The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1259: National Lampoon #41, August 1973

Turns out that this issue, according to Fogel's guide, is worth a cool $100 in Near Mint condition. It's a confluence of great artists, Frazetta, Bode, Adams, I think that makes it worth so much. And the comics really are of pretty stellar quality, both the featured ones and the regular ones in the "Funny Pages" feature.

I got these magazines, as I've said, when I purchased a large magazine collection just before we moved to Calgary. I bought the collection primarily because it was a large run of Heavy Metal, spanning the magazine's whole history, and a full run of Marvel's Epic Illustrated. I'd decided this would be a good window into the European comics my soon-to-be supervisor Bart loved so much. The less said of that the better.

But I also got a fair number of National Lampoon, Creepy, Eerie, and various underground comix. It's only in the last little while that I've realized what a great deal this collection was. I think I paid $200-$300 for the lot, and there's some really amazing comics and magazines in the collection now. I've often fantasized about finding that lost cache of comics in an attic or at a garage sale, but in a lot of ways I have to acknowledge that that's what happened here. The person I bought them from wanted to get rid of them, and I was happy to take them. It's only now, 6 years later, though, that I'm starting to really get an idea of what it is I bought.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1258: National Lampoon #33, December 1972

That really is one off-putting cover.

Today's issue has some of the most racist comics I've ever read in it. Now, given that it's National Lampoon, we are most definitely in the realm of satire, but the words themselves, regardless of the context, are still hard to read, especially when coming from the mouth of a person, albeit a cartooned one. This is one of the great uses of satire, I think, not just to amuse us, or poke fun at something, but to remind us of the uncomfortable nature of language. In satire we can use words that we might not in our regular, more civil conversation or consideration, but we should never become comfortable with those words. Ironic detachment is fundamental to satire, but unfortunately we don't teach these ideas nearly as much as we could. I can absolutely imagine someone not schooled in the idea of satire reading "Chess Piece" and either being completely and utterly insulted and disgusted by it (as it would be utterly repulsive if not satiric), or, worse, completely convinced by it. In today's world, a story like this would have to have been prefaced by a disclaimer, so that everyone knew that it was satire. Does this mean we've become less-astute as readers?

Probably.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1257: National Lampoon #29, August 1972

Another discovery I've made since procuring my underground price guide is that a lot of the big names in underground comix actually did work in National Lampoon. A few years back I got a bunch of issues of the magazine in a lot I bought of Heavy Metals and other fantasy magazines. I was never really that into them, but held on to them just in case they came in handy for something. Which, inevitably, they have.

Actually, I have rifled through them a bit. Neal Adams's "Son of God" comics are amazing, and I'm sure I could have fit them into my dissertation somehow. And there's a bunch of Jeff Jones strips in them, and Jones is an artist I absolutely adore.

So what I did today, and probably will for the foreseeable future for this magazine, is I just read the comics. There were 23 pages, plus a few single-panel gags sprinkled throughout, which is just about the same as a regular comic. The text bits are funny, but are also very, very topical. Some of the critique of Nixon that I see in the comics is perhaps a little more relatable to us nowadays, but I don't know who a lot of the figures that get fun (and occasional vitriol) poked at them are.

The comics were cool. As I noted, there's some Jeff Jones with his excellent "Idyl," some single panel and strips from Gahan Wilson, and a full "comic" inserted that's riffs on the old EC titles, but is about the life of George Wallace. And this is the problem - I don't know who that is. The comic was funny, but I was missing the context.

I think I'll poke about through these a bit more for a few days. I had planned out a full month of interesting things to read, but these mags have taken my attention. More to come...