Up Your Nose #1 - Klevart Enterprises

You don't get much more obscure than this little curiosity--Up Your Nose(And Out Your Ear) #1, courtesy longtime comic artists Ross Andru and Mike Esposito.

As chronicled in a great article about the magazine in TwoMorrows' Back Issue! #13, UYN was an attempt by the team of Andru and Esposito to have a project they controlled from beginning to end, and break away from the grind of monthly art chores. Everybody was gunning for Mad since the sixties, and, like Johnny Carson, that lofty goal resulted in a lot of dead competitors lying on the ground in the wake of those attempts.

The quasi host of the magazine was a fumetti-style character named "Joe Snow", decked out in tight jeans, long hair, shades, and bushy moustache. He introduces the stories, in a very "up the establishment" tone. The first comic story is "Thelma of The Apes", featuring a frequently naked Queen of the Apes, though drawn in a more silly, less prurient style.

There's also "The Ace of Spades"; an attack on racism by seemingly embodying it, "Daniel's Den", a Don Martin-esque attempt at highlighting the work of cartoonist Dan Haskett, "Monsieur Gogo", a very Mad-ish feature on the subject of traveling.

Joe Snow makes a return appearance, then we have "Count Varicose", probably the best strip in the book, drawn in a very Jack Davis/Mort Drucker-ish style. It only runs five pages, and is mostly about Dracula being so out of place in the silly seventies. Next is "Greta Garish", a parody of Hollywood Stardom, a return of "Daniel's Den", Joe Snow introduces the superhero "Garlic Man"(hey, it's no sillier than, say, Justice League Task Force), and then Joe Blow advertises some Up Your Nose t-shirts(optimistic, to say the least).

All in all, pretty silly, but with the talented Andru and Esposito's obvious passion for the book, they could've made something of thos. Unfortunately, the "Joe Snow" character was seen by some retailers as basically an advertisement for cocaine(!), and the a lot of them simply refused to carry the magazine any more. Andru and Esposito tried to buck the trend, but to no avail. Up Your Nose published a second issue, but before getting #3 out the plug was pulled.

Andru and Esposito returned to mainstream comics for fine, solid careers(Andru in particular), but they always regretted that their baby didn't get a chance to grow.