Underground on the Mountaintop: An Interview with Jay Lynch

Driving the half hour from Binghamton to Jay Lynch’s house feels a bit like making a pilgrimage to question a wary sage, minus the physical exertion. “It’s not my job to make false idols,” he explains, “It’s my job to take false idols and drag them into the gutter.” A founding father of the Underground Comix movement alongside Robert Crumb, he created Bijou Funnies and subverted the Comics Code Authority (and the establishment at large). While working at Topps, he designed Wacky Packages - parodies of popular product labels – which deprogrammed young minds against corporate advertising, and led to the creation of the subversive sticker series Garbage Pail Kids. Today, Lynch considers himself to be one of the last living Satirists.

He spent many years living in Binghamton as something of a hidden legend, where he serendipitously met local artist and teacher Greg Bohner, whom he befriended and inspired. With Bohner as my Sherpa, we arrived at Lynch’s home on a mid-March evening, where two women were upstairs organizing rooms teeming with artwork, comics, and letters. They were organizing Lynch’s work to be archived in the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Ohio, which currently houses the world’s largest collection of comics and cartoon art. With all of us in one place seeking to immortalize this renegade of satire, Carousel sat down to talk with the man behind the pen:

TRIPLE CITIES CAROUSEL: When the Undergrounds were first starting out, it seemed like you were pulling back the curtain on a culture that denied the natural state of humanity and tried to fit its citizens into a box.

JAY LYNCH: There was the Good Comics Code, so all of these kids, they wanted to grow up to draw comics. But they didn’t want to work for the Code; they didn’t even want to read Code books. Comics got really dull when they instituted a censorship code in the 1950s. Around 1955, the Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency investigated comic books – there was even a book burning in Binghamton. So we didn’t want to draw Archie or Spiderman or anything like that, so we published our own books, and [they were sold at] head shops at the time.

Regular comic books at that time were considered bundle padding: a comic cost 12 cents then. Playboy cost 50 cents. So the distributor would wrap just about every other magazine with comic books; they’d put them on the outside of the bundle, so the other stuff wouldn’t get ruined, the stuff that they could get higher amounts of money for. Magazine distribution in the ‘30s was consignment distribution: they would give the news dealer credit, and if he sold them, they’d give him his percentage, and if he didn’t sell them, he’d rip off the cover and give them back, just to prove he didn’t sell them, and then the guts would be destroyed. That was because of the Depression, because news dealers didn’t have much of a cash flow to lay out for wholesale.

But when we did the comics, it was at the head shops, and they would buy rolling papers at wholesale prices, and ultimately they would sell them, and if they didn’t sell them, maybe they could return them for credit. So our books, in the beginning, were based on the way that head shops were used to doing business, which was good, because we’d get the money up front; they’d buy the books wholesale. Also, the profit margin: in those days, technology was expensive, and human labor wasn’t. We could get time on a press late at night, on a web press to print the books for very cheap: it’d only cost us a nickel to print the book, and we’d retail for 50 cents and get back a quarter, so it’s a 500% profit margin. And it’s not that way now. Now it costs a dollar-something to print a book and the book sells for $2.50. I don’t know why there are comic books anymore.

TCC: I want to come back to that, but I also want to back up a little bit and talk about the themes, in terms of what you were doing – like pulling the curtain back on the culture that was being, pretty much, imposed upon people. I guess in the 1960s, there was that whole Leave It to Beaver thing, where people would see this nuclear family and this very happy image of America, with your whole “buy your white bread and drive your car with your kids and your wife,” and it seems that the Underground Comix movement was part of a movement that exposed that-

JL: The first successful underground comic was Zap, by Robert Crumb, and he sent me a copy of that, and I was doing a satire magazine at the time – it had comics in it, but it wasn’t a total comic book – and I was doing it with a guy named Skip Williamson, who was a cartoonist in Chicago, so when I saw Zap, I thought, let’s just do a whole comic book, and change the title. [We had been working on] the Chicago Mirror; it was like a humor magazine for hippies. We used to sell it on the street.

And, one time - this was when banana smoking was supposedly going on - it was like this thing about how you could get high by drying banana peels and smoking them, which was a myth. Like an urban myth. But a lot of people believed it, and we were doing a satire magazine, so we told them - in a Jonathan Swift Modest Proposal way - that they could smoke dog poop. And it just went on: that people who smoked dog poop were called “shitheads,” like potheads, and it was just a bunch of jokes like that. And we said the most desirable kind is called Lincoln Park Brown, and we told ’em how to cure it and stuff… But it was satire.

