Comics

Cavalier:  A “hipper” Playboy?

Cavalier magazine began publication in 1952–a year before the first issue of Playboy, to which it is usually compared. By the 1960s, it was striving to be a hipper Playboy, something for the college guys, or the “lads” as they might be called today.  Like Playboy, Cavalier is still being published, though to judge by its website, it’s a lot raunchier today, more like plain old porn. But in the 1960s, there are serious articles, some of them by famous writers (in this issue, Leonard Feather writes about jazz); smutty cartoons, many of them with topical references to hippies and LSD; fashion spreads with pouty (male) models; advice columns (here the lads learn about making a proper cocktail); fiction; and profiles of up-and-coming “cavaliers” (in this issue, it’s artist Jamie Wyeth, at the time 21 years old).   And, oh, almost forgot:   there are photo spreads of bare-breasted women.  Everything–the articles, the fiction, the cartoon, the naked women– was down a notch or two from Playboy in terms of finish and quality.  (Did Playboy ever carry ads for life-size, inflatable “Instant Party Dolls”? I don’t know.)

What if JFK had lived?

Two interesting things about this particular issue:  a feature “If JFK Had Lived,” with illustrations and retouched photographs and a text speculating on JFK’s future after he survives the 1963 assassination “attempt” in Dallas. He is re-elected in 1964, and in January 1969 turns over the White House to his successor, Robert McNamara.  (Not a chance.) The magazine’s summer 1968 deadlines seem to have missed the big Kennedy news, since in the “news stories,” Bobby Kennedy is still living when JFK dies in June 2000.   (RFK had become Secretary of State under McNamara.)  Along with his brother, President Ted Kennedy, JFK celebrates the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1980 (the prediction misses by 9 years), and JFK remarries in 1989, four years after the death of his first wife Jackie in a plane crash.

The Adventures of Fritz the Cat

The second feature of note is a three-page spread, the black-and-white comic strip, “The Adventures of Fritz,” by Robert Crumb.  ”Fritz the Cat” was one of the first “head” comic strips, written by and for people who were stoned.  (Crumb had, in fact, been experimenting with LSD just before publishing this series in Cavalier in 1968. )  Fritz is described in the strip as a “sophisticated, up-to-the-minute young feline college student” — just like the typical Cavalier reader, in other words.

3 Comments »

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead

Sooner or later, this blog was going to have to get around to MAD, right?  We could have done the 1968 election issue, with all of the candidates’ pictures scrambled (and maybe we’ll get to that one eventually).  But this issue — this cover, at least– is priceless:  Alfred E. Neuman– by this date universally recognized as the archetypal dope–decked out as a “hippie,” with a decorative border incorporating some distinctive five-part leaves and a classic MAD motto:  ”Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead.”  (”Drop dead” was a favorite MAD expression.) Here, Al is sporting a scraggly beard and longer red hair than usual, but he has the familiar gap-toothed grin, freckles, jug ears, and vacant expression.  Plus beads, flowers in the hair, cowbell and bear-claw necklace– like, wow.

“The Hippie”: Becoming a laugh line and a stereotype

To land on the cover of MAD in the 1960s was to achieve some sort of pinnacle of pop-cultural notoreity; MAD editors wouldn’t have bothered with you if you weren’t somehow culturally “of the moment.”   But the famous individual, or trend, or icon, or sacred cow had to have attained enough breadth of recognition to allow for sufficient pungency as a MAD lampoon.  And so the arrival of the hippie get-up on MAD in April 1968 tells us quite a lot about the hardening and the codifying of this stereotypical “Sixties” character.

It all happened pretty quickly.  Etymologists generally point to an early-1965 usage of “hippie” (in TIME magazine) as the first “conventional” use of the word, as opposed to earlier, more marginal uses– as variants of the beatnik-era “hipster,” for example.  So throughout 1965 and 1966– and especially by the January 1967 “Be-In” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and, later that year, the “Summer of Love”– the hippie moved rapidly from being “sub-cultural,” socially detached, and “different” to being an utterly familiar archetype–AND a figure of nearly bottomless hilarity.  I would not be surprised if there were “hippie” Halloween costumes in stores by 1968–as there are today.   I wonder when the first sitcom hippies appeared– 1968 again would be a pretty good bet. ( I know that some kind of nadir was reached the following year, when Lawrence Welk showed up in wig and full hippie regalia on his show:  not hard to find–but hard to watch–on YouTube.)

A “weird sub-culture”

So here’s MAD, throwing its considerable weight behind this process of Stereotype Formation.  I remember this issue well (I was 17 when it appeared on the newstands, its price now “30 cents– Cheap” instead of 25), not so much because of the cover but because of the hilarious (well, maybe you had to be there) send-up of one of my favorite TV shows, “Mission: Ridiculous.”   But the issue also includes an extensive “cover story”– a mock magazine called “Hippie: The Magazine that Turns You On (if you’re cool enough to light it up and smoke it!)”  The introduction says:  ”There’s a wild new group of people who have become prominent in America recently.  They have their own unique language, their own strange behavior, and their own bizarre philosophy which is commonly misunderstood by many oldsters.  The group is known as ‘Moderate Republicans.’”    It goes on to explain that there’s another “weird sub-culture” kn0wn as hippies, and MAD is going to explain them in this magazine as a public service.

For sentimental hippies?

The magazine includes fake movie ads (”The Wild Freakout Acid Trip at the Hippie Teeny-Bopper Love-In Orgy on the Strip”); classifieds (”Help! I’m being held prisoner in my Hi-Fi and TV-equipped own room in the suburban home of my materialistic, conformist parents”); a takeoff on the Peanuts “warm puppy” bestseller, this one called ”Uptight is a Dry Sugar Cube”; a gossip column (”Drachma the Digger has made arrangements for starving N.Y. orphans to receive food packages from Vietnam War Orphans”); and a gift guide for “sentimental hippies who want to collect relics of the past:  shoes, ties, soap, bras, draft cards, combs.”

