistance never failed as themes.

Pekar famously met cartoonist R. Crumb in the early 1960s, and gradually came to the conclusion that anything, even the Russian novels he loved so much, could be done in comic form. His long-running series of comics, “American Splendor,” was launched in 1976 (he, too, began as a self-publisher) and continued on almost until his death, in one format or another.

Pekar went through dozens of artists, giving them dialogue and precise directions (in the form of comic panels with stick figures). He couldn’t pay them much: Making his own living never ceased to be a struggle. But the award-winning, 2003 film American Splendor rendered him a public personality, especially on campus, where lecture fees and book sales finally gave him a modicum of financial security. It was long overdue.

One of Kupferberg’s own favorite strips (I received it several times) showed a grandmother with Kupferberg as a child. In one panel he is whistling; in the next, Granny warns, “Yidishe kinder fayfn nit!” [“Jewish children don’t whistle!”] It was obviously a fond, oddball memory of another time. Pekar also had his connection to the culture of the mameloshn, or mother tongue.

In the months before his death, Pekar was working (with me and a handful of artists) on “Yiddishland,” a book that begins with him and his Yiddish-speaking grandfather in Cleveland around 1944. He still wanted to tell his vanished relatives that he had become a Yidishe shrayber, a continuator of Yiddishkeit, and he had, in his own way, reached that goal before the end came. Neither of these deeply Jewish artists is likely to be forgotten soon.

[Cultural historian Paul Buhle is professor emeritus at Brown University. He edited several comics in collaboration with Harvey Pekar, including The Beats. They collaborated on Yiddishland, to be published next Spring by Abrams ComicArts. Contact Paul Buhle at feedback@forward.com. This article was also published in the Jewish weekly Forward.]


Above, from the American Splendor series, cover art by R Crumb. Below, Harvey Pekar by Jeff Smith / The Pekar Project.

On the grumpy but sweet Harvey Pekar

[Paul Buhle and Harvey Pekar collaborated on five books. Karen Winkler of The Chronicle of Higher Education asked Buhle about working with Pekar.]

You worked with Harvey Pekar on several projects, including books on the Beats, SDS, the Wobblies, and the New Deal. How did your collaboration come about?

I was working on my second historical comic, about the Students for a Democratic Society, and I could gather (in some cases writing about my own life) local stories that worked as scripts, but the big narrative was terribly difficult for me, probably because the collapse of SDS was such a huge disappointment in my younger life. Harvey happened to call me and he needed money. I offered him my advance if he would write the narrative. We started there and went on til the end.

Pekar was known for his sometimes irascible commentary. What was it like to work with him?

He pretended to be grumpy. He was grumpy about making very little money for his work, and also about the rightward drift of America after his earliest years, in a family that admired FDR and hoped for a more egalitarian society. But he was truly sweet, generous, and supportive of young artists.

How was his viewpoint on life reflected in his work?

Harvey was able to conceive of his work as his life and vice versa. He may have borrowed the idea from his 1960s close friend, Robert Crumb, but he took it in a different direction, to deeply ethnic, blue collar Cleveland. Many of his early stories were about his own personal relationships but also about his neighborhoods, his job (work at the VA hospital for 36 years) and his interests, such as jazz.

You're a historian. How did Pekar's perspective inform your interpretation of history?

I like to think that I broadened his vistas in his published work, in the sense that in our five books, he read very widely about large historical questions and developed scripts that tell the story differently from a scholarly study, but just as well and in many cases, much better. You didn't need to agree with Harvey's take on SDS or the Beat Generation, for instance, to see that he had strong opinions and a distinct aesthetic.

He was deeply interested in history, as he was in literature and art. If I were describing some Cleveland setting, I would start with demography. He would start by describing a local Serbian restaurant he liked whose owner was actually a Croat, and so on: that was his way of explaining and exploring history.

What do you think will be his legacy in the world of comics and graphic novels?

There were not many artists and writers (he never drew comics, but he gave artists very specific directions, along with dialogue) in the U.S. whose work, before the turn of the new century, shaped the emergence of comics as an accepted, serious art form. Along with Harvey, I count Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Ben Katchor, and Alison Bechdel. These were also practically the only artists of "alternative comics" who made a living.

He expanded what comics can do. When I worked with him on the adaptation of Studs Terkel's Working, I realized -- as an oral historian and teacher of oral history -- that he was also to comics what Studs was to the interview. He knew how to listen to people. He raised the level of comic art.