And I was selling the magazine on the street, and this kid came up to me and said, ‘Hey, that last issue was great, man! We’ve been smoking that dog poop all week.’ And I said, ‘No - it’s satire!’ And he said, ‘No! It’s real! I know!’ So, we decided maybe the hippies weren’t ready for that kind of thing.

TCC: So, I guess I have a question about – that’s really funny – so, the culture-

JL: Wait, what was the question?

TCC: I didn’t quite get to it, actually, but that’s okay. But here is the real question, and it’s more of a speculation than a call for an anecdote. So, back then the culture was very cookie-cutter, and you guys were able to be like, ‘that’s bullshit,’ and you were able to lampoon it. Now, the culture that’s being presented to younger people already comes with a gritty, almost lewd, appeal.

JL: Yeah, the new censorship isn’t so much the censoring of sex or excrement…

TCC: This is what I’m wondering.

JL: The censoring is the censoring of truth. Say there’s something that’s true, that’s dangerous to the power structure. What happens now is you got the internet – it’s free; anybody can be on the internet – you put something up, something that’s true, and then within six weeks there’s disinformation on the same topic, with UFO’s and crazy stuff added to it. So that’s how, what you might say has a basis in reality, is watered down and, ultimately, made ridiculous. So, you know, the internet is there, but it’s not that effective, because if anything dangerous to the power structure comes up, within a week there’s a dozen other pieces on the same topic saying it’s Martians and lizards and, you know, whatever… Not that there’s anything… maybe it’s true that it’s Martians and lizards; I don’t know! I don’t know what’s truth anymore. Truth is relative.

TCC: Has your attitude towards affecting social change and making social commentary through art changed over time?

JL: Eh…no. I don’t know. We used to think we were making the world safe for Nabakov and Henry Miller and stuff that was censored, James Joyce. What we got was Larry Flynt. Which – he has a right to do what he does. But we expected more from the American people, I think.

TCC: What do you think about the way that language is regulated, in regard to the power structure, and versus the power of the image?

JL: Do you know about Korzybski? Count Korzybski who wrote Science and Sanity - well, his first was a paper called “Time-Binding” in the 1920s, and that evolved into General Semantics. But the book that he’s most known for is Science and Sanity. It’s how words connote images that… Well, what’s his name…Trump said “pussy.” What’s the difference? Fuck – “the F word,” we call it now – used to be unprintable. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer’s book: he uses the word “fug.” But it’s close enough. Everybody knows what it means.

TCC: Do you think the deceptively silly nature of comics allowed you to seriously defy censorship?

JL: I think that whole hippie thing – it was just so mass – such a big cult, that you couldn’t go after them. It was before AIDS. Everybody was a hippie. There were hippie stores, and regular society didn’t know what they were talking about. There were words… like, Janis Joplin did an interview in the Chicago Tribune in 1967 where somebody said, ‘What are you going to do?’ [And she said,] ‘I’m gonna ball! I’m gonna ball all night!’ And they just thought it meant, you know, have a good time.

TCC: I guess that’s one way to subvert the censors - use a language that they don’t understand. Could you talk about the power of the grotesque, and the way you’ve used grotesque imagery?

JL: I don’t think about these things. The main thing was, we were reacting to the Comics Code, so we’d try to do what was the most shocking stuff just to break the ice. But a lot of that stuff is very deep. Justin Green’s underground comic Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary was the first autobiographical comic. And it’s heavy stuff. It’s like Portnoy’s Complaint, but it’s a comic book. It’s like Philip Roth, or something. Graphic novels, now, are well-respected things. Then again, nobody knows how to read anymore, so…

TCC: When the Underground Comix movement was first emerging, did you realize what was happening, and what you were a part of?

JL: Well, there were underground comics always, you know. In 1910 there were WWI political comics that were considered to be like underground comics. Tijuana bibles, the pornographic little booklets – “The kind men like” – that they’d advertise in magazines. And Joel Beck was doing these little comics called The Alienated War Babies Report. God Nose was a comic done by Jack Jackson in Austin, Texas in 1964. But it didn’t really catch on ’til Crumb did Zap in 1968, and he was shortly followed by Bijou Funnies, my book, and Skip Williamson’s book. Crumb even came into Chicago; he was in every issue of Bijou, too. And in Austin, Texas, Gilbert Shelton did a book called Feds ‘N’ Heads, and that was like the third Underground Comic. And, after that, it just became a craze. Within five years there were a thousand titles.

