By Michael O’Donoghue & Frank Springer (Ken Pierce Books)
ISBN: 0-912277-34-3
The 1960s satire boom left many unforgettable classics in film and television, but precious little in the form of comic-strips. One notable exception is this cerebral and innocently smutty masterpiece from Michael O’Donoghue – a brilliant writer and performer who was a co-founder of National Lampoon, as well as an involved citizen in the right place at the right time. His later jobs included working with Woody Allen and being the first head writer on the groundbreaking Saturday Night Live.
In a period of immense upheaval he was in a position to say something about Everything and chose methods that people couldn’t ignore – biting commentary, bizarre sexual practices and naked ladies.
His perfect partner in this endeavour was veteran comics stripper, cartoonist and animation artist Frank Springer, who began his career by assisting George Wunder on Terry and the Pirates before branching out into comic books for practically every company in America.
In 1965 they produced for the Evergreen Review a tongue-in-cheek, subversive assault on old America in the form of a parody of silent movie serials such as the Perils of Pauline. And like contemporary cartoon commentaries Little Annie Fanny and The Adventures of Pussycat they used tactics America couldn’t ignore – politics, sexual themes and the aforementioned naked ladies.
Evergreen Review was an eclectic literary magazine which began in the late 1950s. Despite being a “literary†periodical it was always heavily illustrated and carried many cartoons – often of a controversial, sophisticated or sexually charged nature.
The Review debuted pivotal works by Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Gunter Grass, LeRoi Jones, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O’Hara, Kenzaburo Oe, Octavio Paz, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott and Malcolm X.
It closed in 1973, but returned in 1998 as an online magazine edited by founder Barney Rosset and Astrid Meyer. The new Review features flashbacks to classic editions, and new material by contemporary dissident poets such as Dennis Nurkse, Giannina Braschi and Regina Dereiva.
Evergreen Review ran thirteen instalments of Phoebe, ranging from four to eight pages with such chapter titles as ‘Peril Diver’, ‘Liquidated Assets’ and ‘Pain and Ink’ but the jocularity of the titles mask a very dark and instructive comedy. Many images and scenes involve brutality, humiliation, Nazism and bondage: not out of prurience but to make an antithetical statement.
This is clever, worthy stuff, but if you’re looking for a cheap thrill or can’t see past the surface, leave this book alone. The Review’s publisher Grove Press collected the series as a hardback book in 1968, and this paperback from 1986 reprints that edition.
This is a great lost gem, a powerful example of what comics can contribute to the adult world of debate and reason and a clever read. It’s about time for a third edition…
© 1968, 1986 Michael O’Donoghue & Frank Springer. All Rights Reserved.