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For the first time in about 6 months, I got out to Purple Gorilla Comics yesterday and dropped some cash. This was the most expensive of the things I picked up, a lovely little underground from the early 70s. It's got everything you could possibly want in an underground comic - humour, satire, drugs, sex, and a lovable, cartoonish focal character who stumbles through a series of magic carpet directed adventures. I wonder if it's worth looking at the picaresque in terms of underground comics?
I can't find any information on Johnny Chambers, who is primarily responsible for today's comic. He's ably assisted by Bob Inwood, credited with "atmosphere," and each of the dinosaur's adventures certainly has a very different one, both thanks to Inwood's backgrounds (I think) and Chambers' story.
There's something about a lot of the underground stuff I read that seems very naive now, but, really, everything does with the benefit of time. This comic is almost 50 years old. When I think of that number, I do a good job of showing where in time I myself have become stuck - to me, the 1950s are 50 years ago, not the 1970s. And if I think about the attitudes, even the most liberal ones, expressed in much literature from the 50s, it, too, sounds naive. Just as we will in 2070. If we make it that far. What's interesting is that attached to the naivety is also a crudity of language. This is not to disparage the writers, of course, but just to note that our language has evolved significantly in the last 50 years, and, as the Disney+ warnings tell us, sometimes we're going to be exposed to archaic ideas that we find distasteful. This, sadly, is the price of reading older works, be they comics, magazines, or paragons of literary achievement. I'm reading a book about Lemuria from the 1930s right now, and the use of the terms "superior" and "inferior" races is just awful.
I tell myself that they didn't know any better. But, y'know, they should have.
More to follow.
Further Reading and Related Posts
I am slowly discovering the undergrounds - they're weird and angry and psychedelic and I love them. But they're definitely not comics for everyone.