TCC: Do you think a similar movement could happen now, in the digital age, creatively?

JL: Yeah. I don’t know how, exactly. I mean, we did make money off of these books, and actually, over the long run, I think each of the artists made more money than if they were working for Archie or Marvel Comics. Because we’d pay royalties. So every time it was reprinted, they get paid again after it’s sold. So, with the Underground Comix, number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven… were all on the stands at the same time. They never went out of print until people stopped buying them. And then later, they were reprinted in book form.

TCC: What was the importance of meeting places, like cafés and headshops?

JL: We had a meeting – Robert Crumb, me, Skip Williamson, and Jay Kinney; our photograph appears on the inside cover of the first issue of Bijou - at a place in Chicago called the Seminary restaurant, and we decided to pick the last bits of flesh off the dying corpse of comics. […] They called it a conspiracy. Playboy did an article on the Underground Comix called “The Great Comics Conspiracy” pretty early on.

TCC: So you knew what was happening; you were like: we’re making something happen right now.

JL: Yeah; I saved everything.

TCC: What about in a city like Binghamton, where it’s still cheap enough for artists to live, and we’re doing cool things-

JL: Well, Art Spiegelman went to college at, it was called Harpur College then. In the Harpur yearbook, for the year 1970, I think it was, there’s a comic supplement called Phucked-Up Phunnies. That’s bound into the college yearbook. Also, Art has my characters, Nard n’ Pat, and the character he had, Little Man with the Big Mustache, stuck in among the graduating seniors. TCC: You had drawn Nard n’ Pat for that?

JL: They reprinted a Nard n’ Pat in that, that was [from] an early issue of Bijou. Art drew my characters in and his characters, because he was going to college [there].

TCC: And you had met Art in New York City?

JL: No. I met Art when we were kids. We did magazines - which I already gave to the [Billy Ireland] museum – we did fanzines when we were children.

TCC: So you were living in the same town?

JL: No. In an issue of Cracked magazine there was a letter from a guy named Joe Pilati, advertising his fanzine called Smudge. He would interview the people from Mad and the people from Cracked, and he also had comics in there. There’s a movie about this, called Blood, Boobs, and Beast - it’s about Don Dohler, who was one of us then; he did a fanzine called Wild. We all sent for Smudge, and in Smudge there was a review of Wild, and we all sent for Wild. And it wound up me, Skip, and Art – Art did one called Blasé – and we all went and drew these fanzines, and we were like… I was 16 and Art was 14. And later, he won a Pulitzer Prize for the graphic novel Maus. Before that, we did fanzines and Garbage Pail Kids and Underground Comix.

When we were really young, I went to visit Art… we used to draw in the Port Authority bus terminal – this was when Art was like, 15, and I was 17, and we were doing stuff for fanzines. They had wooden benches. So we were on the floor and cutting our Ditto stencils – you know, you’d draw and make a carbon copy: it’s like those things you’d see at the schools if you’re over 40, that were test sheets printed in purple ink – that’s how we printed the fanzines. So we’re drawing our fanzine stuff, because it’s 4am and there’s nothing to do. Or, no, I guess one of us had to take a bus.

So, the place is entirely empty – I know that’s unbelievable today – there was like nobody there except us, drawing our cartoons on these stencils, using a bench for a desk. And the only other two people there are a wino lying in his own juices, and a crazy bag lady. And Art’s sitting there, drawing, and the crazy bag lady comes up – and I’m looking at her, so she’s suspicious of me – but Art’s drawing. Well, she pulls up her shirt, but she’s old, and it’s like, we didn’t want to see that. She says to Art, ‘Hey, boy, you gots dynamite?’ And Art doesn’t even look up. He points to the wino and goes, ‘No, no – that guy over there – he’s got the dynamite.’ So, it was obvious that Art could take care of himself.

When Art was 16 he went to the bubblegum company, Topps, because of Jack Davis, who worked for Mad magazine. We really liked Mad magazine, Harvey Kurtzman, and all of the… Help!, Humbug, Trump – there was a magazine called Trump, it had nothing to do with what the word means today, but Kurtzman did that, too. He left Mad in 1956; we liked the pre-Kurtzman Mad; we didn’t so much care about the post-Kurtzman Mad. Jack Davis was one of the artists for Kurtzman’s Mad, and he also worked for Topps chewing gum. He did the backs of the baseball cards, and he did some novelty cards: he did a Funny Valentine series and stuff.

