Comix Collection Part 2

This is part two of my "underground" comix" collection.
The first part can be found here.

As i said earlier I hope to catalogue them one day.
I'm doing this series because there is a a shortage of good information on the net at the moment regarding 70s underground comix so maybe someone will get these in a google search and get the information they are looking for.
For some more history and/or visuals check these links.

COMICLOPEDIA

UNDERGROUND COLLECTIBLES

UNDERGROUND COMIC INFO HUB

WIKIPEDIA

SNOID	Zap 9	Zap 11
Zap 3 A side	ap 3 B side	Zap 5
Weirdo #3	Fantagoro	Cootchy Cooty Comix
Leather Nun	Dutch Treat	American Flyer Funnies
Sleazy Scandals	ThunderDogs	MOD
Barn Of Fear	Ditko WHA.	Forbidden Knowledge
Mondo Snarfo	Red Raider	Spirit 3D

Record covers, CD’s and failing eyesight.

I miss the old album covers, I don’t miss the vinyl records they contained, I just miss the single and old double gate 12 inch by 12 inch cardboard covers - sometimes with an inner sleeve - with their wondrous artwork and readable linear notes.

I’ve always been a keen music fan and I don’t expect the passion to wane in my old age. I’m also not adverse to technological change but I do know what I like.

Many people these days romanticize the music on vinyl saying it’s a warmer sound.
I say “Rubbish”
Give me a CD anytime. Compact, wonderful sound, no pops or scratches (and even when it sticks it sounds cool) and anyone with a record player and children know the two are not compatible.

If you want proof of how fast vinyl has become redundant just ask any teenager to pick up one of your precious albums and put it on and see how the handle it. Or better still see how fast you jump out of your chair to take it off them.

CD’s are great. Portable and cheaper than ever before and with old catalogues being released and the ability to use disc burning on your home computer you can any music you want. Mp3 players annoy me for the same reason that Discman and Walkman before them annoyed me. I don’t like walking around with earphones isolating me from the wider world. Not to mention the amount of kids on bikes who have never heard me come up behind them in my car and the have nearly swerved in front of me.

Mp3 have also created a more current phenomenon that I don’t really relate to. The mix tape or just the current top hits and the even crazier one of putting your entire album collection on a little stick or card that can be destroyed by forgetting to take it out of your trousers next time you do the washing.

I usually listen to music in my car these days and then it has to be a complete album. It’s great, the sound is clear, I can skip songs easily and I can fit 12 discs in the car glove box.
But it’s when I want to listen to music at home when I realize how much I miss those old vinyl album covers. One thing that a CD can never replicate and this was a problem cassettes had as well was to produce good-sized artwork and lyrics and linear notes you could read without the use of an industrial strength magnifying glass.

I believe that is why kids just burn and download music onto their Mp3 players these days because they never had the pleasure of scanning over the packaging of the music their listening too and looking for hidden messages or pre Photoshop artwork.

I know this sounds like an old man “why do things have to change” whine but I recall when I was pre teen and hanging around my mates big brother’s bungalow and finding all these records with the strangest pictures on them and one had naked boys and girls crawling up rocks on this alien landscape ( Led Zeppelin – Houses of the holy) another was a school desk (Alice Cooper’s Schools Out) Others were plain with beautiful calligraphy (Neil Young Harvest) Many of the records these covers held were thrown in a pile waiting to be returned to their covers. The covers themselves also had different textures and quality. Some were smooth, others had a mottled crocodile skin feel to them. All up they were a hell of a lot different from the Bagpipe and yodeling LP’s that we had at our place.
Since that day I have collected many a record, read many a book and decided that if you love music you have to go beyond the music. I was so amazed at how many people blindly interpreted popular songs with meanings that were never meant to be that I wrote a book about it.
But I have to say if CDs had that extra 7+ inches either side they’d be harder to fit in the glove box but easier to read the words.

For the record (pun intended)
Best album cover – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – Elton John (see above)
Colourful with a triple gatefold sleeve to highlight the lyrics, that are individually stylized by different artists.
Worst album cover – The Long Run – The Eagles
At one time the most expensive album ever produced and all the sleeve had was the band name and the title of the album. A total slap in the face to fans.

How well do you know Shakespeare?

Having just reread Bill Bryson’s excellent Shakespeare I wanted to share some of the rather wonderful things this book brought to light about what we know and what we perceive about the Great Bard - William Shakespeare.
We all know who he is , we all know he is regarded as the greatest ever English language playwright, we would even be able to recognize him by his portrait almost instantly.
These are things we take for granted but as Mister Bryson points out when describing why his book is so thin:
“…to see how much of Shakespeare we can really know, from the record. Which is one reason, why (the book) is so slender”

There hangs a portrait of a man in The National Portrait Gallery of London, no one knows who painted it and its providence can only be traced back to 1747. It has been retouched over time and so ill treated that much of the detail is gone.
Scholars have presumed it is William Shakespeare because of the style it is painted in and the fashion of the clothes. It could be said it looks like a portrait of William Shakespeare, and so it should it one of the three likeness of him that all are taken from.
In fact of the other two one is a statue that was white washed thus removing all its painted on detail. This is at the place of his burial at Holy Trinity Church in
Stratford-upon-Avon and was commissioned seven years after his death; this is also the year the third portrait was made – engraved in brass – for the cover of the famous First Folio, the first collection of Shakespeare’s works. This brass etching wasn’t done from a sitting (as the statue) because Shakespeare was dead seven years before it’s commission, and is considered even by the methods of the day to be a very mediocre piece of work.

Shakespeare left the world nearly a million words of text with his collective works but only fourteen words in his own hand- his name signed six times on various legal documents and the words “by me” on his will.
No original manuscripts survive of his plays, sonnets or poems. The First Folio was constructed by two of his former colleagues and good friends who interviewed actors and friends who had played the roles.
Of the six signatures not one is spelt the same way and the only one not recorded is the one spelling that everyone knows and is now the acceptable spelling used to this day.
The fact is we know little or nothing about this man who left the world so much.
So over the years as more and more written pieces are released on the great man, some are nothing more than critical works on critical works by people who have used conjecture rather than fact to state theories, it is probably best not to judge the personality that wrote the works on just the words because that would be inaccurate and just plain wrong. The facts are we know nothing at all about the man , let alone what he may have looked like.
There are close to 5000 books published just on the subject that Shakespeare didn’t actually write his plays at all.
It is paradoxical that nearly any one above year eight at school could recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant they saw one but of the three surviving likeness two are pretty dodgy works by artists working years after his death and the third a rather more compelling picture of a man that may or may not be someone else all together.
He is at once the best known and least known figures in history.