Blast #2, 4 of 4

Here's the last of this issue of BLAST.(Hey I'm a poet and didn't know it) On Saturday or Monday I'll start using pages from HARPOON.

Blast #2, 3 of 4

I know how much you missed the rest of the issue of BLAST I have. Continuing my survey of humor magazines that are not MAD, NATIONAL LAMPOON, or CRACKED, here are a few more pages. The last of them will be posted Thursday.







A lot of these magazines had a mascot, I think theirs was this screaming guy. He was on the cover of the first issue designed by Bill Everett.



Mike Kaluta did nothing else for black and white humor magazines except for this. Most of what he did was fantasy/superhero-type stuff. It looks like he, like the rest of the contributors, were just in it for the paycheck.

Blast #2, 2 of 4

I remember watching some show like 'Thirtysomething' where a character finds artifacts of their youth in the attic and waxes nostalgic about how silly they once were. Among the things they found were “earth shoes, protest buttons, and zap comics.” The latter was said as if it was a generic term like Band-Aid or Google. That's actually how the general public views underground comics-products of a past generation that went away with their own youthful ideals. I remember when 'Crumb' came out, my parents didn't realize that he kept doing comics all along, let alone that I knew about him and his life.

If the boomers look at underground comics as some hippie thing from the past, their parents must have looked on them as a passing fad as well. To them, underground comics were all about draft dodging and bra-burning and how many drugs you can do. If they actually read them- not necessarily liked, but read them- they'd see that those movements were satirized more than celebrated. Maybe from a different perspective, but more critically than they'd think.

This piece is an example of how the GI generation viewed underground comics. It looks like the BLAST staff just glanced at them and since they weren't heavily edited or in the same style they were used to in the newspaper, they must be crude. And they were only about the counterculture drawn by hippies who didn't know what they were doing. It reminds me of Steve Allen reading rock and roll lyrics.

Blast #2, 1 of 4

BLAST was a peculiar hybrid of MAD and NATIONAL LAMPOON. They did the same kind of parody and used the same format of 52 pages on newsprint, but also had nudity. They only lasted two issues. It had some of the top comic artists, but it still looks like something written at the last minute. It's like when you're in high school and write a paper the night before it's due and don't care as long as it's done.