Art wanted to try to get an original of Davis’ art, so he went to the bubblegum company, and somehow they let him in, and he gave them a copy of Blasé, his fanzine, and they gave him a Davis original baseball card back drawing, you know, pen and ink, not signed. They filed that issue of Blasé, so that when Art graduated high school, they called him and said, ‘You wanna come work for Topps?’ And he did.

So he made a lot of innovations at Topps. Before Art, you’d have to explain to the executives what you intended to do on the gum card, and they wouldn’t understand what you were talking about. So Art developed – he used the Kurtzman idea of doing a rough drawing of the card and, ever since, Topps has worked that way.

TCC: I wanted to ask you about the Wacky Packages.

JL: They were owned by Arthur Shorin. [Topps] was owned by Arthur Shorin, who built the Arthur Shorin wing of NYU - it’s a show business place for kids in college – he built a couple of heart transplant hospitals. Now, it’s owned by Michael Eisner.

TCC: Were you the original creator of Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids?

JL: No; Woody Gelman was the head of the product development department at the time – this is when pop art and Andy Warhol was big – and he wanted to do stickers of just products. But you’d have to get the permission of all these companies and all that stuff. And, plus nobody really believed that any kid would want stickers of products.

So Art said, ‘Let us do parodies,’ and Woody said, ‘Okay, we’ll try it both ways.’ And the parodies did better than the other with the test group, so they did a series of what they called Wacky Packages in 1967, and these were things that you’d punch out of cardboard, and lick the back and stick them on stuff.

TCC: So, you worked with them over time, creating them?

JL: What I would do, is I would create a rough - and there’s a lot of my roughs online – in the old days I would color it; in the modern era, when they invented the fax machine, I would just do a line drawing and fax it. Now, I would send it to them in an email.

The artist for the original Wacky Packs was a guy named Norm Saunders; he painted magazine covers in the ’30s of pulp science-fiction magazines: usually, a woman tied to a pole surrounded by Nazis, or a woman tied to a stalagmite, stalactite, being attacked by space aliens. That kind of thing. Spicy science fiction.

TCC: What about the Garbage Pail Kids? How did that come about?

JL: Cabbage Patch Kids were big. We did a Wacky Packs series: Mark Newgarden did a Wacky Pack called Garbage Pail Kids and it [depicted] the doll in the box, and Arthur Shorin, the owner of the company, was trying to get the Cabbage Patch license. They wouldn’t give it to him, because they thought bubblegum packages were too low-end; the dolls were like $90 each. They started like a handmade thing; then they became a mass-produced thing.

They didn’t get license, so Arthur said, ‘Then let’s do a parody!’ Everybody thought he was crazy, to do a whole series that parodies one product, but Spiegelman figured it out: each doll is a kid’s name with an adjective - the opposite of complimentary - before or after it, like, “Dead Fred.”

They still won’t do “Nina Levin.” It’s a little girl flying into the World Trade Center.

TCC: Too soon. So, was Art Spiegelman the first one to draw them?

JL: We did the roughs. The first series of Garbage Pail Kids, all the finished art was done by John Pound, who was one of the Underground Comix guys. Me and Art and Mark Newgarden; we all did roughs. I drew the comics on the back of them. Tom Bunk is another guy who did them; he works for Mad now. We’re all the same thing. Like, once Len Brown - who was the editor of the humor cards Topps - said to me, “If Topps ever goes out of business, the only other place we could work is Mad.”

TCC: It’s funny that you say that you’re all the same thing. The Underground Comix artists that emerged around the same time as you: you were clearly part of one larger movement, but each of you had a distinct aesthetic. How did you influence each other while maintaining your own individuality?

JL: I think all of the influence of the original guys… well S. Clay Wislon might have influenced us to go further and further over the boundaries of bad taste. But LSD influenced us, and in the beginning, all of the Underground original guys were influenced by EC Comics and Mad - Harvey Kurtzman’s version of Mad magazine. So, when we did the last issue of Bijou Funnies that I edited, Kurtzman did the cover and each one of us did an old Mad comic-style parody of the other guys’ stuff.

TCC: Did you make a point to make your aesthetic distinct from your contemporaries?

