News about National Lampoon and related topics.
At long last, a collection of B.K. Taylor’s National Lampoon comics will be published. For years, readers of my site have asked about such a collection and it’s finally happening. Taylor created both “The Appletons” and “Timberland Tales” comic strips which appeared for over a decade in the Funny Pages section of National Lampoon, generally
Reader David Beckham sent me a link to a nice video tribute he made about Michael Gross. (Gross died in 2015 of cancer.)
I’ve been on the email list for the Gahan Wilson Fundraiser (see below or here), and today the guy running it, Gahan’s step-son Paul, posted a link to an interview with Gahan from back in 2011 for the Mr. Media podcast. It’s mostly about his relationship with Playboy magazine, but National Lampoon comes up a
Randall Enos is a regular contributor to cartoonist Daryl Cagle’s website. Recently, he told the story of the origin and development of his Chicken Gutz comic strip (a personal favorite of mine), which appeared in the Funny Pages section of National Lampoon starting in the early ’70s. Thanks to reader Michael Simmons for the link.
Longtime National Lampoon contributing cartoonist Gahan Wilson is suffering from dementia. His step son, Paul Winters, has set up a GoFundMe campaign to help fund his memory care. Click the link if you want to help. Wilson is known to NatLamp readers for his warped, often macabre sense of humor. He did many covers for the
The Caledonian Record, a newspaper based in Vermont, has posted a piece by cartoonist Randall Enos, who apparently does cartoons for them. Enos, you may know, was also a long-time contributor to National Lampoon, and did the long-running Funny Pages comic strip Chicken Gutz. In the piece, Enos tells how he came to work for
Did you ever wonder about the dog that appeared on the all-time most famous cover of the National Lampoon? The one with the blurb, “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog“? Well, the guys at the Lampoon didn’t shoot him, but somebody did. The dog’s name was Mr. Cheeseface. You can find the whole
Robert Grossman, the prolific and talented illustrator and caricaturist, died on March 18, 2018, at the age of 78. He did several covers and other pieces for the National Lampoon over the years, most famously the fold-out cover depicting Richard Nixon as Pinocchio for the August 1972 (The Miracle of Democracy) issue. I actually met
In the October 1974 (Pubescence) issue, the descriptive text about the cover on the Editorial page (page 17) reads: “COVER: The usual fuck-ups. Hendra, Kelly, and McConnachie thought the original model looked too old, so we—continued on page 84″ In every issue I’ve seen (until now), page 84 was a full-page ad. I always assumed this
Reader Cullum Rogers wrote to me recently to let me know about a project he’s been working on for about a year: A website devoted to magazine parodies called, straightforwardly enough, Magazine Parody. It doesn’t get much better or nerdier than this. Magazine parodies have been around for a long time—200 years, according to Rogers. The
