FARE THEE WELL, SMUT PEDDLER: Al Goldstein RIP (1936-2013)

Al Goldstein has taken the elevator to the big edit meeting in the sky. 

I'll leave the obit-writing to the professionals.

You'll find those here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/nyregion/al-goldstein-pioneering-pornographer-dies-at-77.html?pagewanted=all

And here: http://observer.com/2013/12/al-goldstein-founder-of-screw-magazine-has-died/

All I have to add is this: Some people rear up in horror at the sight of pornography, and there's not much to be done about that. When considering porn, I think it's important to keep this in mind: some of our greatest artists and writers, (along with countless hacks) have turned to porn in the interest of scraping together a living. What they may have been surprised to discover in porn, (along with a modest paycheck) was artistic freedom. And THAT'S what I owe Al Goldstein.

SCREW #1,349, cover art by Kim Deitch

Collector Thomas Stein recently put in a request to see the one and only SCREW cover drawn by underground comix legend Kim Deitch. It just so happens I have a copy, and here it is! 

I chatted with Kim Deitch about SCREW a few years back. A frequent contributor to '60s hippie papers like the East Village Other, Kim told me that the secret to the success of those publications was that they generally included one or two photos of nude hippie gals. Such photos were guaranteed to pique the prurient interest of curious straights. When Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley launched SCREW in 1968, their strategy was to outdo the hippie papers by cramming the pages of their nascent sex tabloid with oodles of naked hippies in full filthy frolic. SCREW would remain a going concern for nearly four decades, while the East Village Other and its psychedelic brethren evaporated almost as quickly as a DMT trip.

The issue is dated January 9th, 1995. 

Nine SCREW covers by SPAIN RODRIGUEZ, (1940 - 2012)

Spain Rodriguez drew many wonderful covers for SCREW Magazine during his long cartooning career. Here are the nine I have in my collection, but I suspect there are lots more. If anyone has a SCREW cover by Spain that's not posted here, I'd love to see it.

Here are two paragraphs I wrote in remembrance of Spain for Tim Hodler at The Comics Journal:

By 1982, I’d outgrown the superhero comics I’d read steadily through my teen years. To fill the void, I was buying all the undergrounds I could find at various long-lost quirky NYC comic shops like Soho Zat. As is typical, Crumb was the gateway drug. Fritz the Cat led quickly to Zap Comix, and while I loved nearly everything I saw between Zap‘s covers, I was particularly drawn to Spain Rodriguez’s bold pages that looked as if they’d been drawn by Wally Wood on four hits of blotter acid. Spain was sketching a world I desperately wanted to visit: brutally violent, brazenly sexy and relentlessly hip. Spain’s vision is a paranoid sci-fi fever dream where insidious corruption trickles down from the hidden seats of power, while leather-clad culture warriors fight that power in the name of the people’s revolution. Good stuff.

Roughly a decade and a half later, in the midst of a notorious legal jam, I found myself reaching out to many “big name” cartoonists in the hope that I’d score contributions for my benefit book. I was struck by the generosity of Spiegelman, Crumb, Robt. Williams, Kim Deitch, and some of the other underground greats, but again, I was especially touched by the kind spirit of Spain Rodriguez. During a visit to San Francisco, Spain graciously spent most of a morning driving me around town in his vintage auto, sharing stories about the city he loved, his underground comix collaborators, and other anecdotes from the kind of life that would make any sane person green with envy. From the Road Vultures to the ’68 Democratic Convention and the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater, this was a man who’d been given a front row seat to the spectacle of mid-Twentieth Century America in transformation. Luckily for his readers, Spain had both the intelligence to understand what he was looking at, and the skill to share his insights with us in ways that were both moving and beautiful. In this instance at least, the cliched caveat that one should never meet one’s heroes was entirely wrong.

  SCREW #1,115, dated July 16th, 1990

  SCREW #1,293, dated December 13th, 1993

  SCREW #1,327, dated August 8, 1994

  SCREW #1,346, dated December 19th, 1994

  SCREW #1,358, dated March 13th, 1995

  SCREW #1,469, dated April 28th, 1997

  SCREW #812, dated September 24th, 1984

SCREW #506, November 1978

 SCREW #875, dated December 9th, 1985

Cover Art for SCREW #1063, featuring cover artist Jim "Hak" Hopkins

By the early 1980s, the path that led cartoonists from Manhattan's School of Visual Arts to SCREW Magazine had been well-established. Kevin Hein, who in his SVA days assisted Art Spiegelman & Francoise Mouly at RAW, later sought full-time work in SCREW's art department, and eventually found himself sitting in the art director's chair. Many of Hein's SVA classmates sold art to SCREW, including Kaz, Drew Friedman, Peter Bagge, and a fellow named Jim Hopkins, who drew for SCREW under the pseudonym "HAK."

