During my last two years of college, one of the things my roommate (the other cartoonist for the campus weekly) and I enjoyed most on Sunday mornings was bong hits and coffee for breakfast while watching the local TV evangelists for cheap laffs — TV evangelists were funny back then — while waiting for the local Sunday morning Tarzan Film Festival for even more cheaper laffs (a lot of local channels were running Tarzan movies on late Sunday mornings back then; what was the deal with that?).
The biggest hit around our dorm was a guy with a pompadour a mile high and a pastel blue suit (that looked like he’d stolen it from the local news anchorman) who broadcast out of Pulaski, VA — my bud and I went to Radford College, in the city (for down there) of Radford, VA, just across the river and down the road a piece — who used to “heal” people on the air, usually wheelchair-bound, deaf, mute, and gullible (interesting, he never did have any blind people on that program). He’d gibber a bunch of phrases strung together as if on heroin, top it off with a little “in Jesus’ name, out, thou (insert affliction), OUT!”, and he’d smack some deaf/mute kid in the forehead and push him back onto the deacons. They’d stand the poor sucker back up, and the preacher would snap his fingers around the kid’s ears and say “say ‘thank you, Jesus'”, and the kid would offer up some barely-intelligible groaning and the preacher would exclaim, “ohh, isn’t it wonderful?”; the audience would burst into applause and “amens” and my roommate and I would laugh so hard we shot bongwater out of our noses…
…all in the cause of satirical and artistic inspiration, of course.
So, after a few months of this, I finally start wondering… why is it always the forehead? No matter what the affliction — not just deafness, but paralysis, arthritic limbs, asthma — Pompadour Boy would always smack his marks… uh, faithful …on the friggin’ forehead! Here, in another early Yipster Times piece, I imagine the day that Reverend Pastel is challenged to heal hemorrhoids on his program. A cheap gag, I know, but I learned early on that good execution can often save a really lame gag. It sure did here; I mean, it did get into the Yipster Times.
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Ahh, the re-emergence of conservatism. Morning in America. A great time to be an American, as long as you were rich, well-connected, and/or a raving religous freak — like the Rev. Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg, VA (creepily, right near where I went to college) who suddenly was a nationwide rock’n’roll star who pissed on the separation of Church and State the First Amendment, and who was insisting that “what Jesus would do” would be to build a couple of new aircraft carriers and an orbital missile defense system and station a naval task force in the Persian Gulf…
This piece states what I think Jesus would’ve done, which, in keeping with proper conservative fiscal policy, would be to save a buttload of cash by converting all those cute little old Baptist churches out there with those cute little old steeples into missile silos, as long as we were in the process of bringing God back to government.
Seriously, though… could you imagine being in your pew one Sunday morning when the klaxons go off in town and the preacher unlocks the cover on the firing button and cuts that sucker loose? It’d probably look like that one scene in one of the early Planet Of The Apes sequels, which sucked (but then, all sequels suck, pretty much), but had this one memorable scene where a bunch of second-generation mutant survivors are in a makeshift church where there’s a single, unfired, loaded missile launcher at the pulpit; all the “congregation” are singing this nasty discordant hymn, and the “minister” finishes the service by mashing the “launch” button. Well, that one scene was really cool — even though the rest of it sucked — and, anyway, that’s what it’d look like.
That’s all, folks.
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One Yippie issue campaign I got the biggest kick out of was their “Nobody For President” campaigns — basically a campaign for not voting — that YIP began in the early ’70s and reached a peak around the late ’70s/early ’80s. It made perfect sense to me when I thought about it: who solved our energy problems of last decade? Who put a short leash on the nuclear power industry? Who ended human-rights abuses in East Timor? Who pushed for comprehensive campaign-finance and election reforms after the Watergate scandals? Who sought to end human-rights abuses by CIA-backed regimes in Central and South America? That’s right, nobody… well, except for that last one, which was Sen. Frank Church, but, still…
This was a proposed poster illustration for the Yippies’ traditional Counterinaugural Protest and Evening Bash, celebrating The Inauguration Of Nobody To No Office At All, held in DC to coincide with the “official” installation of El Presidente. It wasn’t picked, but then at the time, I was competing against the likes of Dana Franzen and Peter “Bugs” Bramley to publish work for national event posters, tough going for a fresh kid right out of school — and the Yipster Times had some serious circulation for an underground paper at the time. Still, this managed to make it into the DC Yippie ‘zine as part of a locally-produced poster, and was picked up by the Yipster Times, anyway, a couple of months after that.
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I’m Uncle Sam, that’s who I am;
I been hidin’ out in a rock and roll band!
Shake the hand that shook the hand
of Ferdinand Marcos and the Shah Of Iran!
–grateful dead, sort of
It was Abbie Hoffman, I think, who said that “a Yippie is a politically aware hippie.”
Actually, I didn’t get wind of that until around 1977 or ’78, as a young art student — the worst possible time to become a hippie, in the deepest pit of Disco Sickness, to some the beginning of the end of American popular culture. I first tried pot and LSD within about six months of each other during that time and, not appreciating suddenly becoming an official “criminal”, managed to get hooked up with the DC chapter of the famous Yippies, or Youth International Party (I was a youth at the time), who staged the lengendary “Smoke-Ins” around the USA, most notably the New York City “May Day Is Jay Day” parade, and the one and only Fourth Of July White House Smoke-In at Lafayette Park and the Mall.
This was printed by the YIP house gang down at 10th and K Streets — there’s some godawful post-post-modern office pile there now — a regularly irregular bunch who organized local smoke-ins and protests and put out a tabloid ‘zine which I helped edit and illustrate, sharing one of the last few original row houses left in downtown at the time. This piece was printed using a combination of standard high-quality monochrome and then-new color photocopiers at a couple of little shops downtown (which are also long gone). The original art was sketched out and traced with black felt-tips on regular sketch-pad paper (oh, c’mon, you remember those), from which a run of several hundred was run on a standard monochrome xerox. The color was worked in with colored pencil on a sheet of vellum thrown over one of the xerox prints and cut to letter size. The whole kaboodle was taken to the shop with the color machine, the vellum overlay taped to the glass, monochrome prints loaded into the bin and run off in very short runs of ten or twenty at first, in order to set the registration, brightness and contrast on the overlay print — and it really was hit-or-miss back then, kiddies — and then went up to batches of fifty or a hundred at a time.
Registration, as you can see, was a big issue here, which is why we did the two-run route (color overlay on top of a monochrome print of the line art). We’d done some test prints of mixed felt-tip and colored-pencil art on the color machine, and it was crap; color xerography was really brand-new then, and one of its major weaknesses was an inability to create properly saturated black, along with its own registration issues. Even the best stuff from the color machine back then had these little fuzzy edges around everything, like badly-registered Sunday funnies. This is one of the last surviving prints from one of our “best batches”, given to me by ex-DC Yippie and blazing synthesizer player Rupert Chappelle.
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