MY AD HOC CARTOONS printed in the underground press

You're going to have to click on each of these three cartoons individually to enlarge them for maximum humor effects. The third was based upon a rightfully short run of a real musical originating in Japan. Peopling it with turkeys and dogs was deliberate. No animals were harmed.

My first job after graduating UCLA found me employed as an assistant art director for an underground newspaper The Los Angeles Weekly News, a spin off of the Los Angeles Free Press, run by its founding editor Art Kunkin. It was a three-day job (literally. I worked 72 hours in a row. You can do that in your twenties. Then sleep one full day, then catch up, lather, rinse repeat.) It involved graphic organization, putting the newspaper to bed i.e., final preparation for printing, shameless infill with my own photographs, and filling in space at the last minute where advertisers had reneged or copy editors had miscalculated column inches.

For this last duty I created the above series of panel cartoons on the fly. I was much influenced by a) "Summarize Proust" by Monty Python; b) the artists at National Lampoon magazine; c) Joe Moshcitta's "10 Classics in 10 Minutes" and d) the first Saturday Night Live. It was, after all, 1973, and the last panel of the Biblical one spoofs the now late John Lennon. The series ran the three times indicated on the above tear-sheets. I drew each of them on the spot in black felt-tip pen to fill in the aforementioned space quotients.