JL: No. I just drew an old man and a cat. It was like a Mutt and Jeff kind of thing.

TCC: That’s Nard n’ Pat; they’re on the cover of this issue of Carousel. Do you want to talk about the significance of their fiftieth anniversary?

JL: Now, comics are an adult medium. They weren’t then. They weren’t even a kids’ medium. I didn’t like the comics that came right after the [Good Comics] Code; there was no surprise.

Before the Code, a character could commit a crime and be apprehended. After the Code, you couldn’t show a crime being committed. So, these superheroes were fighting these vague organizations that wanted to dominate the world. I just - I can’t identify with that.

TCC: Fair enough. What are you working on now? Greg [Bohner] had mentioned Mineshaft.

JL: Well, that’s the only thing left that prints the old Underground Comic artists on a regular basis. It’s mostly half old guys and half new guys. It started as a literary magazine, but it gets less literary and more comic-y. But now he’s going to do it more often, and I hope he gets more printed word in it. I drew the covers for these [issues of Mineshaft]; Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb is in there. Mostly, the old ones are “fancy” cartoonists that who do really detailed things, as opposed to cartoons that take less time to draw than they take you to read. Their concerns are with chaos and detail.

TCC: As a satirist, you seem to have an appreciation for satirizing a brand and knocking it off its pedestal and deprogramming.

JL: Yeah, it teaches kids to think for themselves. In the beginning, Wacky Packages were critiques of the product. Like, Good & Plenty was Good & Empty, because the box would settle and it’s always half-full. But they don’t do that anymore because it’s true. You know, if it’s true, then, they can’t do it, because they’ll be stopped.

Mad used to run ad parodies, until they started doing the reprint books - and the reprint books were selling well – and they knew that whenever they parodied something they’d get a letter that said, ‘You have 90 days to stop circulating this.’ They were monthly magazines, so they’d be gone in 90 days; they didn’t care. But then, after that, if they did parodies that would preclude the possibility of ever reprinting it.

So that’s why Topps did what we did, in a way, because if we got a cease and desist letter that said, ‘You have 90 days – take it off the stands,’ and the gum only has a shelf life of 90 days or something like that…

TCC: And, even then, it’s not that palatable. One would hope, after seeing parodies, that one would think, these brands: this is ridiculous; we don’t need this.

JL: You need something, but they’re never actually where they… Like, if they changed the name of the “Big Mac” to the “Big Motherfucker” this week, you could sell a whole lot of Big Macs, but they’re not gonna do that until Spongebob does anal on TV.

See, we were the first to do the Underground Comix, so it was fun. Then it became a thing. It’s just like anything: it’s not fun to repeat something, especially when they realize it’s making money, then they oversee it more heavily and screw it up. You see it throughout history.

Mad is just a shadow of its former self; because, I keep thinking of: who’s buying this? Originally it was bought by adults, and then they thought, oh, the college students’ll buy it; we’ll market to them. Then they get to high school students, and they think, oh the high school students: we’ll market to them. And then they hit the nine-year-olds, and they market to the nine-year-olds. Now they’re not even reaching the fetuses. Now they’re… I don’t know what it is. It’s simple stuff.

It now has ads – there are ads in Mad, real ads – it’s in color… they’ve even been known to do three different covers for one issue, so the collectors will have to buy all three, whereas they started out mocking consumerism. The same with Wacky Packs: they have different color borders collectors need. It’s like the opposite of what it was. They don’t even actually criticize the product anymore.

TCC: Do you have any words of wisdom, for the generation coming up, as someone who’s seen this happen?

JL: Well, you know, there were half as many people on the planet when we did the Underground Comix, or at least when Kurtzman did Mad, the world population was half of what it is. So now, everybody that’s been born since then has only a fraction of the electrical energy than the people that were born at an earlier time, and there’s only so much electricity to go around there.

I think, in a thousand years, the satire that existed within our time: from Lenny Bruce to George Carlin, to Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, all the dead… If it lives in history, it will be considered, in a thousand years, that our time that we live in is the latter days of the Enlightenment. Because that’s what those guys seem to have been doing: they were talking to a deluded audience, though.

I like to do comics these days because no one understands them. Usually, I would say that I would have something to sell, but I don’t really, except Mineshaft, and maybe the idea that people should think for themselves.

For more information on Lynch and his cohorts, or to order Mineshaft, check out mineshaftmagazine.com.

Rest easy, Jay. January 7, 1945-March 5, 2017.