Porcupines and the Whacking Thereof

B.Kliban
Playboy, May 1977

Alden Erikson
June 1977

Starting with the Sepember 1977 issue, Playboy had a regular feature called Playboy Funnies. Modeled I guess after National Lampoon's Funny pages, it usually had recurring features, often with the same artists. I will refrain from using Bobby London's Dirty Duck, as it was recently collected.

Lou Brooks, Skip Williamson, Christopher Browne

Bobby London and Ralph Reese

Jay Lynch, Lou Brooks

Loyd Little and Ron Villani

CRAZY #73: Fin Fang Foom, part 1

Crazy #73 from April 1981 was one of their “Super Special” editions that mostly featured reprints of previous issues. This one also had something called “The Fuppets” of cutouts so you can do a play of Marvel characters such as Spider-Man and Hulk performed with finger puppets.

This annual was done under a cover by Bobby London, who co-incidentally sent me a birthday greeting through Facebook as I was typing this.

A feature they'd do here and in the annuals was re-letter old comics with new dialogue, like they did with Fin Fang Foom, a monster comic by Jolly Jack Kirby and Darlin' Dick Ayers from Strange Tales #69 in April 1961.

Note how the shorts the Comics Code made them put on the monster have been changed into novelty underwear.

For contrast, here is the original story:

Part Two next Sunday.

More humor for stoners

These were the comics in Head #8, dated November/December 1976. I printed excerpts from the other issue I have a few weeks ago.

This cartoon by Oliver Christianson. Ad for NORML byB. Kliban what was in many magazines at the time. David Pascal Christopher Browne In the magazine, she was running through the text of the articles, which I only removed because the text make no sense in context. Bobby London Bill Woodman Ted Richards I don't know who did this. S. I. Walker Sam Gross

Head:Humor for Stoners

It used to be magazines that specialized in vices had more credibility. High Times, Playboy, and even Hustler were general interest magazines that happened to have articles about their main subject matter. They all had production values just as high as “regular” magazines.

Along with higher credibility and production values were more imitations. High Times had Head magazine, also similar to National Lampoon, which was already past its prime, but still was something people weren't embarrassed to be seen reading. Coincidentally, it had many of the same contributors. Brian McConnachie was the most nonsensical of National Lampoon's early writers, and sometime cartoonist for them, one of his first pieces being The Worst Cartoons In the World which was one of my early influences.

There's a rumor that when he was on the Lampoon staff and they were also publishing Weight Watchers, a subscriber to the latter accidentally got National Lampoon by mistake and wrote to complain about it. McConnachie found out about this and wrote her a letter as the editor of Weight Watchers apologizing for the mistake, and kept sending her more Lampoons. Randy Jones Oliver “Revilo” Christianson was a prolific cartoonist who has fallen off the map since working for Hallmark.

Bobby London I worked with during my brief tenure at Cartoon Network. Denis Kitchen and Gary Hallgren, who with London was one of the Air Pirates. Steve Stiles Christopher Browne, one-time National Lampoon cartoonist who currently draws Hägar the Horrible First-generation underground cartoonist Skip Williamson This piece by Denis Kitchen was also the back cover of Mondo Snarfo I don't get this either. I guess the flies bumped into each other? Anything's funny when you're on drugs, whether it makes sense or not.