It's an Astounding Piece of Americana!

In the summer of 1974 I produced the following messterpiece, on a 15½-by-21½-inch posterboard:

I shall now proceed to explicate its components.

TOP RIGHT-HAND CIRCLE:

The circle and its hollow center are tracings of a 45rpm record.  The four panes are ...

·         12 o’clock:  Image from “Wardrobe of Monsters,” art by Gray Morrow.  Story by Otto Binder. I encountered in Eerie # 15, June 1968. (Note the bottom-left panel.)

·         3 o’clock:  Image from “Head Shop,” art by Jose Bea.  Story by Don Glut.  I encountered in Eerie #51, September 1973.

·         6 o’clock:  Another image from “Wardrobe of Monsters,” Eerie # 15, June 1968.  (Note the trop-center panel.)

·         9 o’clock:  Image from “The Graves of Oconoco,” art by Pat Boyette and Rocke Mastroserio.  Story by John Benson.  Also from Eerie # 15, June 1968. (The last panel.)



THE PSYCHEDELIC HAND:  is a tracing of my own hand, at that time.  The illustrated interior was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I first finished reading on April 25, 1974.  You’ll recall that when Mr Dark is searching for Jim and Will, the boys’ faces are tattooed on his palms.

THE SNAKE:  is a freehand drawing.  But its head is the skull from the Visible Man model kit.

 CENTER MOON/TOWER/HEARSE:

The swastika windmill sitting atop a hearse is inspired by the windmill seen at the end of the original 1931 Frankenstein.



THE SWOOSH IN THE TOP LEFT-CENTER:

The bottom circle contains an image cribbed from the 1973 cover of that monument of tripe, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.



The human silhouette is from some self-help book which I cannot now recall.

The Porky Pig is a common one, like this.

The Groucho Marx caricature is copied from the 1973 Manor Books printing of Groucho and Me.

The Batman face is from the over of an 80-pg Giant, Batman #198, cover-dated January 1968.  

And here’s an insert.

The hand is merely a sketch of the infamous rubber hand I bought at a novelty shop, and took with me on a choir trip to Galveston, TX, where it featured in many gag photos.



What’s on the other side, you ask?

Why, it’s a scotch-taped Beatles collage!



Well, this will have to hold all y’all for the month of September.  We’re takin’ a break until October, when we’ll dive into ...

BLOG-O-WEEN!

See you then!