Did you have another project in the works with him?

Yiddishkayt or Yiddishland (we are still debating the title) will, I hope, appear next year. It meant a lot to Harvey, a native Yiddish speaker. It's the story of secular Jewish-Americans who carried on the centuries-old legacy of Yiddishkayt, and did wonderful things with the language and culture until time ran out. His scripts for this book, to be published by Abrams ComicArt, are more than masterful, and he knew it.

Also see:

• "Paul Krassner: Remembering Tuli Kupferberg" by Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2010.
• "Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs: Rock's Inner City Shaman" by Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2010.
• "COMICS / Paul Buhle: Beyond the Superhero" by Paul Buhle / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2009.

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Ramsey Wiggins : Me and Gilbert Shelton: A Memoir

Legendary underground cartoonist and comix artist Gilbert Shelton.

Me and Gilbert Shelton: A Memoir

By Ramsey Wiggins / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2010

Legendary underground artist Gilbert Shelton will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Tuesday, March 9, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

Shelton is the creator of such iconic comic strips as the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, and Wonder Wart Hog. His comix have sold over 40 million copies in 15 languages. Born in Houston, Shelton developed his art in Austin and then San Francisco. He now lives in France, where he is collaborating with French artist Pic on a strip called Not Quite Dead.

I. The Texas Ranger and Wonder Warthog

"Bright college days, oh carefree days that fly
To thee we sing, with our glasses raised on high." -- Tom Lehrer

In 1960 at the University of Texas (at Austin: that was the only one back then), if you helped to sell the Ranger, the student humor magazine, you got to attend the keg party that was held the weekend after the issue hit the streets. If you were only 20 years old and looked like you were 14, access to many kegs of beer on a Saturday night was a more than reasonable payment for hawking the magazine on campus for a couple of hours.

One of the other perks was that you got to hang out with the people who created the magazine. That’s when I met Gilbert Shelton and the others who brought forth the prize-winning best college humor magazine in the country.

The Rangeroos, as they called themselves, were an extraordinary bunch. Creative, smart, hard-drinking, and somehow older and more worldly-wise than the rest of us, they were the best of the best. We who were less than pretty, less than rich, or, despite being both, still disaffected, were drawn to the like minds of this social and party axis.

Lieuen Adkins and Gilbert Shelton when they both worked for the famed humor magazine, the Texas Ranger. The photo was taken at Lieuen's house on East 23rd in Austin, where the LBJ Library now stands. Photo by Bob Simmons / Austin Photos '62-69 / Texasghetto.org.

This was where I met people who knew stuff: music to listen to, authors to read, how to write, what was funny, and how to drink a lot without throwing up. I also met Janis Joplin, Bill Helmer (later a senior editor at Playboy), Dave Hickey, Billy Brammer, Tony Bell, Lieuen Adkins, Joe Brown, Hugh Lowe, Pat Brown, and all the others who couldn’t settle for life in the herd.

These were heady times. The glacial epoch of the early cold war era was transitioning into Camelot; crewcuts, panty-girdles, Eisenhower, and communist witch hunts were yielding to Ivy League, leotards, the Kennedys, and the Playboy philosophy. We joined the Civil Rights movement. We danced the Limbo, drove MGs and Volkswagens, and listened to The Kingston Trio, Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, and Bob Dylan’s acoustic incarnation. We read poetry and angry young men. It was rumored that women could have orgasms, and that love might be free. Revolution wasn’t in the air yet, but the possibility of joy extended to the horizon.

One of the newer joys back then was to pull the king’s beard. Marching and demonstrating for civil rights had been righteous, but dreadfully serious. Mockery and satire, when served up with a deft hand, were much more cool. A put-down, especially when the target remained clueless about the damage done, was the coolest of all.

The Ranger served this up and more. In 1960 the entire staff was fired three times in the course of a semester for hiding various put-downs and obscenities in successive issues of the magazine. After that, the infighting became more and more elegant, as a blustering and clueless Texas Student Publications office was outflanked again and again by subtlety, irreverence, and skill.


Enter Wonder Warthog.

He had already appeared in 1962 in the Bacchanal, an off-campus commercial attempt by Bill Killeen -- and several of the staffers fired in 1960 -- to escape the strictures of a college publication. The threat of the draft drove Gilbert back to graduate school 1962-63 where he became the editor of the Ranger and further polished the Hog of Steel.

