CSotD: Better living through organic chemistry, Part Two
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Let's begin our on-going sojourn in the high country with one more from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers:
This was a classic primarily for the piece of eternal wisdom in the second panel, which was restated by them and then by pretty much everybody, with mild variations. And, in this one, unlike yesterday's example, the payoff is actually pretty funny, given that marijuana has male and female plants and … well, you can probably intuit the critical difference.
I first saw this piece in the humor magazine at college. College humor magazines swapped stuff around and I don't know that any of them paid anybody very much if at all.
Very little of it was this good, which is not surprising, because Joel Beck was only nominally a collegiate cartoonist and had his own underground comix as well as a gig with the Berkeley Barb.
As said yesterday, there was a lot of "slice of life" in these cartoons and while there was a strong tradition of absurdist cartooning — no, children, there never was anyone actually named "Peter Pissgums and his Pervert Pirates" nor is there any excuse at all for this sort of thing and I certainly didn't have a copy of it on my wall — a lot of the memorable work was social commentary.
Specific to this particular piece of social commentary, places like barber shops and bowling alleys were not a bad place to go if you wanted an experience that fell somewhere on the continuum between people staring and scowling and making loud, snide comments to each other and someone actually hauling you out into the parking lot to kick your ass, but the main problem with barber shops was that barbers had no idea what to do with long hair anyway.
As seen above.
We had our girlfriends cut our hair. Which I guess explains why so many of us had such long hair.
Ron Cobb has done so much cool stuff that it's pointless to do much more than point you at the Wikipedia article and then suggest that you Google him. No, never mind, I'll Google him.
I like this cartoon, which Phil Ochs used as a page filler in his music book, "The War Is Over" whence I copped it. But "After Bathing in Baxters" is one of my favorite albums, including the cover.
By the way, the worst part of going from from LPs to CDs was the demise of album covers.
Being able to hold the album cover in your hand while you listened to the album mattered. If you have any of this sort of artwork in your attic, you may want to pick up some of these.
Anyway, Cobb was/is a mindblowing talent. Not too much on web design, but, hey.
R. Crumb did this piece for the cover of the Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, and it rounds up a whole lot of his material, including, yes, the combined sexist/racist character of Angelfood McSpade.
Crumb made a lot of people uncomfortable, not just on the straight side of the ledger but on the hip side as well. But having your values challenged isn't too bad, as long as you don't pretend it isn't happening, and he sure did criticize a lot that needed criticism.
I'm not sure how I feel about Crumb. I don't think that matters very much.
Meanwhile, back at the chicken ranch …
Another Gilbert Shelton piece that accomplished the '60s equivalent of going viral.
This thing not only caught on in its comic format, but then just grew and grew.
Until it morphed into today's moment of zen:
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