Rare Underground Comix apa-zines from 1969-1970

"Shitty Comeex" and "Mountain Motors Comix"

Underground comix apazines I published in 1969 and 1970. Submissions drawn on ditto masters mainly by me and my high schoolmates include pages by actual underground artists hanging out at the San Francisco Comic Book Co.

Rory Hayes did Granny Crackbaggy for SHITTY and Mad Stoz for Mountain Motors; Art Spiegelman and Jay Lynch teamed up on a very detailed Pro-Junior cover for Private Papers of the DOPPLER GANG.

Gary Arlington's hole-in-the-wall store was my main library for most of '69.

Rory, Crumb and Griffin inspired me to channel their lettering styles, pie-cut eyeballs, tear drops (cum again?); my sense of humor was borrowed from Kurtzman's MAD, Uncle Scrooge (Barks) and Fighting American (Simon & Kirby) as well as ZAP.

My good friend Mu (Mark Ungar) saved some of this obscure stuff from disappearing into the ozone.




"The Good Old Days", by Mark Ungar.

My first exposure to the world of underground comics was Robert Crumb's Keep On Truckin' black light poster. (Not this cheap imitation posted here!)



At Lowell High School, Ken "Crawford" Kaffke and I first met as members of the SFFWWTC (Science Fiction, Fantasy, Witchcraft and Weird Things Club). Ken was well into Carl Barks and EC comics, but was particularly focused on the new undergrounds.

Up until this time, I had found the artistic technique in Zap Comix incomprehensible.
Ken helped me to appreciate the individual pen strokes and to revel in the magnificent blackness of the ink.
The black and white printing served to evoke the accessibility and freedom of the form.



You didn't need to be a corporation to publish, and publish we did, in The Private Papers of the Doppler Gang, the SFFWWTC's zine.
- Mark Ungar

The Private Papers of the Doppler Gang, cover (1970) by Art Spiegelman and Jay Lynch. The had stumbled upon our "weird stuff" as they called it, on the bottom shelf of the SF Comic Book Co.

A Checklist of Underground Comics was another of my projects in 1969. My ad, seen here as it appeared in Rocket's Blast #66, was rushed to meet RBCC's advertising deadline. Note the misspelled title!