WW sent up superheroes, arch-villains, beatniks, LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, and most concepts of morality extant at the time. Gilbert, who has nearly always had a collaborator or two, worked off and on with fellow Rangeroos Tony Bell, Lieuen Adkins, and Joe Brown to produce the first drafts of what would become world-class social satire.

Wonder Warthog later took Gilbert and friends to a wider audience, but back then the Fearless, Fighting, Foulmouthed alter ego to mild-mannered Philbert Desanex, ace reporter for the Muthalode Morning Mungpie was all ours. Frat boys might have money, cars, and high-maintenance girlfriends, but we had Wonder Warthog. Comic books had a whole new meaning.

Things change, and everybody moves on. One day I looked up and I was married, a father, a graduate student, and wore a suit to work at the Graduate Dean’s office. The summer of love came and went. John Kennedy had been assassinated, then Robert, then Martin Luther King, Jr.

Janis died of an overdose, then Jimi Hendrix and Brian Jones. Woodstock had turned into Altamont. The Civil Rights movement had turned into a shooting war. Vietnam was turning teenagers into post-traumatic heroin addicts by the thousands. We all marched after Kent State; My Lai revealed us as torturers, rapists, and murderers. The ship of hope was dashed on the rocks of the military-industrial complex. I drank too much and every night before I fell asleep had the terrifying thought that my life would be the same until I died.

Meanwhile, I heard stories. Gilbert had joined Pat Brown, then a student at the Cleveland Art Institute in Cleveland, where he had tried to work for American Greeting Cards, but it hadn’t taken. Back in Austin, he did psychedelic posters for the Vulcan Gas Company, then he joined the general exodus to the west coast, hoping to do rock posters.

His new strip, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, had begun to appear in The Rag, an off-campus production with low production values and a serious antipathy for the Vietnam War. The strips in The Rag would be reprinted in rags all over the world

In 1971, my college friend Dave Moriaty showed up and told me how he, Gilbert, Jack Jackson (whose art carried the moniker "Jaxon") and Fred Todd had bought a printing press and were publishing comic books as Rip Off Press. I wanted to die from envy. He was thinking of starting a magazine, and suggested that I might want to join them.

Dave Moriaty at the Rip Off Press, 17th and Missouri in San Francisco, in 1970. Photo by Bob Simmons / Austin Photos '62-69 / Austinghetto.org.

II. Rip Off Press

"The term 'drunken printer' is redundant." -- Men’s room wall in Rip Off Press

I wanted in the game. The degree was finished, the marriage was over, my boss was about to retire, and I had more old friends in San Francisco than I did in Austin. The party wasn’t over yet. I had already stopped cutting my hair, so in May of 1972 I quit the job, took out my retirement money, and headed for the coast.

Rip Off Press had relocated from the increasingly dangerous and expensive Haight-Asbury area into the warehouse district at the bottom of the north side of Potrero Hill. There was a trucker’s bar across the street (The Bottom of the Hill Bar, now famous as a music venue), and my friend Moriaty had a flat up the hill on Arkansas Street. You could see Berkeley and Oakland from his back porch and Mount Sutro from the front window. The flat downstairs could be had for $100 a month. Jack Jackson and his old lady lived across the street. Deal.

Rip Off Press was hot. Gilbert wasn’t just an artist, he was now a franchise. He lived with a very, very smart woman, Laura Fountain, and they had a big house on a cul-de-sac that had a block party every Bastille day.

Faded glory: Your correspondent Ramsey Wiggins, upstairs at the Rip off press office in 1972. Photo by Bob Follet.

The Freak Brothers were worldwide. A German lawyer with a Polish name, Manfred Mroczkowski, had come up with the idea that all the bootleg European editions of the Freak Brothers could be licensed and made to pay royalties. The first official publication had just come out in German. Rip Off and their main competitor, Last Gasp Eco-funnies had come to détente; each sold the other’s material in their mail-order operations. Serious business.

Rip Off was begun to print rock posters, but the ancient press wasn’t good enough for close-register poster work. It was, however, good enough for underground comic book covers, and was soon augmented by a better, smaller press. Gilbert’s office/studio/playhouse was upstairs, the press, shipping office, and a cavernous, mostly empty warehouse were downstairs. In the summer, the roof was festooned with sunbathing naked hippies. The truckers loved us. At 10:30 and again at 3:00, Fred Todd would ring a bell and we would troop into the walk-in safe for a smoke break. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

I wasn’t good enough to be on the creative team, but Art can always use another handmaiden. I went to work as a dogsbody in the job printing shop we ran as a sideline and was given the nonpaying title of Managing Editor for the short-lived Rip Off Review of Western Culture.

