GRIN #1, 4 of 4

Parody rule #36- Quote the target verbatim, except make everything the complete opposite.








I mentioned before about artists not caring. Here you can see the paste lines on the art.

GRIN #1, 3 of 4

Like with their PEANUTS parody, there's little reason for there to be a twist on the parody, since most of these strips seem to just be regular BLONDIE strips.

D.J. Arneson was an editor at Dell who also wrote the 'adult comic books' about LBJ.


The artist obviously didn't care about the work and just wanted to get it over with, as witnessed in the second strip here.



There was a similar bit on MR. SHOW of God reading the books-on-tape version of his memoirs (in a parody of the tape of the Robert Evans autobiography)





I should also mention there the magazine had ads I didn't include. They were mostly the '8 tapes for 1 cent' type ads.

GRIN #1, 2 of 4

I'm not sure what requires any of these characters to be of any race. Maybe referring to the ghetto was a way to be topical. The NATIONAL LAMPOON did the same thing a few years later, and though not particularly sensitive, at least they had traits attributed specifically to their ethnicity. And I don't know why these strips had three panels instead of four.

Henry Scarpelli is the father of now out-of-the-closet 80s teen idol Glenn Scarpelli. Not that it's important or anything but it's a piece of trivia you can impress friends with.



GRIN had a thing about ethnic humor when it came to the "safe" stereotypes. The character of Henry Kissinger could have been anyone German.

I think "Fred Wolf" may be a pseudonym, only because there was a "Fred Wolfe" who later wrote for CRAZY. I could be wrong though.

GRIN

Here's GRIN. It was too adult to be MAD, not adult enough to be NATIONAL LAMPOON, and not pornographic enough to be GOOSE. There were three issues published by "AGAP" which to my knowledge didn't do anything else. It was more topical and attempted to be more 'socially relevant' as you will later see.

I think this is supposed to be a combination of Nixon and Agnew, but I'm not sure.

Jack Sparling did a lot of work for mainstream comics and humor magazines. In his final years, he was the editor of SICK, which by that time was owned by Charlton and apparently paying contributors with copies. The most cash-strapped alternative publishers I've worked for don't even do that.

This was the inside front and back cover.


When THE GODFATHER came out the makers took great pains to let the audience know wasn't meant to represent all Italian-Americans. This parody reducing them to the pizza-box stereotype and the humor coming from that would probably be more offensive to them.