National Lampoon Week, Part 1 - June 1972

June 1972 - Ah, the National Lampoon--at one point, it was the focal point of the counter-culture humor wave that was washing over mainstream America in the early 1970s. Before Saturday Night Live, before Steve Martin, before SCTV, there was the Lampoon.

Growing up when I did, National Lampoon was already losing its influence on society, and in any case it was way too adult for me to even consider buying. And by the time I was old enough to do so, the magazine was, frankly, a pathetic also-ran, seeming like an old-time comedian still thinking the word "tits" would produce howls of shocked laughter, and didn't know enough to get off the stage.

But! In its heyday, during the years just before SNL and under the art direction of Michael Gross, NatLamp was like no other magazine, and it corralled an astonishing group of talented writers and artists.

I had really no idea how much comic book-related work NatLamp published until I saw an issue-length examination of the magazine in TwoMorrows' (again with the TwoMorrows!) Comic Book Artist, #24. I couldn't believe the line-up of comics all-stars NatLamp had in their pages--Neal Adams, Gray Morrow, Frank Frazetta, Jeff Jones, Joe Orlando, Frank Springer, Bruce Jones, Russ Heath, and more. And, even better, this material was done in full color, and looked pretty much like a "real" comic--wow! I had to get my hands on some of these issues!

So all this week we'll be talking Lampoon, and since I have no desire to dryly catalog every article(not only would that be boring to write, and even more boring to read, there's this excellent NatLamp site that does the job) I'll be concentraing on the comic book material in each issue. It should be fun.

Obviously, the comic book connection is right off the bat, with a Frank Frazetta cover! Inside there's this gag panel, drawn by no less than the late, great Gray Morrow:

In addition to work by Jeff Jones and Vaughan Bode(drawing their "Idyll" and "Cheech Wizard" strips, respectively), there's some grim cartoons(are there any other kind?) by Gahan Wilson.

The center comic book section is titled "The Last TV Show", written by Doug Kenney(a regular Lampoon writer, who also played "Stork" in Animal House) and drawn by Bruce Jones:

What's astounding to me about a lot of this comic material in NatLamp is how pitch-perfect in tone it was. These things read and felt like real comics, not a sloppy humor magazine approximation of them. This piece could've run in a Warren mag, or even later Jones-centric titled like Alien Worlds.

Be here tomorrow, to see some classic comic book material drawn by none other than...Neal Adams!