Jim Hopkins contributed many covers and comic strips to SCREW during Kevin Hein's tenure as art director. I've always considered Jim to be one of the most talented folks ever to grace the cover of the notorious smut tabloid. Issue #1063 features what might be the best of all the "HAK" covers, this one starring revolutionary stand-up comic Lenny Bruce. Sadly, I managed to save only the cover of #1063, but I believe this gorgeous drawing was accompanied by "Shpritz to Lenny," a touching three-page tribute strip which Jim was kind enough to allow me to reprint in my anthology LEGAL ACTION COMICS Vol. 1 in 2000.

A quick Google search has lead me to this blog, and this blog,
both of which feature what appears to be current work by Jim (no longer known as "HAK") Hopkins, now a veteran of the storyboard scene. From what I can see, Jim's stuff has gotten even more accomplished and beautiful than when I last saw it over a decade ago, (if that's possible).

SCREW #1063 is dated July 17, 1989. Scanning and color-correcting these old, moldering sheets of newsprint is always challenging, but doing justice to this drawing was especially tricky, given the subtlety of Hopkins' technique. My guess is that Jim started off with a B&W image drawn in either china marker or pastel. For his color seps, it appears that Jim did two overlays, ALSO in pastel or china marker, for his yellow and cyan plates. It's a lushly nuanced drawing that deserves better quality paper and a more sophisticated printing press than it got.

Cover Art for SCREW #1024, featuring cover artist Robert Crumb

What can I say about Robert Crumb? He invented underground comix, and after forty years, he remains the towering figure in that scene. His is a household name, spoken reverently by cartoonists and aging hippies, but also familiar to many who've never seen one of his comic books, (thanks largely to filmmaker Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary).

The first time I remember seeing a Crumb drawing was when I was six or seven. During a walk down Jackson Heights' commercial drag 82nd Street, I spied Crumb's unforgettable "Stoned Agin" poster in the window of a head shop. The classic poster's fascinating, frightening sequence of images stuck with me. Growing up in the Seventies, one couldn't help but catch glimpses of Crumb's work here and there out of the corner of one's eye, whether it was a "Keep On Truckin'" sticker speeding away on the bumper of a VW Beetle, or the wonderful, short-lived Mr. Natural Strip that Crumb drew for the Village Voice. Like his less-interesting contemporary Peter Max, R. Crumb contributed an essential component to that decade's esthetic; something floating in the air that inevitably seeped into everyone's skulls.

It was in the early 1980s, (my High School years) when I really jumped into Crumb's work with both feet. I started with all the issues of ZAP and ARCADE I could lay my hands on at Forbidden Planet, SoHo Zat, and other long-forgotten Downtown Manhattan comics shops. When I exhausted the local supply, I was forced to seek out overseas sources, namely the excellent hardbound Crumb sketchbooks published in 1981 by German imprint Zweitausendeins.

Needless to say, I'm a hopeless Crumb fiend. and I'm sure that I speak for most cartoonists when I say that Crumb's work changed the way I thought about comics. Like some powerful hallucinogen, Crumb's comics stripped away the cornball conventions we'd acquired while reading mainstream comics, leaving the doors of perception squeaky-clean and wide open to....what?

Let's leave that question mark dangling while we skip forward a few years to 1988. Al Goldstein visited R. Crumb at his home in Encinitas, CA to interview the cartoonist for SCREW's notorious leased access cable TV series Midnight Blue. A transcript of the Crumb Q&A transcript ran in two or three issues of SCREW, and Crumb supplied drawings for the covers of those issues.

Famous for turning down high-paying illustration gigs out of some fear of "selling out," Crumb certainly couldn't have been tempted by the pay SCREW was offering for covers in those days, (I think it was $200 for cover art at that point?). More likely, Crumb saw Goldstein as a kindred soul, another grizzled survivor of the Sixties' underground hippie papers.

This issue is dated October 17, 1988. To the best of my knowledge, there are three SCREW covers with art by Robert Crumb. One is a detailed close-up portrait of Goldstein, (commissioned by Al himself, of course). The other two would appear to be drawings pulled from Crumb's sketchbooks, and #1024 is one of those. I'm not sure who did the color separations for this one. It may have been Crumb, (who certainly knew his way around a color sep), but more likely, it was someone in SCREW's art department, (I say this because in a few months, I would be tapped to provide color seps for another Crumb cover).

For those of you who started drooling at the thought that there's a Goldstein/Crumb interview out there somewhere in videoland, you can find it right here at William Lustig's Blue Underground, (box art by yours truly).