Lazin’ on a Sunday Afternoon (Sunday Funnies)

The Sunday Funnies?

Today’s Funky Winkerbean

Anybody else reminded of Aldo Kelrast? Almost 13 years to the day?

Need a laugh after that? Go read Wallace the Brave.

“Don’t be like Gurglson”
Hmm, just noticed that, aside from questions and exclamations, Henry doesn’t use ending punctuation.

The Hi and Lois Autumn scene.

Don’t know if this will be it for annual Autumn show in Hi and Lois, but I like that drop panel.
The suburban town, the steeple in the background, the trees and colors – good job Eric.
But couldn’t you have done some kind of take on September Morn for the calendar?

Self-reference in The Fusco Brothers.

The Fusco Brothers doesn’t just have a drop panel – JC Duffy sets it up so the entire left third of the Sunday edition can be dropped; allowing comics sections, if they so desire, to run it as a single tier.

Reproducing because Macanudo is such a charming experience.

¿Qué pasó?

Lalo Alcaraz still credits Junco Canché as the “Special Guest Artist” for today’s La Cucaracha, but I’m not seeing Junco’s tilted “J” signature.

Bill Griffith uses today’s Zippy to make observations about superhero comics.

But I am more interested in that comic book in the last panel.

Muscleman From Mars? Why does that sound familiar?
Here it is! My old copy of Real Pulp Comics #2 (March, 1973) – with a Griffy story:

As Comix Joint explains:

Bill Griffith also reprises his appearance in the first issue…with a hilarious spoof of the comic artist who had taken the underground comics world by storm by 1972: Richard V. Corben. Corben, who had exploded on the scene in Skull, Slow Death, Rowlf, Fantagor and Fever Dreams, was disparaged (or surreptitiously condemned) by many rebellious cartoonists as a slick, shallow and overtly commercial artist who tried to cash in on the underground culture.

Griffith lampoons the style and substance of Corben’s comic art in “Musclemen of Mars,” which features nude, hypermuscular men and women in conflict over matters of little consequence and minor social relevance.

In Griffy’s own words from 2003:

62    This was my exorcism of Richard Corbin. I don’t know if anybody remembers Richard Corbin? He had a highly prolific early career in underground comics doing the most hackneyed, garbage storylines with this intensely eroticized violence that was just … it wore me down. It was the kind of stuff that, I understood what he was doing, but there was something so humorless, so completely seriously humorless about it, that it just seemed like nothing but material for satire. I mean, it was literally just put there for me to satirize, and so I did this strip. It’s almost incoherent. I’m not going to bother reading it. Corbin’s dialogue was incoherent, too. I called it “Muscle Men from Mars,” and it’s nothing but these eroticized overly muscled figures fighting each other in this kind of pansexual—I just wanted to get something out of my system. There’s really no point in reading the dialogue. It’s just “take this,” “take that,” “I’ll pop your eyes out.” This was the only comic strip I ever did that S. Clay Wilson liked. [laughter]It really made me feel kind of warm and fuzzy when he told me how much he liked this comic strip. And he said, “You really should do more like this, you know.” He absolutely missed the satire.

Don’t want to leave you hanging so Bill Griffith’s “Musclemen of Mars,” an adults-only story,
can be read here along with the rest of Real Pulp Comics. Varning För Snusk

Sunday confession: I bought every Richard Corben underground comic I could find,
and followed him to the ground-level and Warren comics.