Evergreen April 1968

I used to go to the comic convention in San Diego every year but it became less about comics and more about comic-like things. There are smaller conventions around the country that serve the same purpose anyway.

But while people were waiting hours in a hot sun to get Adam West's autograph, or whatever it is they spend $400 or more to do, I walked half a mile away to go to a flea market, looking for “old” things.

As a teen and pre-teen, twenty years earlier meant the sixties. I could find things from the sixties cheap. Before E-bay and even before most of the world knew old comics have value, you could still get things relatively cheap. Now people will charge $10 for a coverless moldy Richie Rich comic and if you complain about the condition, they'll tell you that because it's in a bag that makes it worth more. Twenty years ago now is 1994, so most of the things people sell as nostalgia are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Ren & Stimpy. I remember those things from when I was already an adult and working professional.

Being in an old hippie town there are a few dealers still around and where can find things occasionally. My most recent find was some issues of Evergreen Review. Evergreen was the anchor magazine for Grove Press, the company that did all those hippie and dirty (for the time) books. This was the 55th issue from April 1968. I'll be reprinting all the cartoons and humor pieces I come across.

The first thing was a cartoon by Georges Wolinski.

I didn't read most of the text pieces, but while I was scanning things, here's something that caught my eye so I thought I'd share it.

They had to have a certain amount of T&A to sell copies. But because they were for the most part a literary magazine, the nudity was in the context of early photography, or pieces like this.

Michael O'Donoghue was one of the founding writers of National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live, but before that he was a regular in Evergreen They had an introductory masthead similar to Playboy's “Playbill” that he was often in.

This cartoon here was by “McKee”.

Jan Kristofori from Czechoslovakia.

I think many of these cartoons came from magazines in other countries. Most have foreign names and/or only use one name, and I've never seen a lot of them anywhere else except in the Great Cartoons of the World annuals.

Here's one by “Caballero”

Adolf Born

There are a few cartoons by B.Kliban, one of my all-time favorites, that I don't recall ever seeing in any of the collections.

This one's by him too.

The next two are by “Paré”.

Here's an ad by Jules Feiffer. It's a cartoon so I'll include it. It wasn't in the newspaper itself.

Another by Kliban

Tony Munzlinger.

Great Cartoons of the World Series 7, part 5

Editor John Bailey says in the introduction to the book after describing some of the contributors to the book that he's met:

It develops some cartoonists are like their work, and some are not. The “why” is always the niggling thing of anything—the endless “why” that people love to diddle with in their heads. Why is Garbo mysterious and Sophia Loren not? Why was Paris fashionable in the nineteenth century, and a dull bore in the twentieth?

To get further, what is the reader like? The cartoonist has an immense curiosity to know. Dear reader, what are you like? I mean, what are you really like?

Boris Drucker for The New Yorker

Eldon Dedini

Michael Ffolkes

George Price, also in the New Yorker. He's mentioned as one of the cartoonists in the book thusly:

George Price is like his work, but not like the people he draws,, whom he has observed carefully, and whom he deeply loves, or perhaps hates. They have become a full-blooded, consistent cast of characters through whom he conveys ideas about life. One can always count on them to say something pertinent on such subjects as Women's Lib, or ecology, which is surprising, since the whole awful crowd seem to stay in the kitchen most of the time with a monkey wrench and a can of beer. Yet Price is apparently able to express anything through them. I'm not sure if he's saying something antiquatedly sexist here, but apologize anyway.

Miroslav Barták for

GREAT CARTOONS OF THE WORLD Series 6, part 6

I'm continuing to post excerpts from the 1972 book Great Cartoons of the World, Series Six.

This one's by William Steig, from The New Yorker. Of which is said in the introduction:

Steig's “Come to bed” is a great cartoon that transcends the frame of bossy wife and weak fish who needs to be bossed. It reaches into history, and, in so doing, reveals a bit of everyone's childhood.

Jules Stauber

Chon Day in the Saturday Evening Post.

Ton Smits

These two are by Tony Munzlinger

Anatol Kovarsky

Stanislav Holý for Dikobraz

William O'Brian in The New Yorker

Jean-Jacques Sempé in Editions Denoël

Vladimir Renčin, again for Dikobraz

Stanislav Holý

Norman Thelwell in Punch, again written about in the foreword:

Thelwell's [cartoon] depicts a moppet with a tilted blood in his veins, wearing a cowboy suit. The outrageous juxtaposition of the small boy with the great hall brings together the timelessness and the timely by reducing the glorious figure of the duke to the level of any kid in Hoboken.

GREAT CARTOONS OF THE WORLD Series 6, part 3

This was the sixth volume of a series published annually and edited by John Bailey. This particular one is from 1972.

The editor continues (from last week) in the introduction to this book:

The timely cartoonist, however, does not deal with [Eternal Truth]. After an eight o'clock orange juice, he crouches in his favorite chair with the morning paper and an enormous pair of shears, and notes happily that the new cars are falling apart, that the prices of food, clothing, and entertainment have gone up, that women are having terrible problems with their hair, with their hair sprays, and their hair thicknesses. He observes that mod styles are alreadt outdated, and is delighted that women are beginning to wear awful-looking clog heels. All grist for his mill.

The cartoonist makes the truth recognizable, the invisible visible. This is what Daumier did in his caricatures. And in Rembrandt's paintings, one even sees people one recognizes. This is not so with the work of more stylized painters, such as Vermeer, or Raphael, whose paintings are beautiful and to be admired, but not because their people are alive and breathing. Yet the light in Vermeer's paintings is somehow timeless, and easily recognizable as true. The essential truth of the gesture can be seen in the work of other artists, for example Rowlandson, whose work was timely, yet also timeless, because his whole effort was bent toward showing the expressions, attitudes and gestures of greed, lust, and sloth.

As usual, I have no idea what the fuck he's talking about.

First is a cartoon is by Michael Ffolkes

Ton Smits

These three are by Jules Stauber

James Stevenson for The New Yorker

Tony Munzlinger

Eldon Dedini, written about in the introduction:

Dedini's cartoon is a masterpiece that perfectly catches the idiocy of those young people who have no background, no sense of history, but who think everything is original with them.

Michael Ffolkes

Claude Smith for The New Yorker

Leslie Starke for Punch

John Graham, also for Punch

William O'Brian for the New Yorker