It was the end stage of the best of times. In 1972 the summer of love had come and gone, but there were still affordable places to live, the counterculture was alive and well, and San Francisco was -- well, San Francisco. Robert Crumb was there, along with S. Clay Wilson, Dave Sheridan, Ted Richards and all the other underground comic artists.

Rock stars came and went. Chet Helms, grand poobah of the near-defunct Family Dog, appeared from time to time to try and get us to print posters on the cuff. Eddie Wilson, who had started Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, stopped off at our house to have a shower.

Gilbert Shelton designed this poster for Austin's famed rock hall, the Vulcan Gas Company.
The great circus that was Berkeley was across the bay, and Marin County was across the Golden Gate Bridge. Occasionally a young woman would find it interesting that I worked at Rip Off Press. I got tongue-kissed by a Hell’s Angel at the Garden of Earthly Delights, and had enough class to give him some tongue back. We parted with mutual respect. I was, after all, from Texas.

Once at a party I stepped between Robert Crumb and a large, angry woman who took offense at his Big Ass Comics, keeping her at bay while he escaped down the stairs. I ate with artists, and I drank with giants.

Every morning I would drink a pot of strong coffee and walk down Arkansas Street to the bottom of Potrero Hill, arriving at the press at the civilized hour of nine o’clock. Company president Fred Todd would be in the office, pacing up and down, throwing the point of his buck knife into the floor and swearing as he waited for the mail and the daily receipts to see if we would be able to buy paper and ink or, on Fridays, meet the payroll.

The shipping clerks would already have popped their white crosses and begun packing up orders. Moriaty got us to work burning plates for the printers. By 10 the head printer, a part-time rock organist and full time drug addict, would arrive and begin his morning routine of two cups of coffee, two joints and two Desoxyns before cranking up his press. (Our motto was “Quality is not our bag”)

Gilbert would arrive around eleven and, depending on the company that showed up, work, play ping-pong, or otherwise amuse himself. Jack Jackson worked at home but would pop in, usually late in the afternoon. Various print shop customers, artists, artist wannabes, and plain delusionals would come and go through the day.

At noon we would troop across the street for a sandwich and a beer, then back to the press for the afternoon, then back across the street for beer, eighty cent highballs, and a game of pool. Then back up the hill for dinner or out into the night, depending on the amusements available for the evening.

Life was good. I worked in the print shop with a future mayor of Marble Falls and a future Austin real estate developer. One day the drug addict printer got his right arm stuck in the press. He was in a cast for a long time.

Eventually a woman joined me from Austin, and we were together for quite a while. We later had a son who became famous. The Rip Off print shop invested in a worn-out magazine web press that we could never get to work right. I almost fell into the folder.

Things, change, and everybody moves on. After I had been there for about a year, the job printing shop, never a profit center, was declared a failure, closed and the equipment was sold off except for one press used to print comic book covers. The Rip Off Review of Western Culture wasn’t cultured enough and ceased publication. I was out of a job and out of Rip Off Press.

I stayed on in San Francisco for awhile, but after three days transcribing numbers at a nut and bolt manufacturing company for a temp agency, I had had enough. I was a revolutionary, god damn it. I spent two weeks in my basement rebuilding the engine in my 1966 Volkswagen, then packed the woman from Austin and what else would fit and headed back to Austin in September of 1973: The last to come to San Francisco, and the first to go back. I was sad for a time.

Rip Off Press founders Fred Todd, Gilbert Shelton, Jack Jackson, Jackson's companion Beatrice Bonini, and Dave Moriaty.
Time passed. Rip Off Press prospered without me, and I without it. The chance meeting with Eddie Wilson in my San Francisco living room turned into a three-year rock and roll marathon as the Advertising and Public Relations Director at Armadillo World Headquarters. After I burned out at the Armadillo, I made a Faustian bargain and sold ads for the Austin Sun, and, after that I really floundered for awhile. Doug Brown took pity on me and I started one of several stays at Oat Willie’s, Austin’s oldest headshop. The Sixties were officially over, even in Austin. It was confusing for awhile.

Meanwhile, more and more comic books came out of Rip Off Press. Dave Sheridan continued to collaborate on the Freak Brothers, and Fat Freddy’s Cat became its own publication. Paul Mavrides also began collaborating on the Freak Brothers in 1978.

