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It was great to hear you guys do an episode on Ed Subitsky. When i was a kid i would read my dads National Lampoons though even at the time I was sure they were inappropriate for me and probably fucking me up some.
There were loads of great cartoonist at National Lampoon and, unfortunately, some of them were almost totally unknown outside of that magazine, Subizky cheif among them. To be clear most of their cartoonists seemed to have had professional lives elsewhere. The brilliant Gahan Wilson comes to mind. B. Klibans work was everywhere for a time. And many mainstream cartoonists contributed as a side thing like Neil Adams, Frank Springer, Russ Heath. I associate Bobby London (and “Dirty Duck”, his mean spirited version of “Krazy Kat”) with Nat Lamp but he was also known as an underground cartoonist and many years later took over the Popeye comic strip.
But ed Subitzky seems to have been confined to the cartooning ghetto of Nat Lamp and in that he was in the good company of the equally brilliant M. K. Brown and the much loved Shary Flenniken.
I thought Ed was a genius, so Im interested to see if his stuff holds up for me after I pick up the collection you reviewed. I agree with you that his strips probably suffer if read more than one at a time.
I sometimes wonder if his stuff would have worked as well if he could actually draw, or is that a necessary component?
You mentioned Ed’s bit on David Letterman. He started doing that when he was a staff writer on Letterman during the shows first years when it was a morning show. All of his appearances have been collected here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Z7vYARF_4&pp=ygULZWQgc3ViaXR6a3k%3D. If you think he looks like a nebbish wait until you hear his voice.
When i was a kid, B. Kliban lived around the block from me and M. K. Brown lived in the next town. I only knew that about Brown because you could recognise the town (Fairfax) from her strips. I never met either of them but i met Klibans wife when i polished their car. I used to do this door-to-door when I was 11. A few years later Kliban died and his wife quickly remarried…wait for it … Bill Bixby. But now I’m rambling.
If you don’t know Kliban look him up. His work clearly begat the far side but was a bit more out there.
Hi, Joven,
This is incredible! New York Review Comics also put out a book of Flenniken’s Nat Lamp cartoons.
Russ Heath’s “Swamp Sluts” was also incredible.
I think Subitzky’s comics would be LESS funny if he could draw well. (I tried to articulate this in the episode, maybe not very well.) Subitzky too, like the others you mentioned, was earning his living in advertising. He talks about this in detail in the interview in the book.
Amazing stories about washing Kliban’s car and Bill Bixby! My favorite Kliban comic is, of course, “Out of the way, you swine! A cartoonist is coming!”