You get the picture.

Finally, it’s been so long since I looked at MAD that I forgot that they carried no advertisements–except gag ads, like this takeoff on ads for “100 millimeter” cigarettes from the back cover of this issue:

5 Comments »

The Avengers travel back in time — and so can you.

The Avengers, Marvel Comics, September 1968

As of yesterday, August 31, 2009, the owners of Marvel Comics are $4 billion richer, thanks to the Disney Corporation, so it seemed timely to check in on Marvel in 1968– towards the end of the period that for many fans represents the imprint’s Golden Age, when it was selling upwards of 50,000,000 comics a year.  Specifically, we’re looking in on  ”The Avengers,” the ever-changing cast of superhero characters that had first appeared five years earlier.

“A first-hand look at the BIG ONE”

Banding together to fight foes too powerful for one superhero to conquer, the Avengers in Number 56 include Captain America, Hawkeye, Goliath (sometimes known as Giant-Man), Black Panther (a.k.a. “T’Challa,”  from the fictitious African country of Wakanda), and last (and decidedly least, in this issue, where she hardly makes a dent) is Wasp.  In this issue, the four male heroes go back in time — thanks to a time machine in the castle of defeated foe “Doc Doom”– back to the waning days of World War II.  ”I’ve always WANTED a first-hand look at the BIG ONE,” Hawkeye says as he climbs onto the “Chrono-Square.”  No doubt a lot of boys reading these comics agreed:  they, too, wanted to travel back to those exciting, Nazi-killing days of the war that their fathers had fought in but didn’t talk about too much.  Seems that Captain America had remained haunted by the death of his young sidekick, Bucky, in an explosion during the War (”He was a GREAT little guy… the best partner a man ever had”) and wanted to see for himself what had actually happened.   Suffice to say that the rest of the story involves an encounter with Baron Zemo (”foremost of all Nazi agents”), a pair “hulking humanoids” created by the Baron, some American G.I.’s coming to the rescue, and some problems with “parallel time continuums.”   The foursome gets back to the present, intact, but Bucky stays dead (but not for long; it’s complicated).

“You Can Have a He-Man Voice” and “Now You Can Be Taller Instantly”

Revisiting comics like this one is its own kind of time travel for boomers like me– less for the stories and the comic art (though I remain fond of the sound-effects words, like “PHTOOSH!” “SPKAK!” and “KWOM!”) than for the advertisements, which seem as changeless as Holy Writ:  Charles Atlas invites me to “Check the Kind of Body You Want.”  A geeky-looking kid selling “Grit,” America’s Greatest Family Newspaper, says it’s a swell way to make a lot of money and win prizes, too.   A page of tiny ads offers me Famous German Medals, live chameleons, X-ray glasses, a midget spy camera, Joke Gum, Smoke Bombs, and a device to eliminate my blackheads and pimples in seconds, suggesting that I can “Be Good Looking!”

I wonder:  (a) Did anyone ever send off for any of these “self-improvement” aids, and (b), did they work?

And whatever happened to that collection of comics you had?

1 Comment »

The wacky adventures of Archie Andrews and his friends–permanently enrolled in Riverdale High School, somewhere in the United States–began appearing in comic books just a few weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  The Archie franchise moved quickly from comic books to a radio series and newspaper funny pages in the 1940s.   But it was as comic book characters that they are best remembered, and in 1968 the comics were still going strong (though the price had gone up from 10 to 12 cents).  In fact, that year might be said to constitute a major milestone in the life of this durable series.  See that little miniature drawing above the title on this cover?  Yes, that’s “The Archies,” the fictional garage band (well, of COURSE it’s fictional–all of the band’s members are cartoon characters) that cut its first album in 1968 and became an animated cartoon series on television, tying in with the launch of the band.  The group appears in a story in this issue, saving the day by stepping in as a substitute for a string quartet at the annual teachers’ “tea dance.”   In the cover image, that’s blonde Betty Cooper on the left, attired in hip-huggers; rich, brunette Veronica Lodge on the right, in mod go-go boots; and the combo itself:  Archie on guitar, Jughead Jones on drums; and Reggie Mantle on bass.  (If the catchy beat of The Archies’ hit single of 1969, “Sugar, Sugar,” suddenly and annoyingly popped into your head, my apologies.)

The characters of Archie and his friends were said to be inspired by the successful “Andy Hardy” series of the 1930s, though in the world of Archie, there are no counterparts to the wise Judge Hardy (Andy’s dad) among the series’ buffoonish adults (the school principal, Mr. Weatherby; spinster schoolteacher Miss Grundy; tycoon Mr. Lodge, etc.).  In the 1950s, Archie and his friends (along with the somewhat similar Dobie Gillis gang) became widely recognized as stand-ins for “Typical Teenagers,” something of an obsession of that decade.  They changed very little over the years, even as the teenage years and youth culture in general became more complicated in the 1960s.  Hints, however, are dropped every now and then into these pages that the counterculture and the generation gap were affecting even these “average” teens and their followers (who were kids and pre-teens, for the most part).   There is that band, after all–unthinkable, probably, without the precedents of the British bands and their American imitators (e.g., the Monkees) in the 1960s.  And there’s an ad in this issue for “Psychedelic Poster Covers” for books; they’re “mind-blowing,” with “groovy love slogans.”   Finally, there is a panel in one story in this issue in which Archie’s lazy friend Jughead shows up at the Andrews’ front door, yawning and saying: “Is there a place for us guys who don’t want to make love OR war?”

No Comments »