The last from my pile of REALISTs

from #84, November 1968



from #86, Nov-Dec. 1969


Who knew that more than 40 years later there'd be fundamentalist libertarians emulating what they think were the goals of the fake Indians?

Your guess is as good as mine as to what those arches are. They look like motion lines and I think that's supposed to be a minor, but the poor printing makes it somewhat illegible. Anyone know?


Once again I unearth something by a big-name artist when they were really young that would embarrass them. Or maybe not. Art Spiegelman was on the masthead of SCREW well into the nineties even though he hadn't done anything for them for almost twenty years.

Realist 4

Here are more gag cartoons from issues of THE REALIST, the underground yippie satirical journal.
from #66, April 1966


from #83, October 1968

This looks like Sam Gross. I asked him about it and he said it sounds like something he would do but doesn't remember. He usually signs everything but maybe this was too "out there" then.

Charles Rodrigues was always one of the more incendiary cartoonists of NATIONAL LAMPOON making fun of the disabled and prejudice. You wouldn't know from his work that he was very religious.


“Clean For Gene” was the slogan Eugene McCarthy used while running for President under the Democratic ticket in 1968, presumably so the public wouldn't think all Democrats were dirty hippies.


from #84, November 1968

A few years ago a friend of mine was driving with his visiting sister and when pulled over by the cops facetiously said “Oh No, the pigs!”, something they would probably find amusing themselves. His sister said back, “Isn't that what 60s radicals used to call policemen?” I guess there are red and blue states.

Cartoons from The Realist, part the third

I found out there's an archive of every issue of the magazine, but I'll stick to the issues I have.
All are from #66, April 1966


Avis Rent-a-Car had the campaign “We're number two and still trying harder”

more from THE REALIST

from #31, February 1962



I found this cartoon by friend of the show Bhob Stewart, one of the pioneers of comics fandom. The hand is mine. That's what you get from holding the back page on a scanner.

Mort Gerberg continues to do work for magazines like THE NEW YORKER.


These are from #66, April 1966. In addition to writing humor, Paul Krassner also ran an underground abortion referral service, which he writes about in this issue.
Falcon is Ian Falconer

Cartoons from The Realist

The Realist existed in a much thinner form in its later years, but at one time was on newsprint and it had a circulation of at least 70,000. It's probably most famous for the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster that was bootlegged so much in the sixties. The magazine was a sort of humor sort of hippie news sort of leftist magazine published by Paul Krassner, kind of a combination of NATIONAL LAMPOON and THE NATION, humor side-by-side with serious news. It also had a lot of cartoons, often by established cartoonists who probably couldn't get these printed anywhere else.

These are all from #31, February 1962









Interestingly though, Krassner's Wikipedia entry makes no mention of his tenure at HUSTLER.

more from that issue next week. The Realist, I mean, not Hustler.