Foreign-language editions came out officially in every European language except Russian. I’ll bet there is at least one unofficial version there, too. So far, no one in China has offered to make a deal, nor have the African languages stepped up, but long after the counterculture had lost its currency in the U.S. it remained alive and well in Europe, and The Freak Brothers did well. The Freak Brothers appeared in High Times magazine, and Universal Studios bought the license to produce a live-action Freak Brothers movie. Gilbert did an album cover for Doug Sahm, and then one for the Grateful Dead. Money rolled in.

Then, the logical next step for the Freak Brothers: A coffee table edition.

Freak Brother Freewheelin Franklin with his customary sage advice.
III. Oat Willie’s Campaign Headquarters

Ok, so I’m a clerk at Oat Willie’s, in 1978, leading the simple life, when the word comes out that Rip Off Press has done the first Freak Brothers collection, a coffee-table sized perfect bound book, for a respectable price and at a respectable investment in production costs, which Gilbert is going to go on tour to promote. One of the places he wants to do this is Austin, and since Oat Willie’s sells more Freak Brothers comics than any place in Texas, he wants to do an autograph party here.

Did I mention spending three years flogging rock and roll at the Armadillo? Anyway, Doug asked me to help a little with the publicity, so I started calling around and, a few days before the event went around to visit a few disc jockeys at a few radio stations. It turns out that the Freak Brothers are about as famous as Jerry Garcia. Everybody talks it up on the radio, and Gilbert gets to do an on-air on the top-rated FM station in Austin.

Came the day, and the place was a mob scene. Gilbert signed autographs until his hand hurt. TV stations showed up, then more people showed up. At one point a cop showed up in a patrol car, and everybody was nervous until it turned out he just wanted a signed copy of the new book like everybody else. He went to the head of the line.

I’m pretty sure that was the biggest-grossing day in Oat Willie’s history. It was the first really good day for me in a long time, anyway. I remember it fondly.

And Then…

Things change, and people move on. Gilbert and Laura escaped to Europe in 1979, first for an extended visit, and then permanently to Paris in 1982. Robert Crumb and his wife Aline Kominsky live in France, too. Two American national treasures, expatriated to France. Hmm.

Gilbert Shelton: Cool one with a cool one.
Dave Sheridan, Gilbert’s first collaborator, died of cancer in 1982. The Freak Brothers continued with collaborator Paul Mavrides. Universal Studios bought two more licenses to produce a Freak Brothers movie, and another company, bolixbrothers in Bristol, England, has been trying to produce an animated feature since 2003. The latest, but hopefully not the last, Freak Brothers collection is the full catastrophe, the Freak Brothers Compendium, which is the complete collection, all under one cover.

Gilbert’s latest undertaking is Not Quite Dead, the adventures of the world’s least-famous rock band. It’s also a collaboration, this time with the French underground cartoonist Pic. Three issues of this comic are out so far, and two have been translated into English.

Me, I stumbled around like a bull in a china shop until I had a spiritual awakening in 1989, and have been remarkably clear-headed since then. I live sedately in Austin with my wife, who understands me.

We’ve both done well, Gilbert and me.

I’ll get to see him one more time at Oat Willie’s on Friday, March 12th, where he’ll be autographing his works one more time. I’m doing a little publicity for this one, too, but maybe the lines won’t be as long. Or maybe they will.

He’ll host an art retrospective on Saturday the 13th at the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture if you miss the autograph party. If you see a tall old guy with a glass of club soda, it’ll be me.

Until we meet again: Gilbert Shelton's Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers were first published in Austin's underground newspaper, The Rag.

• Cartoonist and underground artist Gilbert Shelton's work is being featured in an exhibit at the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture, 1516-B South Lamar Blvd. in Austin. Shelton's work will be on display from March 13th-May 8, 2010. An opening reception, featuring the artist, will be held on March 13, starting at 7:09 p.m. Original art and prits will be available for sale.
• Gilbert Shelton -- whose published work includes The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, Wonder Wart Hog and Not Quite Dead (with French cartoonist Pic) -- will autograph copies of his work at Oat Willie's Campaign Headquarters, 617 West 29th St. in Austin, beginning at noon on Friday, March 12, 2010.
• Shelton -- whose Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers are to be featured in a movie now under development, will appear in "A Conversation with Gilbert Shelton" at South by Southwest (SXSW), at the Austin Convention Center, Monday, March 15, 2010, at 3:30 p.m.

Gilbert Shelton: Things are looking up.

