Cultural & Political Satire

"Rock 'n' Roll Forecast 1984" was written and drawn in 1972 for a new satire magazine to be called Grin. Plans for the magazine fell apart at the last moment, and Cloud Studios' Bill Skurski ended up re-packaging the issue's material as a one-shot underground comic with the unfortunate title of Drool. 1984 seemed off in the distant future at the time, but if you adjust the time-frame forward by twenty years, some of the predictions weren't too far off, tattooed heads and male drag bands among them.

"Friday Night at the Crimson Cougar" was produced for yet another ill-fated publishing venture, in this case a national comics (and puzzles) tabloid called The Funny Papers. It lasted about 3 issues before going under. I concocted an ongoing 1-page series to be called "Slice of Life Comics," and produced three tabloid-page strips, only one of which saw print before the venture went belly-up, in part due to lame distribution. "Where Are They Now?" is one of the never-before-published lost Funny Papers strips.

"Too Real" was the opening strip in a political comic I founded in 1978, Anarchy Comics. I was also political cartoonist for In These Times at the time. The clip-art style of this strip was to influence cartoonist Tom Tomorrow.

"Hotline to Heaven" was one of several strips I did for High Times magazine at the start of the '80s.

"Say!" was a look at the evolution (or devolution) of the counterculture, as seen from the start of the Reagan era.

"Time to Disorganize" was a 2004 exercise in bittersweet nostalgia, drawn for Wobblies!, a graphic history of the I.W.W., edited by long-time friend Paul Buhle and WWIII editor Nicole Schulman.

• 
• 
• 
• Rock 'n' Roll Forecast 1984
  First published in
  Drool
  No.1, 1972.
  3 pages, black and white,
  ink and duotone board.

• 
• Friday Night
  at the
  Crimson
  Cougar
  First published
  in
  The Funny
  Papers No.2
  March 1975.
  1 tabloid page,
  color, hand-
  separated.
• 
• Where Are
  They Now?
  Drawn for
  The Funny
  Papers c.1975.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• Too Real
  First published
  in Anarchy
  Comics
  No.1, 1978.
  5 pages,
  black and
  white.

• 
• Hotline to Heaven
  First published in
  HighTimes Magazine
  1981,
  black and white.
• 
• Say!
  First published in
  Dope Comix
  No. 4, 1981.
  1 page, color.

• 
• 
• Time to Disorganize
  First published
  in Wobblies!
  (Verso Books) 2005.
  2 pages,
  black and
  white.