Gilbert Shelton and the Simpsons' Matt Groening.

Gilbert did this jacket art for the Grateful Dead.

Wonder Wart Hog at home.

Fat Freddy's Cat speaks in many tongues.





Shelton's latest effort, done in collaboration with French artist Pic.

Still from long-in-development Freak Brothers movie, Grass Roots.

Texas Ranger party in 1963 at 18th and Brazos in Austin. That's Fontaine Maverick dancing on the furniture. Ramsey Wiggins is the tall guy in glasses and the gray sports jacket (already) turned to the left. Photo by Bob Simmons © 2000.

Some of the Rip Off Press crew at the corner of Franklin and Golden Gate Ave. in San Francisco in 1969. Photo by Bob Simmons.


Rip Off Press staffers dine in San Francisco, 1972. L-R: Bob Follet, editor of the Rip Off Review; Beatrice Bonini, Jack Jackson, Dave Moriaty, Aline Kominsky, Ramsey Wiggins, and Philipp Carlisle. Grab from a polaroid photo taken by the waiter.

Oat Willie's crew, 1977. Ramsey's the tall dudely one in the shades. Photo by Ken Hoge.

Ramsey Wiggins, his own self. Photo by Eric Rosenblum from the Austin Sun Reunion, October 31, 2009.
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R.I.P. Bill Narum : Legendary Artist of the Texas Counterculture

Below, cover of Space City!, June 1, 1971. Illustration and design by Bill Narum.

Bill Narum was a dear friend of The Rag Blog and my personal friend and colleague for more than four decades. He was art director at Space City!, the pioneering underground paper we published in Houston in the late Sixties and early Seventies. He was a major force in the Houston underground radio scene -- at KLOL and KPFT -- and became one of the most important graphic designers and poster artists in the Texas counterculture. And he was still going strong.

He was also an activist, deeply committed to social justice, to basic political and cultural change, but -- as with most things in his life -- he did it without bombast or bluster.

Bill Narum was an exceptional talent; he was also a calm and gentle human being. His death leaves a void that cannot ever be filled.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / November 19, 2009

R.I.P. Bill Narum:
Legendary Texas counterculture artist,
underground radio pioneer

By Chris Gray / November 19, 2009

See gallery of Bill Narum art, Below.

Bill Narum, a key figure in Houston's counterculture in the late 1960s and early '70s, passed away Wednesday night, November 18, 2009, at his home in Austin. The cause of death was an "apparent heart attack or something that took him quickly while sitting in his studio at the art table in his chair," said Narum's close friend Margaret Moser, who profiled him for the Austin Chronicle in 2005.

Austin native Narum, who was in his early 60s, grew up in Houston and discovered his talent for graphic design early on. "In the fifth grade, I'd been drawing girlie cartoons from Playboy in a notebook, and I left it in my desk after class," he told the Chronicle. "The next day I was reprimanded for disrupting class because they were passing around my notebook."

In the late '60s, Narum co-founded Houston free-form FM rock station KLOL and worked as an illustrator for underground newspaper Space City News. He struck up a long-lasting friendship with a band then just starting out, which had recently rechristened itself ZZ Top. Narum would go on to become ZZ's house graphic artist, moving from posters and album covers such as 1976's Tejas to epic murals for the band's fleet of semis and the famous cactus-and-cattle-skull stage design for the trio's legendary 1975-76 "Worldwide Texas" tour.

Bill Narum, from left, with Houston underground radio pioneers Dan Earhart and Larry Yurdin. Photo by Gloria Hill, Austin, 2008.
After moving back to his hometown in the '70s, Narum continued designing posters for venues such as Antone's and Armadillo World Headquarters, and explored a budding interest in both video and computer-game design. In 2005, he was elected president of the board of directors of Austin folk-art storehouse the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture around the same time his 40-year retrospective, "You Call That Art," opened at the museum.

Speaking of Narum's many achievements, SAMOPC director Leea Mechling told the Austin Chronicle: "He's a major contributor to the cultural dynamics of not only Austin, but Texas, the United States, and the world."

Source / Houston Press

Senator John (Corn Dog) Cornyn, R-Texas, aka Lapdog to President Bush. Graphic by Bill Narum / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2008.




Also see:

• Bill Narum: We Call That Art by Margaret Moser / Austin Chronicle / Nov. 20, 2009
• R.I.P. Bill Narum / by Bill Hood / This Week I Learned / Nov. 19, 2009

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